Gala Rexer

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.

Gala is an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC) and contributes to the SPRC podcast seriesLink opens in a new window. At Warwick, she currently serves as one of the co-directors of the Social Theory Centre. Link opens in a new windowBefore joining Warwick’s Sociology Department as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in 2024, she was a Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, as well as the Centre’s inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-23). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Humboldt-Universität 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, tentatively titled Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Israel/Palestine (forthcoming in 2026 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.

My current 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. 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 Race, Resistance and Modernity(convenor)

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

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

• Rexer, Gala (2023) The Materiality of Power and Bodily Matter(ing): Embodied Resistance in Palestine. Body & Society, 29(4), 3-28.
• Rexer, Gala (2023). Borderlands of Reproduction: Bodies, Borders, and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Israel/Palestine. In: Special Issue “The Sexual Politics of Border Control”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(9),1549-1568.
• Yurdakul, Gökçe, Rexer, Gala, Eilat, Shvat & Mutluer (2019) Contested Authorities over Life Politics: Religious-Secular Tensions in Abortion Debates in Germany, Turkey, and Israel. 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. The Consequences of Israeli Human Rights Violations on the Health of Women in the Gaza Strip. 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 Françoise Vergès. SPRC Podcast.
• Rexer, Gala (2022). Words failed us: Repairing sociology’s haunted past means finding new language to write about the social world. The Sociological Review Magazine.
• Rexer, Gala (2022). How Race, Nationality, and Gender shape Fieldwork and Data Collection. ASA Political Sociology Section Newsletter Spring/Summer 2022.