Structural inequalities have a profound impact on marginalized people’s bodies, and their traces can be found across different spatio-temporal scales: from the infrastructures of health systems, to the altering of cells through endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Whether in Europe, the Middle East, or globally, the social and biological reproduction of Black, non-white, or poor populations is disrupted not only by structural racism and heteronormative gender relations, but also on the cellular level. My research identifies the material effects of racial capitalism through the lens of reproduction. Focusing particularly on birthing people’s reproductive health and rights, I analyze how racism and structural violence engender embodied inequalities. In so doing, I use qualitative research to advance reproductive and environmental justice in a moment of climate emergency, neo-Malthusian population control, and border closures.

My book manuscript, Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Israel/Palestine, shows how the Israeli state’s demographic concerns and imperatives govern Palestinians’ everyday lives, intimate decision making, and reproductive resistance across contemporary Israel and Palestine. 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 takes the Palestinian case to spell out the conditions of a justice-based approach to reproduction and a right to family.

I am a postdoctoral fellow at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation and I received my PhD in Sociology from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. I was the academic curator of  “<Interrupted =“Cyfem and Queer>“ , a three-part interdisciplinary symposium on technology, gender, and sexuality, which took place in 2018 and 2019 in various locations in Berlin. Before that, I was research associate and project coordinator of a joint research project on Body Politics in Israel/Palestine, Germany, and Turkey. 

My research and writing have been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Humboldt University’s Caroline von Humboldt Program, the German Green Party’s Heinrich Böll Foundation, and Humboldt University’s gender equality fund.

I am a member of diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery and contributed to Practices of Attunement, an itinerant study group.