Gil Rothschild Elyassi
Welcome,
This page gathers traces of ongoing writing, teaching, collaborations, and questions that move across institutions, places, histories, and empire. My work follows several lines of inquiry indebted to and in conversation with critical theory, settler colonial and decolonial thought, Black radical thought, sociology of knowledge, sociology of institutions and the state, law and society, punishment and society, STS, queer thought, and collaborative traditions of study.
Across these inquiries, I explore the infrastructures through which some forms of life, movement, and relations become possible, free, and exploitable, while others are rendered disposable, violable, or impossible. I study these dynamics across sites such as penal and carceral supervision, policing, drug regimes, universities, digital surveillance, and colonial and racial classificatory technologies. I also ask how forms of life, people, objects, and technologies inhabit these arrangements, exceed them, refuse them, or return.
The Liberal Carceral Nexus, Security, and Return
This line of work examines the relationship between liberal and carceral forms of governance. Thinking from Palestine, Israel, and the United States, I am interested in how institutions that govern through freedom – including universities, drug legalization regimes, or regulatory forms of policing – depend upon carceral infrastructures organized around removal, containment, and the ongoing prevention of return. I am especially interested in breaches in established divisions between spheres governed through freedom and zones of confinement and exile, exploring what becomes possible in their wake.
01
British Journal of Sociology
02
British Journal of Criminology, with Ely Aaronson
03
Regulation & Governance, with Ely Aaronson
04
City & Community, with Nikki Jones, Kenly Brown, Eduardo Bautista Duran, Kaily Heitz, Jasmine Kelekay, and Geoffrey Raymond
Epistemic infrastructures of Governance
A second line of inquiry explores epistemic and technological infrastructures through which governing institutions produce knowledge, social ontologies, and recognition. Recent projects focus on probation supervision, electronic monitoring and digital surveillance, recognition infrastructures, and the datafication of judicial action. Across this work, I ask how institutions fragment and stabilize life, action, and people as legible and actionable objects of governance, and what relations and knowledge exceed their institutional object forms, remain fugitive, or are rendered immobile.
02
Recognition Infrastructures: Colonial Genealogies and the Mizrahi Struggle to Be Counted
In progress, with Lihi Yona
03
Institutional Passage: Ontological Fragmentation, Stabilization, and Activation through Probation Supervision
In progress
04
Digital Carcerality
Ongoing research project
Whiteness, Jewishness, and Coloniality
A third line of inquiry focuses on the intersections of whiteness, Jewishness, and coloniality. This work develops through collaborative and transnational conversations across disciplinary boundaries, and it bring scholarship into dialogue with artistic practice, essays, and collective study. A growing part of this inquiry asks what it might mean to think Jewishness beyond colonial racial formations, attending both to historical inheritances and to alternative affiliations, traditions, and futures that persist alongside, within, and beyond them.
02
Theory and Criticism (Hebrew)
03
UConn, 2025. A transnational gathering organized by Lewis R. Gordon and Adane Zawdu Gebyanesh
Study and Pedagogy
I approach teaching as a practice of collective study, bringing students and/or scholars into conversation with existing intellectual traditions while treating us as participants in the production of knowledge. I am particularly interested in forms of inquiry that begin from situated experience and proceed through reflexive and careful observation, dialogue, research, and experimentation. Alongside traditional academic forms, I experiment with institutional cartography, digital archives, essays, and other collaborative formats that allow new questions, concepts, relations, and possibilities for collective understanding to emerge.