Merav Shohet

Dr. Merav Shohet is a cultural anthropologist whose specializations in psychological, medical, and linguistic anthropology lead to ethnographic research on affect, morality, and health. In Vietnam, North America, and, most recently, Israel/Palestine, her studies of care and gendered subjectivities illuminate how communicative practices–and the socio-historical and political-economic transformations of which they are a part–mediate individuals’ experiences of moral personhood and lived possibilities in contexts of care-giving, suffering and recovery.

Extending her interests in narrative, ethics, and inequalities, Dr. Shohet has recently been working on care, aging, and the end of life in changing kibbutz communities, including under war conditions, and on the pandemic’s harmful, syndemic effects on racialized end-stage kidney disease patients in Greater Boston, where she documented chronic terminal patients’ struggles to flourish. In future, she also hopes to return to her earlier eating disorders research, to investigate lifespan illness and recovery processes, and how discourses of food, economic development, and cross-cultural psychiatry insidiously figure in marginalized people’s lives.