Layla AbdelRahim

Layla AbdelRahim is a Canadian comparatist anthropologist and author, whose works on narratives of civilization and wilderness have contributed to the fields of literary and cultural studies, animal studies, philosophy, sociology, anarcho-primitivst thought, epistemology, and critique of civilization and education. She attributes the collapse in the diversity of bio-systems and environmental degradation to monoculturalism and the civilized ontology that explains existence in terms of anthropocentric utilitarian functions.

Her books Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation: Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness (Routledge 2015) and Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education (Fernwood 2013) make a contribution to children’s literary theory and a critique of education as rooted in the civilized need for the domestication of children as resources.

AbdelRahim received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College and, upon graduation in 1993, received the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to pursue an anthropological project in Europe. She did graduate work in 1993-94 at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales) or l'EHESS and master studies in social sciences at where she later worked as Visiting Researcher at the department of social anthropology. She completed her Ph.D. at the Université de Montréal, Department of Comparative Literature. Her dissertation entitled Order and the Literary Rendering of Chaos: Children’s Literature as Knowledge, Culture, and Social Foundation, examines the effect of ontological premises on human self-knowledge (anthropology) and the repercussions of such knowledge on the anthropogenic destruction of the world’s life systems and diversity.

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