Maya Fennig is a senior faculty member at the Bob Shapell School of Social Work at Tel Aviv University. Her research and teaching lies in two independent yet inter-related areas of well-being. The first concerns the broad area of cross-cultural mental health, exploring how socio-cultural contexts shape individuals' mental health symptoms and behaviors. The second focuses on the psychosocial consequences of exposure to adversity and forced migration on children, youth and families. Maya was recently awarded the prestigious Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellowship. As an Azrieli fellow, Maya will use interviews, focus groups, and innovative arts-based methods—storytelling, drawing, drama and spoken word—to ethnographically explore the ways in which liminality and protracted displacement unfold in the lives of war-affected refugee children residing in Italy and assesses how they shape their identity, belonging, rights, citizenship, mental health, well-being and imagined futures. The Azrieli-funded research project will be part of a multi-site, multi-year study (funded by SSHRC) which will allow Maya and her colleagues to explore liminality in diverse conditions—reception centers in Italy, urban communities in Israel, and refugee camps and makeshift squats in Greece.
Maya completed her PhD at McGill University's School of Social Work under the supervision and mentorship of Dr. Myriam Denov. In her dissertation, Maya conducted a critical ethnography in which she investigated Eritrean refugees' distinctive explanatory models of mental health — their own ideas or theories of what may have caused their predicament, the consequences of their psychological distress, and the type of care they believed they needed to recover. In Israel and Canada, Maya has worked with non-governmental organizations to promote the health and rights of refugees, receiving several awards: the Jeanne Sauvé Public Leadership Fellowship, and the Vanier Canada Scholarship. Her work has been published in leading journals including Social Science and Medicine (SSM)-Mental Health, Transcultural Psychiatry, The Journal of Orthopsychiatry and The British Journal of Social Work. After residing in Montreal for almost a decade Maya has recently packed away her winter parka and moved back to Tel Aviv where she lives with her partner and two young daughters.
