Irus Braverman

Irus Braverman is a legal scholar and ethnographer, and is a professor of law and an adjunct professor of geography at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).^[1] She was born in Jerusalem.

Education and career

Braverman trained in law and criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She served as a public state prosecutor and as an environmental lawyer, both in Israel, and was also trained as a mediator and worked as a community organizer for environmental justice issues and as a political activist.

Braverman wrote her doctorate in law about the politics of tree planting and uprooting in Israel/Palestine, which she later transformed into a book entitled “Planted Flags: Trees Law, and Law in Israel/Palestine.” She has been an Associate with the Humanities Center at Harvard University, a Visiting Fellow with the Human Rights Program at Harvard University Law School, and a Junior Fellow with the Center of Criminology at the University of Toronto, among others.^[2]

For 2013-4 she was appointed a residential fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and for 2014, a fellow of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) as a Ryskamp Grantee. She will also be a visiting scholar at the Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law.

She has won the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) to her book Zooland for Outstanding Book of the Year, Current Events (2013).^[3]

Braverman’s scholarship focuses on “the imbrications between law, space, and power, with an emphasis on materiality.”^[1] Her work explores the tensions between governance and natural and unnatural environments, such as zoos, public toilets, and “tree landscapes.” ^[1] Her first monograph, House Demolitions in East Jerusalem: ‘Illegality’ and Resistance (Hebrew), focuses on the planning laws and regulations applied in East Jerusalem and how they contribute to discriminatory practices. Her second monograph, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2009), describes land and identity struggles in Israel/Palestine through the acts of planting and uprooting trees.^[4]

Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford University Press, 2012), is her third book; for it. she conducted interviews with zoo managers and administrators as well as animal activists to write an ethnography of zoo administration.^[5] Donna Haraway has called Zooland, "Beautifully written, finely researched, astutely argued, Zooland offers a wealth of stories, data, and views to understand the potent work of zoos and their life-propagating messiness, astonishing technologies, and detailed ordering of their captive subjects deemed wild." ^[6] Stephen Cave at Financial Times has noted how Zooland "illustrates how there is nothing natural about the lives of zoo animals."^[7] Braverman has also published essays on law, space, and the politics of nature,^[8] including “The Tree is the Enemy Soldier” in Law and Society Review,^[9] “Civilized Borders” in Antipode,^[10] “Uprooting Identities” in PoLAR,^[11] “Looking at Zoos” in Cultural Studies,^[12] “Passing the Sniff Test” in Buffalo Law Review,^[13] and “Animal Frontiers: A Tale of Three Zoos in Israel/Palestine” in Cultural Critique.^[14]

Notable publications

The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography, Irus Braverman, Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney & Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar (eds.) (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).^[15]

Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford University Press, 2012)^[16]

Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2009)^[17]

House Demolitions in East Jerusalem: 'Illegality' and Resistance (Hebrew, 2006)

References