My research examines how organizations innovate and adapt when working at the intersection of two grand challenges: the climate crisis and violent conflict. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork focusing on environmental peacebuilding initiatives in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, I study how organizations develop novel practices to address complex societal challenges despite significant constraints.

In these extreme, high-stakes contexts, despite governmental or societal hostility, organizations manage to creatively engage, adapting to complex and frequently changing political environments. My research demonstrates how organizations navigate competing institutional demands, build capacity for cooperation despite power asymmetries, and evolve their approaches across generations.

My PhD dissertation, written as a collection of articles, focuses on an established Israeli environmental peacebuilding organization and its work with 24 additional Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian organizations and initiatives. Drawing on over four years of fieldwork, I examine these organizational dynamics through multiple intersecting perspectives - ethnonational, gender, and generational - showing both possibilities and limitations in cross-border environmental cooperation.

Committee: Those who sagely remind me that fieldwork can’t go on forever and a good dissertation is a finished one—Michal Frenkel (Sociology, Chair), Tammar Zilber (Business), and Itay Greenspan (Social Welfare).