https://galarexer.com gala rexer Mon, 22 May 2023 18:53:18 +0000 https://galarexer.com en https://galarexer.com/About Sun, 07 Mar 2021 15:36:07 +0000 gala rexer https://galarexer.com/About Gala RexerLeverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Warwick I am currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Sociology Department and an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC). In the fall 2025 term, I was a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. At Warwick, I serve as one of the co-directors of the Social Theory Centre. At UCL, I am a contributor to the SPRC podcast series.&nbsp; Before joining Warwick, I was a Lecturer (Visiting Assistant Professor) in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at UCL’s SPRC (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 theory, STS, anti-colonial thought, and medical and global sociology. My work has appeared in academic journals including Body and Society,&nbsp;Ethnic and Racial Studies, The Sociological Review Magazine, Social Text, Films for the Feminist Classroom, and The British Journal of Sociology. I am currently a guest editor for a Special Issue on Sociology in the Times of Genocide in The Sociological Review. My first book, titled Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel (forthcoming August 2026, 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 Palestine/Israel and beyond.&nbsp; Supported by my Leverhulme grant, I have begun a second book project,&nbsp;Entangled Reproduction: Life in the Wastelands of Racial Capitalism,&nbsp;which brings together concerns for reproductive and environmental justice. It investigates how the uneven distribution of waste and toxicity materializes not only in polluting infrastructures and landscapes of debris, but also in people’s bodies and their everyday practices of social and biological reproduction. Speaking (Upcoming) “Slow, Spectacular, Catastrophic: The Reproductive Body and Temporalities of Violence in the 21st Century,”&nbsp;British Journal of Sociology Conference (April 2026) Past (selected) “Waste as Relation: Studying Toxic Infrastructures and Health Inequalities,” BSA Conference (April 2026) Research seminar “Social Justice, Cities and Citizenship,” University of Leeds (january 2026) Book talk “Demographic anxieties,”&nbsp;Center for the Study of Women and Society, CUNY (November 2025) Visiting research Scholar presentation,&nbsp; Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU (November 2025) WGSS working group presentation, Yale University (october 2025) window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'G-YVGH2YXWXR'); https://galarexer.com/Peer-Reviewed-Articles Sun, 07 Mar 2021 15:39:12 +0000 gala rexer https://galarexer.com/Peer-Reviewed-Articles Rexer, G. (2023) Body and SOciety, 29(4), 3-28.&nbsp; The Materiality of Power and Bodily Matter(ing): Embodied Resistance in Palestine Rexer, G. (2021) In: Special Issue “Sexuality and Borders”, Ethnic and Racial Studies,&nbsp;44(9),1549-1568. Borderlands of reproduction: bodies, borders, and assisted reproductive technologies in Israel/Palestine. Yurdakul, G., Rexer, G., Eilat, S. &amp; Mutluer, N (2019) Comparative Sociology, 18(5), 706-734. Contested Authorities over Life Politics: Religious-Secular Tensions in Abortion Debates in Germany, Turkey, and Israel window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'G-YVGH2YXWXR'); https://galarexer.com/Essays-Reports-Reviews Mon, 22 May 2023 18:53:18 +0000 gala rexer https://galarexer.com/Essays-Reports-Reviews Gala Rexer (2026) FILMS FOR THE FEMINIST CLASSROOM, 13(2) Permission to Imagine: Palestinian Liberation and the Failures of Liberal DemocracyFilm review of Lyd (2023) and Two Blue Lines (2015) Gala Rexer (2026) BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY A Man Among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism (Jordanna Matlon, 2022)Book review&nbsp; Gala Rexer (2024) social text Social Theory after* Gaza?Witnessing the Transnational Circuits of Race-Making Suhaila Abu Jalala, Anat Rosenthal, Gala Rexer, and Ghada Majadli&nbsp;(2023) physicians for human Rights Israel The Consequences of Israeli Human Rights Violations on the Health of Women in the Gaza StripResearch Report Gala Rexer (2022) The sociological Review Magazine Words failed us Repairing sociology’s haunted past means finding new language to write about the social world#4 most read paper on The Sociological Review Magazine website in 2022. Gala Rexer&nbsp;(2022) asa Political Sociology section newsletter, Spring/summer 2022 How Race, Nationality, and Gender shape Fieldwork and Data CollectionTales from the Field Gala Rexer (2022) Diffrakt | Centre for Theoretical Periphery What’s in your bag, Ursula K. Le Guin?The Carrier Bag