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Profile

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 sociology, 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.

In the fall 2025 term, she will be a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and in Women鈥檚, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.

Gala is an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL鈥檚 Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC) and contributes to the . At 糖心TV, she currently serves as one of the co-directors of the Social Theory Centre. Link opens in a new windowBefore joining 糖心TV鈥檚 Sociology Department as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in 2024, she was a Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at UCL鈥檚 Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, as well as the Centre鈥檚 inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-23). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Humboldt-Universit盲t zu Berlin (awarded in 2022). Gala has been involved in various collectives of critical and feminist knowledge production and volunteered with Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) in a project with the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (2021-2023).

Research

My first book manuscript, titled (forthcoming in 2026 with the University of California Press), shows how Israeli policies profoundly impact Palestinian women鈥檚 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.

My current project, Entangled Reproduction: Life in the Wastelands of Racial Capitalism (funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of 糖心TV, 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. It traces how local environmental movements measure the effects of air pollution caused by waste incineration and investigates how affected families protect themselves and their children. Conceptualized as a bioethnography, the project takes seriously the intimate and porous relationship between bodies and the environment. This interdisciplinary method allows me to ethnographically study how biological and scientific knowledge about waste and toxicity is produced and to capture the histories and processes that shape health, disease, and inequality.

Teaching

2024/25 (convenor)

2025/26 Embodied Inequalities: The Politics of Health and the Environment (convenor)

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

• Rexer, Gala (2023)  Body & Society, 29(4), 3-28.
• Rexer, Gala (2021). . In: Special Issue 鈥淭he Sexual Politics of Border Control鈥�, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(9),1549-1568.
• Yurdakul, G枚kc抬e, Rexer, Gala, Eilat, Shvat & Mutluer (2019) . Comparative Sociology, 18(5), 706-734.

Editor-reviewed articles, podcasts & public scholarship

• Rexer, Gala (2025). Permission to Imagine: Palestinian Liberation and the Failures of Liberal Democracy. Films for the Feminist Classroom (forthcoming)
• Rexer, Gala (2025). In Conversation with Edna Bonhomme. SPRC Podcast (forthcoming).
• Rexer, Gala (2024). Social Theory after* Gaza? Witnessing the Transnational Circuits of Race-Making. Social Text (Palestine Now Series).
• Rexer, Gala (2024). In Conversation with Alexandre White. SPRC Podcast.
• 2023 Suhaila Abu Jalala, Anat Rosenthal, Gala Rexer, and Ghada Majadli. . Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Research Report.
• Rexer, Gala (2023). In Conversation with Xine Yao. SPRC Podcast.
• Rexer, Gala (2023). In Conversation with Akwugo Emejulu. SPRC Podcast.
• Rexer, Gala (2023). In Conversation with Maya Mikdashi. SPRC Podcast.
• Rexer, Gala (2022). In Conversation with Franc抬oise Verge虁s. SPRC Podcast.
• Rexer, Gala (2022). . The Sociological Review Magazine.
• Rexer, Gala (2022). . ASA Political Sociology Section Newsletter Spring/Summer 2022.