Professor Limor Samimian-Darash

Limor Samimian-Darash is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Federmann School of Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has studied the topics of preparedness for future risks and uncertainties in health and security for over ten years. She has more recently focused explicitly on scenarios to address future uncertainties through imagination and narration. She is the author of Uncertainty by Design: Preparing for the future with scenario technology (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Her research interests include security and preparedness, anthropology of the state and policy, biosecurity, emergency, theory of risk and uncertainty, and governing technologies of the future (scenarios).

She has studied for more than 10 years the topics of preparedness for future risks and uncertainties in fields of health and security. In the past few years she has specifically focused on scenarios as a dominant way to address future uncertainties through imagination and narration.

In her ISF-funded research (2015-2018) Turning Points exercises in Israel, she explored through extensive fieldwork, nation-wide emergency preparedness exercises. In her current research project on Global Scenarios, funded by the ISF (2019-2022) she examines forms, practices, and conceptualizations of future plausibilities through scenarios in global organizations in the fields of health and energy. Her BSF-funded research on future imagination technologies (2019-2022), comparatively examines modalities of future imagination, design, and planning in the high-tech sector in Israel and the US.

Samimian-Darash was chosen as one of five promising early-career social scientists in Israel, for the Alon Fellowship (2013–2016). She published dozens of works in world leading academic venues.