Dr. DDor-TheInstruction-jacket11aniel Dor, a linguist, media researcher and political activist, received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University (1996). He has been teaching at the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University since 1998

Dr. Dor is the author of The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology (OUP, 2015) – a new conceptual framework for the description, analysis and explanation of human language as a socially-constructed communication technology, designed by cultural evolution for the specific function of the instruction of imagination. The introduction to the book can be found here. A series of six lectures on the theory, given in 2008 at the Central European University in Budapest, can be watched here. Together with Evolutionary Biologist Eva Jablonka, Dor has published a series of articles on the evolution of language, highlighting the complex co-evolutionary relationship between the cultural evolution of language as a technology, and the cognitive evolution of human individuals as its users. The articles are here

Together with Lia Nirgad, Dor founded the Social Guard, an NGO that maintains a constant civic presence in the Israeli Parliament (Knesset), monitors and assesses the MKs work, and informs the public about each and every discussion bearing on issues of social justice and civic equality in Israel

Dr. Dor has also written extensively on the role of the media in the construction of political hegemony – especially in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of his books, ‘Intifada Hits the Headlines: How the Israeli Press misreported the Outbreak of the Second Palestinian Uprising’ (Indiana University Press) was titled Book of the Year in Communication (2004) by Choice Magazine. The books, articles, reviews and interviews are here

Between 2004 and 2007, Dr. Dor served as Chairman and Academic Supervisor of Keshev, the Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel. Under Dor’s supervision, Keshev published a series of reports on the Israeli media’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a report on the coverage of the second Lebanon war, and a series of interactive, educational CDs on critical news consumption. All these can be found here. For additional Keshev reports, covering the period from 2008 to the present, go here