Dr Gala Rexer

Gala Rexer is a feminist sociologist who researches gender and sexuality, affect, and race in relation to health inequalities. She studies reproductive and environmental injustice and practices and movements that resist them. Broadly, her work explores the historical connectedness and contemporary spatial and embodied conditions of nationalism, settler colonialism, and (racial) capitalism in Israel/Palestine, Germany, and the UK. She is interested in the relationship between theory and methodology, transnational feminisms, and global solidarities. Gala has been involved in various collectives of critical and feminist knowledge production and volunteers with Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) in a project with the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme.

Gala is currently working on her first book. 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 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.

Her next project, Entangled Reproduction: Life in the Wastelands of Racial Capitalism (funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Warwick, 2024-27), 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 was the SPRC’s inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-23) and received her PhD in Sociology from Humboldt University in Berlin. Her work has appeared in academic journals including Ethnic and Racial Studies, Comparative Sociology, The Sociological Review Magazine, and Body & Society, and has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Humboldt University’s Caroline von Humboldt Program, and the German Green Party’s Heinrich Böll Foundation.