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 (forthcoming), 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. Since 2021, I volunteer with Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) in a joint project with the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme.

My book manuscript, Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Israel/Palestine, offers an analysis of how Israeli sexual and demographic politics limit Palestinian women’s reproductive rights, health, and decision-making. 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 approaches Palestine as a generative site to theorize how in a settler colonial context, the making and management of gender, race, and space revolve around the reproductive body. It argues that thinking reproductive justice from Palestine offers an important lens onto the persistent embodied effects and afterlives of empire, European colonialism, and global white supremacy.

Photography by Ink Agop, ©️ Creamcake

Speaking (Upcoming)
“‘How does it feel to be a population?’ Thinking Reproductive Justice and Global Solidarity from Palestine”, ASA ANNUAL Meeting, (August 2023)

Past (selected)
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 Hospital as “Terra Nullius”: Medical Neutrality and the Political Conditions of Israeli Settler Colonialism”, Sarah Parker Remond Centre’s “Colloquium on Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies”, UCL (2022).

“Extracting the Future: Military Environments and Reproductive Injustice”, Conference “Beyond Militarism”, University of Cambridge (2022)

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