Dr Hamutal (Tali) Jaffe-Dax

Hamutal (Tali) Jaffe-Dax is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and St Antony's College. 

Before arriving to Oxford, Tali was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As a cultural, cognitive, and formal sociologist, Tali studies the socio-mental schemas that underpin social actors’ sense-making processes. Specifically, her research explores the ways in which these shared frames for perception, attention, and classification inscribe, validate, and reinforce hierarchical ethno-national systems, social inequality, and cultural dominance. Her work centers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a tragically revealing case of cultural struggle over distinctions, boundaries, and definitions of space, time, and identity.

Tali’s previous research examined the spatial perceptions of Palestinians and Israelis, as reflected in locals’ sketch-maps and mental maps of Al-Quds/Jerusalem. Within this framework, she analyzed the polarized attentional prisms through which Jewish-Israelis and Arab-Palestinians construct their ethno-national view of space—while consistently “blindspotting” the Other’s place. 

Her doctoral research (Rutgers University) explored the cultural phenomenon of “status downplay”—a paradoxical type of status display whereby the downplaying of status symbols counterintuitively signals high social status. Her postdoctoral research projects take a cultural-cognitivist approach to examine the perceptual rupture and classificatory crises that erupted amid the recent war events.