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“Gaining Access was a Major Challenge” – 5in10 with Dalia Halabi

Dalia Halabi is a sociologist of education who adopts a “study up” approach to critically examine educational and social disparities. She holds a PhD in Leadership and Policy in Education from the University of Haifa and an MA in Conflict Management and Mediation from Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral research explored the formation of elite identity among Palestinian students and alumni of private schools in Israel, analyzing how educational experiences shape distinction, belonging, and social trajectories within a context of national marginalization. Currently, Dalia lectures in the Department of Education at Oranim Academic College and serves as a mentor for principals in the Mandel Foundation’s Leadership Program. Dalia combines academic inquiry with over two decades of experience in civil society and feminist activism. She formerly served as Director of Dirasat – The Arab Center for Rights and Policy, an NGO that utilizes applied research to influence policy and advocate for the rights and equity of the Palestinian community at local and national levels. She has also worked with numerous NGOs on issues related to educational justice, gender equity, and political participation. Her work is rooted in critical theory and decolonial thought, aiming to bridge research, policy, and grassroots action in pursuit of transformative social change and justice. In the academic year 2025/26, she is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
 

Dalia Halabi in a red blouse, listening and taking notes during an event.
Dalia Halabi. Photo: Private.

1. How would you explain your research to someone who is not an expert?

My research focuses on the cultural capital of the ‘minoritized elite’ (Higgins et al., 2024) among Palestinians in Israel, focusing on its defining features: education, knowledge, skills, lifestyle, and tastes.

Building on my previous research project that examined elite identity and privilege among students and graduates of private schools within the Palestinian community in Israel (For more details see my articles here), my current research aims to further explore the cultural capital of this emerging new elite. In explaining cultural capital, Pierre Bourdieu (1984) argues that certain behaviors, preferences, tastes and practices are harnessed by privileged classes to maintain high status and reproduce power. Yet, Bourdieu has been critiqued for framing cultural capital predominantly within the context of hegemonic White middle- to upper-class experiences, often overlooking ethnic and racial dimensions (Meghji, 2019). Prudence L. Carter (2003) defines non-dominant cultural capital as the range of preferences and dispositions associated with lower-status groups. Building on this critique, I propose examining cultural capital through the lens of identity, historical narratives, interactions with dominant groups, and the positioning of minority groups in relation to the majority.

Similar to middle- and upper-class Black Americans, the Palestinian elite has cultivated cultural capital and attained certain privileges. This recently emerged elite, however, differs from other hegemonic elites by embodying a nuanced identity shaped by their national belonging. I use the term “minoritized elite” (Higgins et al., 2024) deliberately instead of minority elite to highlight that the group’s marginalization is not inherent but rather the result of systemic processes, political dynamics, and societal structures that actively position them as “less than” the dominant group within the state. As such, their cultural capital, often regarded as non-dominant, carries a unique character shaped by their belonging to an indigenous national group and their lived reality in the shadow of the ongoing Palestinian Israeli conflict. This context shapes their everyday experiences, habits, leisure activities, tastes, and preferences, highlighting the need to further explore how their national identity and ethnic belonging influence this capital. Additionally, I focus on the interplay between dominant cultural capital, as embodied by the Jewish hegemonic group, and the non-dominant cultural capital of Palestinians in Israel.

2. What intrigued you when you started your academic journey?

From a young age, I was shaped by the dual realities of my identity: a member of a marginalized, suppressed national group and a woman in a patriarchal society. These experiences made me deeply aware of injustice and fueled a strong drive to challenge it. For many years, I acted on this drive through grassroots work with Palestinian NGOs, striving to contribute to a more just and equitable society. This active engagement with social issues sharpened my perspective and ultimately guided my research path.

In my research, I focus on educational inequality, but with a twist: instead of studying the disadvantaged, I “study up.” While most research examines marginalized groups such as immigrants, women, ethnic minorities, the powerful elites who generate and sustain inequalities often remain invisible. Their invisibility is part of their power, and my work seeks to make them visible, raising difficult questions about class, power, and hegemony.

My first research project explored elite education among Palestinians in Israel, particularly private schools. I found familiar patterns of elitism, distinction, and privilege similar to private schooling in Europe and the U.S., but also unique dynamics shaped by these students’ positionality as members of a stigmatized national group. These schools do more than reproduce privileges: they empower students and strengthen the community and the social fabric. This provoked many questions and made me realize that the situation is far from black and white: it is deeply complex. On one hand, these educational institutions are exclusive, functioning like closed clubs. Yet, within the context of the Palestinian minority, where state policies often seek to weaken the community, they play a vital role in strengthening it and in cultivating its emerging elite.

3. What were formative encounters or challenges?

Researching elites is an entirely different experience compared to studying marginalized groups. From the beginning, gaining access was a major challenge, and I quickly realized that I would need to draw on my own social capital including personal relationships, community connections, and trust built over time, to enter these closed circles. But even once access was granted, the real difficulty, as Inglis (2023) notes, was “making something of it and pressing elites to say something meaningful” (p. 359). Elite participants often respond with suspicion, set strict conditions, or at times display unwillingness or even hostility toward engagement.

