Gala Rexer

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Warwick

I am currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Sociology Department. Before that, I was a Lecturer (Visiting Assistant Professor) in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (2023-2024), as well as 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, and medical and global sociology.

My work has appeared in academic journals including Body and Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Comparative Sociology as well as The Sociological Review Magazine, Social Text, and the British Journal of Sociology (forthcoming). 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 the 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.

Speaking (Upcoming)
“Waste as Relation: Studying Toxic Infrastructures and Health Inequalities,” BSA annual Conference 2025, university of Manchester

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

“Sociology/ies of Palestine”, British Sociological Association (september 2024)

“Palestine as a Feminist Issue”, Centre for Gender Studies, Lancaster University

“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)

panelist “global and transnational approaches to race and racism”, Inaugural bjs Conferenc e, (April 2024)

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