Approach to Storytelling and White Feminism https://galarexer.com/Teaching Sun, 07 Mar 2021 20:45:42 +0000 gala rexer https://galarexer.com/Teaching Courses I have taught, co-taught, or am currently teaching the following classes: Embodied Inequalities: The Politics of Health and the Environment (module convenor 2025/26, BA Sociology, University of Warwick) Race, Resistance and Modernity (module convenor 2024/25, BA Sociology, University of Warwick)The Politics of Health and Medicine: Race, Gender, Nation (module convenor 2023/24, MA Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies, UCL) Topics in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies (co-teaching 2023/24, MA Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies, UCL)Body Politics and the Margins of Life: The Secular/Religious Tensions (module convenor 2017/18 and co-convenor 2016/17, MA Social Sciences and MA Gender Studies, HU) Supervision I have supervised a number of Master’s dissertations in Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies, UCL (2023) as well as undergraduate dissertations in Sociology, University of Warwick (2025). Workshops From 2021-2023, I have been on the steering committee for an EU-funded study on the consequences of Israeli human rights violations on the mental health of Palestinian women in the Gaza strip, led by Physicians for Human Rights Israel and the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme. I have designed and taught a two-day introductory workshop on qualitative research methods and data collection for the projects’ research assistants in Gaza. Guest Lectures BA Yale University, Technology, Race and Gender, session on Reproductive Justice (2025) ma global health and development, ucl, session on the history of global health (2024) Bsc Sociology, UCL, Session on Sexual Politics and the nation-state (2024) MA Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies, UCL, session on Feminist and abolitionist Ethnography (2023/2024) MA History &amp; Philosophy of Science, UCL, session on Reproductive (In)Justice (2023) MA Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies, UCL, session on Race, Capital, Feminism,(2023) MA Gender, Society, and Representation, UCL, session on Decolonial Feminism (2022) window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'G-YVGH2YXWXR'); https://galarexer.com/Demographic-Anxieties Mon, 14 Feb 2022 15:47:55 +0000 gala rexer https://galarexer.com/Demographic-Anxieties Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel(forthcoming August 2026, University of California Press) This book examines how the Israeli settler colonial state and its borders shape Palestinian women’s reproductive freedom.&nbsp;Demographic Anxieties uses the Black feminist reproductive justice framework to&nbsp;show how Israeli policies profoundly impact Palestinian women’s reproductive rights, health, and decision-making and to foreground 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, this book takes Israeli hospitals, fertility departments, maternity wards, and infrastructures of care as sites of inquiry into the governance of Palestinians’ lives.&nbsp; Demographic Anxieties examines the everyday encounters between Palestinian patients and Jewish Israeli doctors to argue that alongside the spectacular and disastrous forms of Israeli state violence, we must also consider quotidian forms of surveillance and control to understand Israeli politics. The key intervention of this book is to show how these overlooked sites of “tender violence” are foundational for the settler state to implement its sexual and demographic politics. It explores how Israeli political subjectivity, and its collective structure of feeling is founded on the control and restriction of the Palestinian population’s reproduction.&nbsp;In other words, Demographic Anxieties argues that reproductive injustice is a feature, not a bug of the settler colonial project. window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'G-YVGH2YXWXR'); https://galarexer.com/Audio-Events Tue, 17 Jan 2023 13:49:28 +0000 gala rexer https://galarexer.com/Audio-Events SPRC podcast series UCL Institute of Advanced Studies · SPRC In Conversation with Edna Bonhomme Gala Rexer talks to Edna Bonhomme, culture writer, historian of science, journalist, and author of “A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19” (2025). The conversation covers theoretical and methodological questions about the relationship between confinement and disease, Edna’s anti/inter-disciplinary approach to writing, health and illness in literature, and how the intersectional fight for prison abolition relates to struggles for health equality. UCL Institute of Advanced Studies · In conversation with Alexandre White 