Dr Gala Rexer

Gala Rexer is a feminist sociologist who researches gender, sexuality, and race in relation to health inequalities and the body. Drawing from the fields of feminist and queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and global and medical sociology, she studies reproductive and environmental injustice and practices and movements that resist them. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Sociology Department. Before that, she was a Lecturer 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). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (awarded January 2022), funded by the German Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Her first book, 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. Her current project, Entangled Reproduction: Life in the Wastelands of Racial Capitalism, explores how ongoing exposure to pollution, waste, and toxicity affects reproductive choices, pregnancy outcomes, and parenting practices of communities living near toxic infrastructures in London.

Gala’s 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 (Palestine Now Series), and the British Journal of Sociology (forthcoming). At UCL, she has organized the seminar series Perspectives on Racialisation, Gender and Feminist Methodologies (2022-23), and she is a contributor to the SPRC podcast series.