Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University. Her research addresses scholarship at the crossroads of labour migration, citizenship and civil society and scholarship on the re-scaling of politics and urban governance.  She has published over thirty refereed articles on these topics in journals like International Migration Review, Gender and Society, Political Geography, IJURR, Law and Society Review, Ethnic & Racial Studies and Social Problems, among others. She is the author of over twenty refereed book chapters, the co-editor of two collective volumes and the co-author of a book on Migrants and Workers: the political economy of labor migration in Israel (in Hebrew).

Kemp is currently conducting a 3 year project titled “Do papers matter? Legal liminality in the life-course of migrant workers and refugees’ children (ages 12-25) in Israel” funded by the Israeli National Science Foundation. The project deals with the socio-political implications of the uncertain legal status on migrants’ and asylum seekers’ children and youth. While the number of children and youngsters growing up in legal uncertainty as a result of recent waves of precarious migrations and restrictionist policies has been on the rise in wealthier countries, only recently research has begun to pay systematic attention to the multiple social, political and developmental consequences of this phenomenon. Drawing on the Israeli case, the research engages recent sociological and anthropological scholarship on legal liminality and examines how ambiguous legal status intersects with specific legal and policy frameworks, institutional actors and, children’s own expectations and histories.

Themes related to current research:

• New Non-ethnic Migrations and the Changing Dynamics of Israeli Citizenship
• From a Land of Refuge to a Land of Non-asylum: The Israeli Case
• The Bio politics of Global Care-work Migration in the Middle East

For more information about her research activities and publications see here.