Dr. Natalia Gutkowski

 

Social-Cultural Anthropology
 Science
Technology and Society Studies (STS)
Anthropology Beyond the Human
Time and Temporality
Israel/Palestine and the Middle East  

 

Email: gutkowski.natalia@gmail.com
Personal website: Natalia Gutkowski

CURRENT PROJECTS

My first book Struggling for Time: Environmental Governance and Agrarian Resistance in Israel/Palestine will be published with Stanford University Press in May 2024.

Struggling for Time examines how time is used as a mechanism of control by the Israeli state and a site of mundane resistance among Palestinian agriculture professionals. Natalia Gutkowski unpacks power structures to show how a settler society lays moral claim on indigenous time through agrarian environmental policies, science, technologies, landscapes, and bureaucracy. Shifting the analysis of Israel/Palestine from land and space to time, she offers new insight into the operation of power in agrarian environments and develops a contemporary framework to understand land and resource grabs under temporal justifications.

Traveling across both policymaking arenas and Palestinian citizens' agrarian fields, Gutkowski follows the multiple ways that state officials, agronomists, planners, environmentalists, and agriculturalists use time as a tool of collective agency. Through investigations of wetland drainage in Galilee, transformations in olive agriculture, sustainable agrarian development, and regulation of the shmita biblical commandment, the "year of release" for agricultural fields, this work highlights how Palestinian citizens' agriculture has become a site for the state to settle and mediate time conflicts to justify its existence. As Struggling for Time demonstrates, time politics will take on ever greater urgency as societies and governments plan for an uncertain future in our era of climate change.

In my second book project “Species Remaking Borders: Climate Change as a Regional Challenge”, I follow scientists, policymakers, and agriculturalists in Israel, the West Bank and Jordan who cooperate around pest management. I show how insects’ mobility forces state and social actors to collaborate, but it also reveals changing forms of power under climate change predicament. These dynamics frame climate change as a political and regional scale problem rather than the prevalent national or global frameworks. This research is novel in its regional fieldwork challenging the prevalent methodological nationalism evident in the region and overcoming the nation state as a central unit of study in the social sciences.

ACADEMIC POSITIONS

2019–2024	Post-Doctoral Fellow, The Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
2019–2020	(Declined) Lecturer, Judaic Studies Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
2017–2019	Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Academy Scholar, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University.
2017–2018	(Declined) Post-Doctoral Fellow, Center for Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
2016–2017	Visiting Graduate Fellow, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.
2015–2016	Graduate Fellowship, The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University.
2015 Spring	Visiting Student - Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz.

AWARDS and SCHOLARSHIPS

2022              Research Grant, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Research Authority.

2020-2021     Returning Scientist Grant, Israeli Ministry of Absorption.

2018              Max Gluckman Prize for Outstanding PhD, Israeli Anthropological Association.

2015              The Land Theme Award, Institute for Social Sciences, Cornell University.

2015              Tammy Steinmatz Center for Peace Studies Doctoral Award, Tel Aviv University.

2014–2015    The Whole Organism Award, Chief Scientist, Ministry of Agriculture, Israel.

2012–2015    Israel Science Fund Grant No. 932/12. *PI – Prof. Dan Rabinowitz

2011–2015    Tel Aviv University Rector and The School of Environmental Studies PhD Scholarship

2014              Honorable Mention: Lebach Institute for Jewish-Arab Coexistence, Tel Aviv University.

2011–2013    Excellence in Teaching - Honorable Mentions by the Kibbutzim College’s Dean.

2012–2013    The Smaller Winikow Foundation for Environmental Research Scholarship.

2012              The Israeli Sociological Association: First Prize in MA Thesis contest.

PUBLICATIONS

MONOGRAPH and EDITED VOLUME

1. Gutkowski, Natalia. (2024) Struggling for Time: Environmental Governance and Agrarian Resistance in Israel/Palestine. Stanford University Press, 340 pp.

2. Gutkowski, Natalia, R. Grosglik and L. Shani (eds), (2017) Israeli Sociology vol. 18(2) Special Issue on Environment and Society, 269 pp. (Hebrew).

