In this episode of the SPRC podcast, Gala Rexer speaks about her book Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel (University of California Press, 2026). The conversation explores how reproductive justice in Palestine/Israel is shaped by borders, incarceration, and the global histories of eugenics. Drawing on ethnographic research with Palestinian patients navigating fertility treatment in Israeli medical institutions and Israeli fertility doctors, Rexer also discusses the experiences of Palestinian health-workers in Israeli fertility clinics, and the informal networks through which Palestinians sustain reproductive futures. It also considers the ethical challenges of researching Palestine/Israel, the responsibilities of the ethnographer, and methods of “fugitive anthropology”: a feminist approach to research that remains accountable to the embodied realities of colonialism, conflict and racialised violence. The episode closes by reflecting on feminist debt, and the responsibilities of scholars working from positions of relative safety.
Gala Rexer is a feminist sociologist whose research examines gender, sexuality, race, health inequalities, and the body. She is known for her work on reproductive and environmental injustice in Palestine/Israel, Germany, and the UK. She is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, where she also co-directs the Social Theory Centre, and Honorary Research Fellow at UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre. Her current research explores the effects of pollution and toxic infrastructures on reproduction, health, and family life in London. She is the co-editor of a special issue ofThe Sociological Review on "Sociology in the Times of Genocide". This conversation is about her new book, Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel, published by the University of California Press in 2026.
Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures at UCL English.
This podcast was recorded in September 2026.
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