Tair Karazi-Presler - Research projects

Boredom as an Affective-Cultural Lens in Qualitative Inquiry

This project uncovers boredom, typically framed as a methodological failure, as a culturally produced affect that reflects collective expectations about what counts as “interesting” knowledge. Drawing on the researcher’s experience of boredom in the field, the analysis shows how this affective response becomes an entry point into contrasting emotional repertoires: whereas the military setting fosters vivid, expressive, and dramatic narratives, the bureaucratic environment promotes emotional restraint, limited reflexivity, and a managerial façade of neutrality. Through this comparative lens, boredom emerges as a product of cultural codes that define which emotions, narrative forms, and modes of disclosure are deemed authentic, compelling, or analytically worthy. In doing so, boredom becomes not an obstacle but an interpretive tool that exposes the affective-cultural order underlying authority, professionalism, and femininity in organizational life.

Moral Boundary-Work and Cultural Repertoires of Worth in Hyper-Masculine Organizations

This project examines how senior women officers in the Israeli military articulate and legitimize their power through forms of cultural judgment and moral distinction. Their narratives demonstrate how women draw symbolic boundaries between themselves and the hyper-masculine organizational culture, deploying repertoires of authenticity, moral clarity, and partial apology to craft a sense of worth in an environment where authority is implicitly coded as masculine. These discursive strategies involve simultaneously rejecting and appropriating masculine cultural scripts, revealing how women navigate the tension between dependence on institutionalized forms of power and critique of the norms that delegitimize them. Through this lens, culture emerges not only as a constraint but also as a pragmatic toolkit that enables women to constitute professional subjectivity and justify their authority within a setting that fundamentally threatens their legitimacy as powerful actors.