Hila Shamir
![[candidate photo]](picture.jpg)
S.J.D. Candidate
Teaching Fellow, Harvard College Government Department - Trafficking in Persons
| Status: | In Residence |
| Email: | hshamir@law.harvard.edu |
Dissertation
Care Commodified: The Commodification of Domestic Work and Sex work in Globalizing Economies
In globalizing post-industrial societies most women have entered the work force. This results in unavoidable distributive changes in the division of labor within the family. One change is a redistribution of domestic work between husband and wife, another is the redistribution of domestic work between women of different classes, in the form of commodified domestic and care services: cooking, cleaning, etc. My research seeks to be an inquiry into the relationship between family and market, through the examination of processes of commodification of care, focusing on four paradigmatic cases of women’s care work. The first is the prototype of ‘care-work’: housewife’s work in the home. The following three are the main market reconfigurations of the prototype: paid domestic work, sex work, and mail ordered brides. Through the study of the four paradigmatic cases I seek to investigate the nature of the distribution of care along gender, and class lines.
Fields of Research and Supervisors
- Social theory and theory of the family, with Professor Janet Halley, Harvard Law School, Overall Faculty Supervisor
- Distributional analysis: the economics of care , with Professor Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School
- Welfare, care and legal reform: between theory and practice, with Professor Lucie White, Harvard Law School
- Employment law and labor migration in Israel, with Professor Guy Mundlak, Professor of labor law and social policy in the Faculties of law and Social Sciences at Tel-Aviv University
Additional Research Interests
- Employment Law
- Family Law
- Feminist Jurisprudence
Education
- Harvard Law School, S.J.D. Candidate 2005-Present
- Harvard Law School, LL.M. Program 2004-2005
- Tel-Aviv University School of Law, LL.B. 2003
Appointments and Fellowships
- Graduate Program Fellow, LLM advisor, 2005-2006
- Fulbright Scholar, 2004-2006
- E. David Fischman Scholar
Representative Publications
- "From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work and Sex Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism", co-authored with Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, & Chantal Thomas, with separate monographic sections by each co-author, 29(2) Harvard Journal of Law & Gender 335 (2006)
- "Between Intimacy and Alienage: the Legal Constitution of Domestic & Care Work in the Welfare State", co-authored with Prof. Guy Mundlak, to be published in Migration and Domestic Work: A European Perspective on A Global Theme (Helma Lutz ed., forthcoming, 2007)
Additional Information
- Languages: English, Hebrew