Navigating these encounters required careful strategies: adopting a cooperative, non-threatening stance, engaging in informal social interactions, and at the same time applying critical thinking to interpret and analyze their statements. It became clear very quickly, who held power in these interactions: the elites themselves. Their preference for invisibility through discretion, selective sharing, or strategic silence, is a key source of their power. Experiencing this reinforced the importance of studying elites to me: to uncover how they perceive and justify their privilege, and how they construct the narratives that sustain and legitimize social inequality.

4. What do you consider to be the role of the humanities and social sciences in times of upheaval, fragmented publics, and authoritarian transgressions?

In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci (1929–1935) discusses the distinction between “technical” (or “technical-scientific”) subjects and “organic” or “humanistic” subjects, linking them to their social functions and the type of intellectual labor they require. Technical knowledge is specialized and instrumental, often neutral in itself. Organic or humanistic knowledge is interpretive and critical, linked to power, ideology, and social change. These “organic” disciplines have the power of connecting knowledge to society, shaping critical consciousness and renaming phenomena in critical ways. They foster the development of organic intellectuals, individuals capable of interpreting social realities, articulating collective interests, and guiding their communities.

Gramsci emphasizes that education in the humanities is crucial for political consciousness and for the establishment of a more just society, whereas purely technical training may reinforce the status quo if detached from critical reflection. Gramsci also noted that this dynamic is classed. While lower-class families often encourage their children to pursue technical studies for their economic security, elites understand the symbolic and political power of the humanities. By guiding their offspring toward philosophy, literature, and history, they reproduce the cultural and intellectual capital necessary to lead, define social norms, and sustain their hegemony.

This is why, in my opinion, studying the humanities is crucial for everyone, not only as a path to personal enrichment, but as a collective means of fostering critical awareness, dismantling inequality, and working toward a more just society.

5. What book, article, film, exhibition or song would you recommend, and why?

I first came across Tara Yosso’s article “Whose Culture Has Capital?” during my PhD, and it was a turning point in my academic journey. Yosso’s argument challenged Bourdieu’s traditional notion of cultural capital by highlighting how communities of color possess rich forms of capital that are often unrecognized or devalued within dominant frameworks. Her discussion of resistant and aspirational capital deeply resonated with me and pushed me to rethink how cultural value is defined and by whom.

In the Palestinian context, these ideas opened up a new way of seeing how individuals and communities sustain themselves within systems that marginalize them. Resistant capital, expressed through acts of persistence, critical awareness, and defiance against structures of inequality, is central to how Palestinians navigate education and identity. Aspirational capital, which is the ability to maintain hope and imagine possibilities beyond structural constraints, is equally vital, as it drives educational striving despite political, social, and economic barriers.

These forms of capital reveal the limits of Bourdieu’s framework, which privileges dominant, Eurocentric definitions of what counts as “legitimate” culture. Yosso’s work inspired me to explore the interplay between dominant and non-dominant capitals within Palestinian society, and to question who decides what is considered “worthy” knowledge, and who holds the power to grant legitimacy, or the “kingship” in Bourdieu’s words, over cultural capital itself.

Continuing this idea, I would also like to recommend the works of the artist Heiam Mustafa, a Palestinian artist, who often paints women with their backs to the audience or with them looking away. Symbolically, Mustafa’s art in my opinion defies the critic’s gaze, as if declaring, you are not the one who decides what matters, I am. Through this reversal, she reclaims authority and power, determining for herself what counts as worthy art. Her work illustrates how non-dominant cultural capital resists marginalization and redefines itself as dominant within its own frame of reference. This interplay between dominant and non-dominant cultural capital forms the core of my current postdoctoral research at EUME, where I examine how marginalized groups negotiate recognition, redefine value, and challenge existing hierarchies of cultural worth.


References

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Carter, P. L. (2003). ‘Black’ Cultural Capital, Status Positioning, and Schooling Conflicts for Low-Income African American Youth. Social Problems, 50(1), 136–155.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Eds. & Trans.). New York, NY: International Publishers.

Higgins, K., Friedman, S., & Reeves, A. (2024). “Outsiders on the Inside”: How Minoritised Elites Respond to Racial Inequality. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–21.

Inglis, P. (2023). In the Company of Elites: Some Practical and Moral Dilemmas of Studying up. In S. Hitlin, S. M. Dromi, & A. Luft (Eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Morality (pp. 357–371). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

Meghji, A. (2019). Encoding and Decoding Black and White Cultural Capitals: Black Middle-Class Experiences. Cultural Sociology, 13(1), 3–19.

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose Culture has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.


Citation: “Gaining Access was a Major Challenge” – 5in10 with Dalia Halabi, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 20.11.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/62483

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (November 20, 2025). “Gaining Access was a Major Challenge” – 5in10 with Dalia Halabi. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved December 6, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/156dc


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