UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre Podcast

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.

Luke de Noronha is joined by Chenchen Zhang, Associate Professor in International Relations at Durham University. Chenchen’s book Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China, was published by Oxford University Press in June 2026. The book examines how ideas of ‘the West’ and articulations of China-West difference are produced and mobilized in contemporary China, with a focus on reactionary political discourse in Chinese cyberspace. Chenchen situates the Chinese case study within a wider critique of the global far right and postcolonial nationalisms. This podcast was recorded in June 2026.

A conversation about Rahul Rao’s book, ‘The Psychic Lives of Statues’. The conversation considers the agitation caused by attempts to remove celebratory statues of figures involved in the violence of the Atlantic Slave trade or of colonialism. Are statues made into ‘idols’ by people who want to defend these histories? How should we understand the sudden ‘coming alive’ of these previously forgotten and unnoticed representations of the human form? What can we learn from the distinctive erection of statues by corporate or state projects in our time and should we view these recent attempts to mark and control space through statues as a continuation of the spatial and representation tactics of European colonialism?The conversation was recorded in July 2025.Speakers: Gargi Bhattacharyya and Rahul Rao.

Luke de Noronha is joined by Gavan Titley, Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University. Gavan has written several books on race, racism and multiculturalism, with a particular focus on the generative role of media and communication, including Is Free Speech Racist? with Polity Press in 2020. They discuss the question of free speech, which has become so central to questions of native entitlement and authoritarian populism in the present. The conversation was recorded in November 2025. Speakers: Luke de Noronha and Gavan Titley

Luke de Noronha welcomes Sita Balani, Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London and the author, most recently, of Deadly and Slick: the Sexual Life of Race in Britain (Verso Press, 2023). They discuss Sita’s recent writings on culture wars, melodrama as a mode of political communication, and the difference between the ordinary and normal. This conversation was recorded in November 2025Speakers: Luke de Noronha and Sita BalaniProducer: Trisha HartEditor: James Fox

Radical Abundance – understanding the reconfiguration of the global economy and how we might survive itKeir Milburn and Kai Heron in conversation with Gargi Bhattacharyya. This conversation was recorded in the summer of 2025 and discusses the changing role and approach of the United States and the extreme hardships arising from climate catastrophe as triggers to re-imagine the global economy.The conversation was recorded before the publication of Kai and Keir’s excellent and celebrated book, ‘Radical Abundance’, but the themes of the conversation echo the preoccupations of the book.There was a lot to discuss here – as a result we have split the conversation into three sections for ease of listening.

Radical Abundance – understanding the reconfiguration of the global economy and how we might survive itKeir Milburn and Kai Heron in conversation with Gargi Bhattacharyya. This conversation was recorded in the summer of 2025 and discusses the changing role and approach of the United States and the extreme hardships arising from climate catastrophe as triggers to re-imagine the global economy.The conversation was recorded before the publication of Kai and Keir’s excellent and celebrated book, ‘Radical Abundance’, but the themes of the conversation echo the preoccupations of the book.There was a lot to discuss here – as a result we have split the conversation into three sections for ease of listening.

Radical Abundance – understanding the reconfiguration of the global economy and how we might survive itKeir Milburn and Kai Heron in conversation with Gargi Bhattacharyya. This conversation was recorded in the summer of 2025 and discusses the changing role and approach of the United States and the extreme hardships arising from climate catastrophe as triggers to re-imagine the global economy.The conversation was recorded before the publication of Kai and Keir’s excellent and celebrated book, ‘Radical Abundance’, but the themes of the conversation echo the preoccupations of the book.There was a lot to discuss here – as a result we have split the conversation into three sections for ease of listening.

Gala Rexer talks to Edna Bonhomme, culture writer, historian of science, journalist, and author of “A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19” (2025). The conversation covers theoretical and methodological questions about the relationship between confinement and disease, Edna’s anti/inter-disciplinary approach to writing, health and illness in literature, and how the intersectional fight for prison abolition relates to struggles for health equality. This conversation was recorded in June 2025Speakers: Dr Gala Rexer, Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Warwick and Honorary Research Fellow at the SPRC // Dr Edna Bonhomme Producer: Gala Rexer and Trisha HartEditors: James Fox