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RESEARCH

AREAS OF RESEARCH

Through the last 20 years my main interest has been the development of the PAP. PAP is a conceptual and practical framework for understanding poverty and for working with families, which defines poverty as a violation of human rights and emphasizes the daily resistance of people in poverty to their predicament. PAP’s detailed model of direct practice incorporates principles of critical social work, social activism, and relational psychotherapy. According to PAP, in order to be relevant for people in poverty social workers should understand their practice as political, resist the Othering of people in poverty and stand by service users in their struggle against poverty. 

Since 2015 the Welfare and Social Services Ministry has implemented the PAP nationwide. As part of this implementation the Ministry has launched new programs and rights centers in social service departments, and has established a new role of ‘Social Rights Social Worker’. A special PAP training program has been introduced to social work curricula in academia and in in-service education settings.  

Since 2020 PAP has entered the training of lawyers who work in the Ministry of Justice.

I am trying to advance critical social work through teaching and research. With the support of very good students of mine I established special critical social work tracks within the B.A. and M.A. programs at BGU, and these tracks energize my work.  

As part of a bigger project of hope, I see great importance in documenting and conceptualizing social work practice that operates in the margins of the field and uses critical principles.

I have been interested in a wide range of qualitative methodologies, especially with the ones that are more connected with social justice orientation, such as participatory action research, performance autoethnography, and collaborative inquiry.  

During 2008-2016 I served as the director of the Israeli Center for Qualitative Methodologies of People and Societies.  

Research Team

  • Ph.D Eynat Vager-Atias

    Team member

    Eynat Vager-Atias

    Ph.D

    teaches poverty-aware training courses to senior social workers in social service departments and works on the development of poverty-aware practice in educational settings. Eynat’s expertise is in youth work, and she wrote her Ph.D. at BGU the discourse and practice of social workers with Young Ethiopian-Israelis.

  • Ph.D Shachar Timor-Shlevin

    Dr. Shachar Timor-Shlevin

    Shachar Timor-Shlevin

    Ph.D

    Ph.D. is a lecturer at the Louis and Gabi Weisfeld School of Social Work, Bar-Ilan University. His research deals with professionalization processes in social work, mainly focusing on critical social work, the construction of a critical theory of practice, and implementing critical rationality in social policy.

  • Ph.D. Yuval Saar-Heiman

    Dr. Yuval Saar-Heiman

    Yuval Saar-Heiman

    Ph.D.

    is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie post-doctoral fellow at the department of social work of Royal Holloway University of London, where he studies parents' involvement in policy design, participatory practices with parents to children at risk and parent advocacy programs in the UK. He wrote his Ph.D. on the poverty-aware paradigm in child protection settings and he has significant experience as a practitioner working with parents of children at risk. He combined his theoretical and practical knowledge when teaching social workers at the framework of the implementation of the Poverty-Aware paradigm by the Welfare Ministry.

  • Keren Tzafrir

    Team member

    Keren Tzafrir

    is a lawyer, currently completing her MA studies in law at Bar-Ilan University. She is the research coordinator of the program for developing poverty-aware practice for lawyers who work with poor debtors. The research focuses on poverty-aware training delivered in a number of courses to attorneys working for the Ministry of Justice, specializing in debts and private debtors.

  • Ph.D Ensherah Khoury

    Dr. Yuval Saar-Heiman

    Ensherah Khoury

    Ph.D

    is the coordinator of the study on the development of poverty-aware model for the Arab-Palestinian society. Her doctorate thesis, which she wrote at the Gender Studies program in Bar-Ilan University, dealt with egalitarian gender ideologies and practices among Palestinian Arab men in Israel. Ensherah has major experience as a social worker in the field of marital violence. In her last role as a practitioner she was the director of the Center for Treatment and Prevention of Marital Violence in Acre.