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 non-white and 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 doctoral dissertation and book project, Bodies and Borders, is set in Israel and Palestine. It demonstrates how Palestinian women's reproductive choices, practices and outcomes are impeded by a variety of borders set up to protect the Israeli settler colonial state, and asks what strategies Palestinian women use to overcome these borders and give birth in Israeli fertility clinics. Based on more than two years of ethnographic research with Israeli medical staff and Palestinian women undergoing fertility treatment, it shows how Israeli authorities, policies, and medical staff’s practices limit reproductive justice for Palestinian women.

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 (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Tel Aviv University) on Body Politics in Israel/Palestine, Germany, and Turkey.

My research and writing has 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.