Miri Lavi-Neeman is a faculty Member at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and the director of the Center for Arid Social Ecologies. Miri was born in Jerusalem, Israel. Between 2003 and 2016 she lived in Berkeley, California, pursuing her Phd 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 at UC Berkeley as their research director. Previously to Berkeley she worked at the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership and was the founding editor of Israel’s first journal for social environmental education, Hakadur Beyadenu.
Miri’s scholarship draws on political ecology, critical human geography, development theory, and critical ethnography. Her research projects examine conservation, rangelands, and energy precarity as well as new understanding of climate change, in pastoralist communities drylands, and in particular in Bedouin Communities in Israel Negev/Naqab.