(Videos forthcoming)

Invited Talks and Presentations:

• “Women’s Education for a Sustainable World”. Keynote Speaker and opened the ceremony for the Science, Art, and Sustainability Project at Vanitha College (the oldest and most prestigious women’s college in India), Hyderabad, 9th August 2016 3pm.

• “Epistemology and Engineering: a Critique of Narratives and Civilization”. Invited public lecture for the academic staff of the CK Reddy College of Engineering and Technology, Hyderabad, open to all disciplines, but mostly attended by professors from engineering (bio-engineering included), environmental, physics, and architecture departments. The lecture addressed the ways in which the various underlying principles of civilization and wilderness affect cultural practices pertaining to the utilization of space, 10th August 2016.

• “Sociology as a Narrative of Civilization”. Department of Sociology, Osmania University, Hyderabad. Invited lecture on the underlying premises in sociology, anthropocentrism, violence, and ecocide. 9th August 2016 10 am.

• “Critique of Civilization and Prospects of Education in an Imperilled World”. 5th Orientation Course for Furthering Professionalization of Educators. Invited lecture for professors at Osmania University, Hyderabad, India, on the importance of critique of civilization across academic disciplines for a new and viable educational model. 8th August 2016.

• “Epistemology, Civilization, and the Roots of War”. Public lecture at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. 4th August 2016.

• “Civilization and Patriarchy: The Domestication of Sex and the Origins of Gender”. Invited speaker at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Tapti Hostel Public Lecture series. In this lecture, Layla AbdelRahim proposes to examine gender as a necessary development of civilization that is rooted in the domestication of resources, in which the domesticator owns the product of human and nonhuman labor and controls their reproduction and sexuality. The civilized construct of gender has been a pivotal development in the creation of a social structure that legitimates violence and requires forcible reproduction of resources and the extermination of humans and nonhumans who are deemed useless or harmful for this system of ownership. To function as an institution, gender thus has been incorporated into the foundations of civilized epistemology and fuels our socio-environmental and economic paradigm. 3rd August 2016.

• “Origin Stories and Political Paradigms”. Invited public lecture at the Department of Political Science, Delhi University. The lecture addresses the reification of fictional and scientific understanding of the origins of humanity and life. The spectrum of political and socio-economic paradigms in civilization share one element in common: an anthropocentric epistemology that normalizes and legitimates violent praxis against those defined as nonhuman in this system of knowledge. Furthermore, as a discipline, political science provides a narrative that institutionalizes the anthropocentric perspective and proliferates a socio-economic culture of growth on a finite planet.  3rd August 2016.

• Participant in development of school curriculum for sustainability and rewilding at AGASTYA Foundation; 17-24 July 2016.