SPRC podcast series

Gala Rexer and a group of Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies master students, Aisha Rana-Deshmukh, Gabriel Rahman, Julia Snow, and Alex Eaglestone, welcome Alexandre White, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of Epidemic Orientalism (Stanford University Press, 2023).

Dr. White discusses health and illness through the lens of racial and sexual boundaries in Victorian and contemporary horror and figures of the monstrous, the role of health regulations in the making of racial difference in the Middle East, and a humanist approach to sociology and history.


Gala Rexer welcomes Xine Yao, Associate Professor at UCL and author of Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2021).

Reflecting on how Disaffected has travelled as a book, a theory, and a method over the past two years, Xine speaks about what thinking through and with the fields of Black studies, Indigenous studies, Asian diasporic studies, and queer of colour critique does to our understanding of race, gender, and affect, and how we approach literary and cultural text as theory. They discuss how their citational practices shape teaching and scholarship, and explore modes of affective disobedience that engender counter-intimacies and new forms of decolonial solidarity.

Gala Rexer welcomes Akwugo Emejulu, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and author of Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press, 2022).

Discussing the figure of the fugitive from a Black feminist perspective, Akwugo addresses questions about solidarity and coalitional work, strategies of counter-storytelling and playing with new forms of writing, and discusses the difficulties of staying in the liminal space of fugitivity as a mode of experimentation, ambivalence, and disidentification from the figure of the Human.


Gala Rexer welcomes Maya Mikdashi, Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Lecturer in the Middle East Studies Program at Rutgers University, to talk about her book Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (Stanford, 2022).

Maya reflects on the multi-disciplinary genealogy of her book, and describes what it means to take different fields (anthropology, gender studies, and Middle East studies) seriously. This conversation also engages with the relationship between geopolitics, epistemology, and methodology, and with the making and unmaking of categories when we ask the same question from different locations.


Gala Rexer welcomes Françoise Vergès, franco-Reunionnese activist, independent curator, and public educator, to talk about her most recent books, A Feminist Theory of Violence (2022), The Wombs of Women. Race, Capital, Feminism (2020,) and A Decolonial Feminism (2019).

Françoise discusses how women’s rights have been deployed in the service of the carceral state, and how a decolonial feminism needs to reimagine a collective politics of protection against violence, pollution, and exhaustion outside of the nation-state form and capital. Françoise calls upon us to strike, unionize, and fight back, to rethink the family, reproduction, and care outside of racialized frameworks of security and deservingness, and to nourish comrade- and friendship, revolutionary love, and inter-generational transmission of feminist thought.

Events archive

Supported by the British Sociological Association (BSA) and the LSE Phd Academy, Writing as Repair/Repair as Writing is a day of talks, discussions and workshop encouraging participants to think critically and in an interdisciplinary way about writing practices in academia. The day will include an opening talk by Dr Gala Rexer, a writing workshop led by Heba Hayek and a panel and group discussion chaired by Anna Nguyen.

Organised by: Yasmine Kherfi, Sophie Marie Niang, Sarai Kirshner, rémy-paulin twahirwa


UCL's Sarah Parker Remond Centre is pleased to announce a new seminar series, Perspectives on Racialisation, Gender and Feminist Methodologies 2022-23, organised by Dr Gala Rexer, Postdoctoral Fellow at the SPRC.


Event recording: Decolonial feminism: a politics, working towards the abolition of capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and the state; a theory, rethinking logics of exploitation, oppression, and the institutions that engender them; a pedagogy, recognizing and understanding difference as a pre-condition for working together across difference. Françoise Vergès and Edna Bonhomme repoliticize feminist thinking and practice, which have been increasingly deployed in the service of the carceral state, neoliberalism, and developmental paternalism. In this conversation, they will think through state violence, climate catastrophe, racial capitalism, and reproductive (in)justice in order to map out a cartography of decolonial feminist thought.


Sexuality and Borders is a two-day international symposium hosted and funded by New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, 2019 (participant). Special Issue The Sexual Politics of Border Control published in the Journal for Ethnic and Racial Studies. 

Three-part interdisciplinary symposium on technology, gender, and sexuality “<Interrupted =“Cyfem and Queer>” happening across various queer community spaces in Berlin 2018-2019 (academic curator/organiser)