Tuesday 27 October 2026 12:30pm to 2:00pm
Department of Sociology Sociology Seminar Room
Department of Sociology, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RQThis event is part of the Sociology Seminar Series.
Open to: All staff and students, graduate and undergraduate.
Access note: Historic building, not wheelchair accessible.
About
Demographic Anxieties examines how the Israeli settler-colonial state and its borders shape Palestinian women’s reproductive freedom. Grounded in a Black feminist reproductive justice framework, this work foregrounds the sexual politics of settler colonialism by demonstrating how Israeli policies profoundly impact 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, the book takes Israeli hospitals, fertility departments, maternity wards, and infrastructures of care as sites of inquiry into the governance of Palestinians’ lives.
Demographic Anxieties examines everyday encounters between Palestinian patients and Jewish Israeli doctors and argues that, alongside spectacular and disastrous forms of Israeli state violence, we must also consider more quotidian forms of surveillance and control. Written from an anticolonial feminist perspective, it asks what Palestine, as a site of knowledge production, enables, complicates, or demands from a transnational feminist approach to reproductive justice.
Link: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/demographic-anxieties/paper
Speaker biography:
Gala Rexer is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at University College London.