Adriana Kemp is a political sociologist and the director of the School of Social Studies and Policy at Tel-Aviv University. Her research focuses on intersections between labor and forced 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, Social Problems, Urban Studies, Environment and Planning A and JEMS among others. She is the author of numerous book chapters, the co-editor of two collective volumes and the co-author of a book on Migrants and Workers: the political economy of labour migration in Israel. 

Kemp was a visiting professor at Columbia University, the Lipinsky Visiting Professor at SDSU, and the Chateaubriand 2020 Visiting Professor at Sciences Po. She has been invited to give testimonial in parliamentary committees on issues related to migration and has worked as a consultant for the OECD, among others. Her many civic activities include serving as the chair-woman of ACRI, the largest HR NGO in Israel in 2010-2014. 

Kemp has been a recipient of numerous research grants, including 5 grants from the National Science Foundation and 2 grants from the Ministry of Science and Culture. Her latest research project titled “Do papers matter? Legal liminality in the life-course of migrant workers and refugees’ children (ages 12-25) in Israel”, deals with the socio-political implications of precarious legal status on migrants’ and asylum seekers’ children and youth. Drawing on the Israeli case, she examines how new forms of legal violence intersect with policy frameworks, institutional actors’ moral evaluations, and migrant children’s future making. 

Research interests: 

• Non-ethnic Migrations and the Changing Dynamics of Ethno-National Citizenship 
• The political economy of labour migration
• Precarious Migrants and Non-Asylum Regimes 
• Civil society, social mobilization and neoliberalism
• The Bio politics of global care-work migration in the Middle East
• Urban citizenship and neoliberalism 
• Legal liminality, institutional violence and migrant children