Dr. Lahav-Raz

Dr Lahav-Raz is a Senior Lecturer at the Sociology & Anthropology Department. She holds a master's degree in sociology and anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2009) and a doctorate in sociology and anthropology from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2016). 

She is an anthropologist with expertise in gender and sexuality, sex-work studies, digital anthropology and the intersections of gender and sexual politics, technological developments, and marginalized communities. 
For the last decade, she conducted multidisciplinary ethnographic research on various aspects of the Israeli sex industry, showing it as a political sphere in which gender and ethnonational racialized social hierarchies are played out and contested. Her objective as a scholar is to unveil the prevalent discrepancy between abstract theory and marginal groups' life experiences and how state policies in this specific field reflect social and moral agendas. Dr Lahav-Raz published work, which consists of both online and offline methodologies, include a range of topics: youth and young adults involved in prostitution; masculine repertoires of sex industry clients; technological developments and their ramifications for sex work; the history of prostitution policy and regulation in Israel; the impact of digital media on sex work activism; perceptions of sex workers towards legislative models; and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sex workers' aid organizations.  

Following her postdoctoral fellowships at the Rhode Island University (2017) and as the winner of the ISF Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Leicester (2018-2020), she has been researching sex tourism in the Middle East and the impact of the Global North policy regarding human trafficking on the development and adoption of prostitution regulation in the Middle East. Dr Lahav-Raz is also one of the co-founders of the Israeli Association for the Study of Prostitution, Sex Work and Sex Trafficking (2019).