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. UCL Institute of Advanced Studies · In conversation with Xine Yao 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. UCL Institute of Advanced Studies · In conversation with Akwugo Emejulu 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 <img width="1260" height="1630" width_o="1260" height_o="1630" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/776c206b28be18ac33336110ca63a3b46ed797e9b50064bf891ac39edbc6076f/SCA-presentation.png" data-mid="239755023" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/776c206b28be18ac33336110ca63a3b46ed797e9b50064bf891ac39edbc6076f/SCA-presentation.png" /> Research Presentation at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU, November 11, 2025 <img width="1080" height="1354" width_o="1080" height_o="1354" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5521699841c3546e2821ebf2947f14c2dfb76fe1395862ec2570e75cbd9ad6c5/Screenshot-2025-10-22-at-15.28.05.png" data-mid="239755049" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5521699841c3546e2821ebf2947f14c2dfb76fe1395862ec2570e75cbd9ad6c5/Screenshot-2025-10-22-at-15.28.05.png" /> Book talk at CUNY’s Center for the Study of Women and Society,&nbsp;November 4, 2025 <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8ef78811335ddca8c6be57829e7ed411e8f2843e97f8fa7ac479b54f4064d8dd/A643492.jpeg" data-mid="222725903" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8ef78811335ddca8c6be57829e7ed411e8f2843e97f8fa7ac479b54f4064d8dd/A643492.jpeg" /> speculative feminisms | #4 Writing (the Weird), Performing (Transgression), Resisting (Identity) A conversation with Maxi Wallenhorst, Melanie Jame Wolf, and Yasmin Zaher at diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery, November 28, 2024 <img width="1587" height="2245" width_o="1587" height_o="2245" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d241a0ea0db3eedfdf95ab21a180d397491ba4d9aaa4ad5a2fc645d3870f9cc3/writing.jpeg" data-mid="180434760" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d241a0ea0db3eedfdf95ab21a180d397491ba4d9aaa4ad5a2fc645d3870f9cc3/writing.jpeg" /> 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.&nbsp;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:&nbsp;Yasmine Kherfi,&nbsp;Sophie Marie Niang,&nbsp;Sarai Kirshner,&nbsp;rémy-paulin twahirwa <img width="768" height="1087" width_o="768" height_o="1087" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b2a998fc64e1bfa35e91f8b7452cfa2eb67396246bdce0a8f8074ebec727615b/perspectives_series_flyer_a5_1.jpg" data-mid="179583947" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/768/i/b2a998fc64e1bfa35e91f8b7452cfa2eb67396246bdce0a8f8074ebec727615b/perspectives_series_flyer_a5_1.jpg" /> 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:&nbsp;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.<img width="1325" height="2048" width_o="1325" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/90a81e037edd27858769dca3e840cb7607e6de2c2dd0600f7ae6ebcd3fb0ab54/53567262_10157007842893749_5802487180374835200_n.jpg" data-mid="180439743" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/90a81e037edd27858769dca3e840cb7607e6de2c2dd0600f7ae6ebcd3fb0ab54/53567262_10157007842893749_5802487180374835200_n.jpg" /> Sexuality and Borders is a two-day international symposium hosted and funded by New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication,&nbsp;2019 (participant).&nbsp;Special Issue The Sexual Politics of Border Control published in the Journal for Ethnic and Racial Studies.&nbsp; <img width="2000" height="2817" width_o="2000" height_o="2817" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0528a6aa10380645932980b7e5bf5a4c88c708f9c948bbe27beb58de6bc5d116/webposter-3rd-interrupted-by-flufflord.png" data-mid="180439740" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0528a6aa10380645932980b7e5bf5a4c88c708f9c948bbe27beb58de6bc5d116/webposter-3rd-interrupted-by-flufflord.png" />Three-part interdisciplinary symposium on technology, gender, and sexuality&nbsp;“&lt;Interrupted =“Cyfem and Queer&gt;” happening across various queer community spaces in Berlin 2018-2019 (academic curator/organiser)&nbsp; <img width="2000" height="2817" width_o="2000" height_o="2817" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f74ec2060697e2c3169cdec0d6821603a98756e6b6259d85d94bac9207ade253/-1st-_Interrupted--Cyfem-and-Queer_WEB_HD.jpg" data-mid="180439729" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f74ec2060697e2c3169cdec0d6821603a98756e6b6259d85d94bac9207ade253/-1st-_Interrupted--Cyfem-and-Queer_WEB_HD.jpg" /> window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'G-YVGH2YXWXR'); https://galarexer.com/Credits Tue, 23 Mar 2021 20:37:42 +0000 gala rexer https://galarexer.com/Credits Website by Yuli Serfaty