JOURNAL ARTICLES

1. Gutkowski, Natalia (2023) “Climate Change and the Environmental Imaginary in the Middle East” (Theory and Criticism). 57: Winter. pp 69-81 (Hebrew).

2. Gutkowski, Natalia (2020) “Bodies that Count: Administering Multispecies in the Borderlands of Palestine/Israel.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space Vol. 4(1) 135–157.

3. Gutkowski, Natalia (2018). Governing through Timescape: Israeli Sustainable Agriculture Policy and the Palestinian-Arab Citizens. International Journal of Middle East Studies 50(3), 471-492.

4. Gutkowski, Natalia, Grosglik. Rafi Shani, Liron (2017) Toward a Social-Environmental Paradigm in Israeli Sociology and Anthropology. Introduction to Israeli Sociology vol. 18(2) Special issue on Environment and Society, p.7-28 (Hebrew).

5. Gutkowski, N. Disegni D., Rabinowitz D. (2013) “Fair Trade Olive Oil and its Environmental Impact”, in The Journal of Ecology and the Environment, 4 (1) p. 22-13 (Hebrew).

JOURNAL ARTICLES IN PROGRESS

1. Gutkowski, Natalia and Ashawari Chaudhuri (n.d.) “Time as Power in Agrarian Environments” (Under review, Journal of Peasants Studies).

2. Gutkowski, Natalia and Rafi Grosglik (n.d.) “A Self-Defeating Warfare? The Red Palm Weevil and the Military-Agriculture Nexus in the Time of Climate Change” (In Preparation).

3.  Gutkowski, Natalia (n.d) “Un/Settling Times for Border Control: A Porous Political Ecology of Date Plantations in the Jordan Valley” (In Preparation)

4. Gutkowski, Natalia (n.d) “Native Agrarian Science: Palestinian Arab Agronomists’ Navigation in the Israeli State System” (In preparation).

RESEARCH COMMENTARIES and BOOK REVIEW

1. Gutkowski, Natalia (2023) Book Review of “Azazel Mall” Off Road Driving in the Judean Desert: Consumerism, Nationalism, and Israeli Manhood” by Asaf Hazani” (Israeli Sociology) Vol 24(1). (Hebrew).

2. Gutkowski, Natalia (2021) “A Borderless Virus? The Sovereignty Games in the Administration of COVID-19 in Israel/Palestine.” Israeli Sociology Vol. 21 (2) 90-97. (Hebrew).

3. Neugarten Tamar and Gutkowski Natalia (2013) “Community Gardening: Reclaiming Public Spaces”, in MAARAV [Ambush], Online Journal for Art, Culture and Media. February Issue (Hebrew and English Publications.)

BOOK CHAPTERS

1. Gutkowski, N. (2024) “Cultivating Indigeneity - Producing Time, Israel/Palestine, 2013” in Wolf-Meyer Matthew and Danielle Elliot (Eds). Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing Minnesota University Press. 

2. Gutkowski, N. (2016). "Teaching Environmental Justice in Israel", Avisar I. (ed), The Challenge of Sustainability: Education for Social and Environmental Responsibility in Israel Hakkibutz Hameuchad Publication, Tel Aviv. [In Hebrew - Translation available].

3. Gutkowski, N. (2012) (The chapters) “World Agriculture”; “Rural Development in Israel”; “Agricultural Work, Agriculture Crosses Borders”; “Agriculture and the Environment”, in Zaban, Haim (Ed.) 150 Years of Agriculture in Israel, Maariv Publication, Tel Aviv. (Hebrew)

4. Adwan Sami, Bar-on Dan, Eyal Naveh, Bader Khalil, Gutkowski Natalia, Al-Husseini Maysoon, Cohen Nir (2012): Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine. New York, NY, The New Press.

5. Gutkowski, N. (2007) “Kibbutzim Education College – An Open Space of Supremacy?” in Aloni, Nimrod, (ed.) Education and Context –Kibbutzim College Publications, Tel Aviv. [Hebrew -Translation available].