Bereavement, Storytelling, and Reconciliation: Peacebuilding Between Israelis and Palestinians

Despite the ongoing conflict and the general neglect by the media, power brokers, and the public, grassroots organizations in the Middle East persist in their dedication to “people to people” diplomacy between Israelis and Palestinians. The Parents Circle-Families Forum is a bi-national NGO committed to peacebuilding and reconciliation between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Its most distinctive features are its membership, composed of 300 families from each side who have lost a close relative to the conflict, and its use of storytelling to connect the two sides. Bereaved individuals develop the capacity for empathy and moral responsibility beyond their own people by encountering “the other” via personal stories of loss and suffering. In pairs, Palestinian and Israeli members then share these stories with students in each society, modeling compassion and human solidarity, in an effort to bring about social transformation. This paper, based on ethnographic research recently conducted in Israel and the West Bank, considers the moral dynamics of these encounters and presentations, and their potential contribution to reconciliation and conflict transformation

When it pays to be friendly: employment relationships and emotional labour in hairstyling

This article examines worker-client relationships in hairstyling. Data are drawn from interviews with 15 hourly-paid and 32 self-employed hairstylists and a self-administered survey. Relations of employment are found to be central to the deployment of emotional labour. Self-employed owner-operators are highly dependent on clients, rely on deep-acting, enact favours, and are prone to emotional breaking points when they fail to realise their 'congealed service'. In contrast, hourly-paid stylists perform surface acting, resist unpaid favours and experience fewer breaking points. Methodologically this article demonstrates the importance of comparative employment relations analysis (CERA) for exposing the relationship between employment structures and labour process experiences