Layla AbdelRahim

Layla AbdelRahim is a comparativist anthropologist. Her main field is epistemology with a focus on civilization and the roots of violence against human and other animals as well as the environment. Her work contributes to a range of disciplines, such as anthropology, literary and cultural studies, animal studies, anarchism, philosophy, sociology, anarcho-primitivism, geography, environmental studies, and education.

Having travelled and lived on five continents, Layla AbdelRahim is fluent in a variety of languages and cultural contexts. She has worked as anthropologist in Western and Eastern Europe, as journalist of war and in refugee relief and development in North East Africa, and currently is an independent researcher and author based in Montreal. She is particularly interested in questions of human violence and traces its root to the ontological premises of domestication in our epistemology. These premises postulate the raison d'être of living and non-living beings in terms of consumption in a hierarchy of food chain thereby centering predation in civilized socio-economic and socio-environmental culture.  Her work thus examines the intersections of speciesism, racism, and sexism and the effect of civilized epistemology on the environment. Drawing on palaeontological studies, ethology, and biological anthropology, she challenges the precepts in the narrative of anthropology that constructs the human animal as predator and consumer. Her examination of civilized and wild narratives is relevant to a wide range of disciplines, among which are philosophy of science, evolutionary theory, animal studies, human animal studies also known as anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, ethics and theology, environmental studies, economics, education, and literary theory.

Education

Ph.D. University of Montreal, QC, Canada

M.A. University of Stockholm, Sweden

B.A. Bryn Mawr College, PA, U.S.A.

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Comparative and interdisciplinary studies, anarchism, Scandinavia, Russian literature and culture, wilderness, critique of civilization, ethology, ecology, anarchist studies, medical anthropology and its intersections with law and criminology, literature, epistemology, philosophy and anthropology of science, roots of violence, nationalism, war

Personal Interests

The forest, life, physics and earth sciences, theatre, film

Subjects

Anthropology - Soc Sci, Applied Linguistics, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Economics, Finance, Business & Industry, Education, English Language & Linguistics, Environment and Agriculture , Environment and Sustainability, Geography , Health and Social Care, Literature, Other, Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion, Religion, Sociology, Sociology, Criminology and Criminal Justice