Maayan Ravid

Maayan Ravid is a critical social scientist who uses interdisciplinary approaches to study borders, inequality, racism, and state actions to control and exclude.  She is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Criminology for the 2025-2028 academic years. Her research project is entitled: The Making of Differentiated Beings in Israel: how and why the state excludes. It examines structural racism and group differentiation through studying state control and exclusion of minority groups by Israel's criminal justice systems.

Prior to her current fellowship, Maayan completed several postdoctoral and research positions in Israeli universities focused on state treatment of minority and racialised groups. Positions include a postdoctoral fellowship at Bar Ilan University’s Department of Geography (2021-2022), a postdoctoral fellowship at Tel Aviv University’s School of Social Work (2022-2023), and a research management position at Haifa University’s Laboratory on Migration, Resilience, and Gender in the School of Social Work (2024).

Across projects Maayan focuses on state treatment of minority and racialised groups, particularly in Israel. Her research interests include ethnonationalism, migration and citizenship, inequality, criminalisation, social and spatial aspects of exclusion, asylum, immigration detention, racism, and postcolonial thought.

Maayan obtained her PhD from Oxford's Centre for Criminology in 2021, where she was also part of the Border Criminologies Network. Her doctoral thesis, titled: Criminalisation and Detention of African Asylum Seekers in Israel: Exclusionary Policies, and the Dynamics of Race and Place, explored asylum detention in Israel in relation to differential politics of belonging and its’ postcolonial context. Maayan completed an MSt in Socio Legal Research from Oxford’s Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, with the thesis titled: Crossing Borders from Exceptional to Criminal - Asylum Rights in Ethnonational States: A Socio-Legal Case Study of Israeli Discourse on African Asylum Seekers and their Rights. She has a BA in Political Science and African Studies from Tel Aviv University. All her studies were informed by grassroots activism alongside migrant and asylum-seeking communities in Israel over 15 years.

More recently, Maayan has shifted her focus to intersections of racialisation, material and symbolic bordering work, and their interplay in urban settings in the Israel-Palestine context. She increasingly invested in illuminating the myriad forms of exclusion and control directed at Palestinians by the Israeli state. She hopes that shedding light on injustice will further possibilities for change toward a better future.