Dr. Miri Lavi-Neeman was born in Jerusalem, Israel. Between 2003 and 2016 she lived in Berkeley, California, teaching and pursuing her Ph.D at the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. In 2014 she received the Israel Institute postdoctoral fellowship, and joined the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israeli Law Economy and Society as their research director.

Miri’s research draws on political ecology, critical human geography, development theory, and critical ethnography. Her recent projects focus on the new epistemologies of climate change, and the relationship between conservation, science, and territorial struggles in the desert, namely the political life of camels in the Negev highland, politics of grazing at climate frontiers in Area C, and critical approaches to renewable energy in off-grid unrecognized Bedouin villages, as well as privatization and the settlement processes in the Negev.

Miri is a researcher at the Arava Institute, where she also teaches courses on political ecology and environmental education.

Among Miri’s recent publications:

Radical Imaginations? Changing Concepts of Agrotourism and Development as a Platform for a Regional Change in Bedouin Villages of the Negev Highlands, with Noa Avriel-Avni, Geography Research Forum (January 2025)

The Climate of Occupation – Climate (im)mobilities and produced environmental precarity in Palestinian pastoralist communities, with Shahar Shiloach, Kriot (June 2022)

See here Miri’s interview for the WEBN project.