Ronny will join the Climate & Energy Lab under Prof. Mamane’s guidance.

A study by Ronny in India uses artificial intelligence to measure water parameters in sewage wetlands. Sewage swamps are a global issue. In many developing countries, sewage swamps are used for agricultural purposes. Ronny’s research aims to develop a free platform so farmers can assess whether a particular water source is safe and suitable for agricultural use at any given time.

Dr. Umansky & Prof. Sened published an article examining how challenger parties enter the political area and the effect of this entry by looking at the Italian 5 Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle – M5S).

“We explain the M5S’s entry strategy in 2013 using the spatial approach to party competition and employing expert survey data collected for each national election between 2008 and 2018. These data allow us to analyze the changing spatial configuration of Italian politics due to the increasing salience of pro/anti-EU and pro/anti-immigration dimensions. We then apply the theoretical notion of the uncovered set (UCS) to trace how the M5S’s entry reshaped the overall space of party competition, causing a realignment of existing parties. This work contributes to the ongoing debate on the electoral success of challenger parties and the emerging cleavages and polarization of party systems in Western European countries.”

The Boris Mints Institute and the International Graduate School of Social Sciences have joined forces to start a new discussion forum inaugurated as the “International Club”.

The “International Club” will meet, mostly virtually but not only, to discuss the most pressing challenges to global order.

Our inaugural meeting will take place on September 28 at 09:00 U.S. Eastern time, 10:00 A.M. NYC time, 04:00 P.M. West European central time, and 05:00 P.M. Israeli and Eastern European time.

Post doc Fellow Nadine Knab presented a talk in a symposium at the Annual Conference of the British Society of Social Psychology in London (5^th-7^th September 2022) which focused on Innovations and impact in addressing global challenges. The symposium was titled ״When Social Identities Face Contemporary Challenges: Implications for Intergroup Relations״ – including studies from a wide range of intergroup relations from Northern Ireland, to Germany and Israel. In her talk titled “Helping Disadvantaged Groups – How Norms and Threat Perceptions Can Lead to Social Inequality” Nadine presented two studies showing that there are psychological factors influencing action tendencies from host-society members towards refugees that could – in the long run – maintain social inequality. 

Wednesday, May 11th, 2022

14:00 | The Garden Suite, Naftali Building 

Opening Remarks

• Prof. Itai Sened, Dean, Gershon H. Gordon Faculty of Social Sciences, Head of BMI

15:45-17:00 | The Garden Suite, Naftali Building
BMI on the biggest challenge facing the globe – Part 1: No More War?

Wednesday 16.3.2022 | 11:00 | Room 527, Naftali Building, TAU

Speaker: Dr. Nadine Knab (postdoctoral fellow at the Conflict Resolution lab)

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing? Helping Relations Between Advantaged and Disadvantaged Groups

Abstract
Do people who help refugees have a similar underlying motivation as people who show discrimination? Helping as a concept inherently entails unequal power relations, as the help provider has resources that the help recipient does not have. Thus, we argue that helping, not unlike discrimination, can lead to a maintenance of power relations, especially when helping is offered in a dependency-oriented manner. We propose that norms to help refugees (in one’s social environment and on a country-level) impact which of these seemingly different action tendencies is shown. Results of this research project have implications for the implementation of initiatives to help disadvantaged groups in ways that can increase social equality.