Gala Rexer

Lecturer (Visiting Assistant Professor) at University College London


I am currently Lecturer (Teaching) in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, where I have also been the Centre’s inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-23). I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (awarded January 2022), funded by the German Heinrich Böll Foundation. My writing, teaching, and public engagement work draws from the fields of feminist and queer theory, anti-colonial thought, medical humanities, and global sociology.

My work has appeared in academic journals including Body and SocietyEthnic and Racial Studies, Comparative Sociology, and The Sociological Review Magazine. At UCL, I have organized the seminar series Perspectives on Racialisation, Gender and Feminist Methodologies (2022-23), and I am a contributor to the SPRC podcast series. From 2021-23, I have volunteered with Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) in a joint project with the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme. 

My first book manuscript, tentatively titled Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Israel/Palestine (under contract with University of California Press), shows how Israeli policies profoundly impact Palestinian women’s reproductive rights, health, and decision-making and foregrounds the sexual politics of settler colonialism in Israel and beyond. Based on in-depth interviews and more than two years of ethnographic research with Israeli medical staff and Palestinian women undergoing fertility treatment in Israeli hospitals, Demographic Anxieties argues that reproductive injustice is a feature, not a bug of the settler colonial project.

Photography by Ink Agop, ©️ Creamcake
Speaking (Upcoming)
panelist “global and transnational approaches to race and racism”, Inaugural bjs Conference, (April 2024)

“reproductive injustice: a feature, not a bug of settler colonialism”, Kings college, public policy research seminar, (June 2024)

“methodologies for living with toxicity”, UCL & wits university, breathing in: Air and atmospheres series (june 2024)

roundtable: “Gendering the question of Palestine”, European conference on politics and gender, ghent university (july 2024)

Past (selected)
“‘How does it feel to be a population?’ Thinking Reproductive Justice and Global Solidarity from Palestine”, ASA ANNUAL Meeting, (August 2023)

Invited Lecture for the “Writing as Repair/Repair as Writing” workshop AT LSE Sociology/the bsa Postgraduate Forum Event series (2023)

“Critical, Speculative, Otherwise: Towards a Sociology of Refusal and Repair”, BSA Annual Conference “Sociological Voices in Public Discourse” (2023)



e-mail︎@galarexer