רותם מיכל

Michal Rotem is a Ph.D. candidate at Tel Aviv University's School of Political Science, Government, and International Affairs.
Her dissertation ‘The Political Plate’ examines changes in discourse concerning animal product consumption. Specifically, tracing both governmental and public discourses, Michal analyses how democracies handle social activism against vis-à-vis the food industry, discerning the causal mechanisms leading to policy making. She also focuses on specific social groups that object to legislation promoting the consumption of animal products from national perspective.
Rotem examines how governments respond to social discourse both in favour of and against animal products food consumption.  In her work, she investigates which policies are publicly accepted in terms of reducing the negative impacts of intensive agriculture, which are not and why . She uses grounded theory, case studies, and discourse analysis. 
The dissertation has a possible theoretical and empirical contribution to deciphering normative transformations in relation to the legitimacy of intensive farming. Another contribution is a classification of policies in relation to change and uunderstanding the barriers to creating an environmental policy in the context of reducing animal food consumption.