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Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Book & Speaking tour
It is with great enthusiasm that we are announcing the 2013 speaking tour for anthropologist, unschooler, and anarchist Layla AbdelRahim. Layla will be touring with her new book Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams through various communities in the Cascadian Bioregion.
https://www.facebook.com/events/388959827898277
Tour dates:
(1) Tuesday October 8, 5:30-7:00
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Surrey BC, Unceded Coast Salish Territories
Crime and Reward from an Anarcho-primitivist Perspective.
See description below or on FB event: https://www.facebook.com/events/235575403266795/?notif_t=plan_user_invited
(2) Saturday October 12, Spartacus Books
Vancouver BC, Unceded Coast Salish Territories
The Ingrained Premises of Injustice in the Unknowledge Sold as Education
https://www.facebook.com/events/522685137805658/?ref_dashboard_filter=calendar
(3) Sunday October 13, 7pm
Purple Thistle
Vancouver BC, Unceded Coast Salish Territories
The Insidious and Resilient Narratives of Domestication: Pitfalls to Watch for in Autonomous Learning Zones.
https://www.facebook.com/events/675007529178671/?ref=3&ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular
(4) Tuesday, October 15, 7pm,
Camas Books – 2620 Quadra St,
Victoria BC, unceded Lekwungen Territories
What’s in a Class? On Reproduction of Gender, Species, and Ethnicity as Categories for Labour and Consumption.
https://www.facebook.com/events/169052663280221/?fref=ts
(5) Wednesday October 16, 7pm
Duncan Garage Showroom
Duncan BC, unceded Quw’utsun’ Territory
Schooling as a Political Choice to Conform to the Colonizing Narrative of Domestication
FB event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/206747696164527/
(6) Friday, October 18, 7pm
University of Victoria
Victoria BC, Unceded Lekwungen Territories
The Ship of Fools as a Place of Spectacle, Healing, and Education where the Wild are Sent to Die.
http://geography.uvic.ca/colloquiums/AbdelRahim%20screen.jpg
(7) Tuesday October 22
Black Moon Collective, 113 4th Ave W
Olympia WA, Coast Salish Territories
Children at the Forefront of the War of Civilization over Colonization of Resources
https://www.facebook.com/events/580690978658664/
(8) Wednesday October 23, 7pm
Black Coffee, 501 E. Pine st.
Seattle, WA, Occupied Duwamish Territory
https://www.facebook.com/events/347668795368906/?fref=ts
(9) Friday October 25, 7:30pm
Red and Black Cafe
Portland (with music by special guest Mike XvX)
https://www.facebook.com/events/178111952381696/
(10) Tuesday October 29th, 12:00 – 2pm
Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, IN
To order copies of Wild Children Domesticated Dreams
http://fernwoodpublishing.ca/Wild-Children-Domesticated-Dreams/
Please visit Layla’s Website (where you may find many of her writings online)
https://laylaonthe.net
The Wikipedia entry about Layla Abdel Rahim
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layla_AbdelRahim
Full presentation descriptions and links to interviews and talks:
Interviews:
1) On Animal Voices, Vancouver by Alissa: http://animalvoices.org/2013/10/layla-abdelrahim-tribute-to-turkeys/
2) On Gorilla Radio, CFUV (University of Victoria) by Chris Cook: https://soundcloud.com/cfuv/gorilla-radio-layla-abdelrahim
3) On Doers, Makers, Thinkers CFUV (University of Victoria) by Julian: https://soundcloud.com/cfuv/doers-makers-thinkers-layla
Talks:
(1) Tuesday, 8th October, 2013, 5:30 pm.
Department of Criminology, Kwantlen Polytechic University, Surrey, B.C.
Watch video here:
http://youtu.be/uVQujVAN6zM
Title:
Crime and Reward from an Anarcho-primitivist Perspective
Abstract:
George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Black teenager, Trayvon Martin, this summer came as a surprise to many mostly because the civilised believe words and focus on language rather than on praxis and consequences. Namely, civilised people see the judicial system with its verbose process of trial as a system of justice and in the eyes of those involved in Zimmerman’s trial, there was “no evidence beyond reasonable doubt” that Zimmerman acted outside the confines of the American law. The question thus was not whether killing someone was wrong, the problem that was to be resolved in this system of justice was whether the killer had the right to kill.
In this lecture, Layla AbdelRahim discusses the civilized premises that construct the human animal as predatory and thus centers murder in anthropology itself and reinforces the predatory narrative. Furthermore, this predation is structured by the classificatory system of civilized epistemology that categorizes groups of living and nonliving beings, whether human or not, as “resources” and “consumers” thereby excluding whole groups and immense suffering from the public discourse on justice. And as discussed in her book, Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education, this predatory narrative is reinforced by both the medical sector and the system of education.
