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 Society, Ethnic 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 Conferenc e, (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)

The Materiality of Power and Bodily Matter(ing): Embodied Resistance in Palestine

Borderlands of reproduction: bodies, borders, and assisted reproductive technologies in Israel/Palestine.

Contested Authorities over Life Politics: Religious-Secular Tensions in Abortion Debates in Germany, Turkey, and Israel