(2) Tuesday, 16th
In Duncan, B.C.:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/39913923
Title:
Schooling as a Political Choice to Conform to the Colonising Narrative of Domestication
Abstract:
Obligatory schooling has become the global narrative that frames our understanding of how children must learn. Narratives become reality when people act according to the plot that drives these narratives. Hence, obligatory schooling, where children are taught through literacy how to know and live in the world, has become the reality for most human children on earth. Furthermore, even if the specific details of what, for instance, is taught in French schools might differ from what might be taught in Kenya, there is a unifying experience of submitting children to “discipline” and hierarchical structure of obedience through literacy from an early age. This literacy is mostly linked with today’s major civilisations: European, Arab, and Chinese, the core of whose syllabus aims to domesticate human resources and instill in them a place in the hierarchy of the “food chain”. In this respect, the seemingly personal choice of parents or a community to whether send their children to school or choose to educate them at home or in the community, in both cases, constitutes a political choice: one to conform to the socio-economic and political system based on consumption and exploitation or to resist this paradigm. In this talk, Layla will draw on her discussion of “unschooling” and “schooling” in her new book Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education (Fernwood Publishing 2013) to address how successful resistance has to entail a critique of the underlying speciesist, racist, and misogynist mandate of the domesticating narrative of civilisation and the disciplining methods of the civilised institution.
(3) Friday, 18th October at 3pm.
Department of Geography, University of Victoria, B.C.
Title:
The Ship of Fools as a Place of Spectacle, Healing, and Education where the Wild are Sent to Die
Abstract:
The Medieval European allegory of the Ship of Fools was more than a metaphor or a literary ruse to critique the Church and the state. In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault argues that this trope was also a real socio-political tactic used to cleanse the civilised space by isolating the “mad” or the “unreasonable” from “society”. For civilisation, “reason” has two constituents: raison d’être and sanity. The sane are here defined as those existing for the purpose of domestication in a “natural” food chain hierarchy. In this sense, “society” consists of those working for the “reason” of domestication and socio-economic hierarchy, exploitation, and consumption and those who cannot or refuse to abide by the domesticator’s definition of their reason for existence are either sent to sanatoriums, hospitals, or other correctional facilities to be cured or killed.
Drawing from the research conducted for her book, Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education (2013), Layla AbdelRahim discusses schools and children’s culture as spaces of such isolation and “correction”: where the wild raison d’être to dream and to exist for one’s own, known or unbeknownst to self purpose is extinguished and where the child is taught to exist to serve as a human resource in the chain of exploitation of nonhuman resources.
(4) Saturday, 12th October at 7pm
Spartacus Books, Vancouver, B.C.
Title:
The Ingrained Premises of Injustice in the Unknowledge Sold as Education
Abstract:
In this discussion, Layla will draw on the research conducted for her book Wild Children –Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education, in which she examines the underlying premises in the construction of knowledge that the institution of education produces and proliferates. The first premise is that knowledge of others must be organised and based on “classification” of forms of life and nonlife. Hence, in monotheistic narratives, God creates groups of beings on different days and, in science, classification is the primary organising principle of knowledge. Knowing the self and the world by relating to individuals as members and representatives of an epistemological “class” fosters alienation from and ignorance of the real experiences of others and provides a system of oppression of whole groups of human and nonhuman beings. In other words, epistemological classification establishes economic classes, where some control the power and agency over the construction of “knowledge” while the others constitute “resources” to be domesticated and colonised by such knowledge and exploited as labour force and the source of pleasure and well-being for the “ruling” classes. Therefore, examining and critiquing how unknowledge about what is human or nonhuman is produced and reproduced through schooling and other cultural narratives is critical to overcoming gender, racial, and speciesist oppression.
(5) Tuesday, 15th October at 7pm. Camas Books, Victoria, B.C.:
Title:
What’s in a Class? On Reproduction of Gender, Species, and Ethnicity as Categories for Labour and Consumption
Abstract:
How do we know the world? How do we relate to the world and to our knowledge of it? Today, most people around the world believe that we cannot learn how to live in the world without having gone to school and received an “education”. However, what is this “education”? What is its content, its method, or its purpose?
Education is a systemic production, reproduction, and transmission of specific socio-economic constructs about humans, society, and the world. These constructs are then passed on as “knowledge”, which ensures the coexistence of epistemological classes as socio-economic classes in a hierarchical paradigm. Civilised science prioritises Cartesian thinking that divorces “reason” from “emotions” precisely because empathy with the exploited, the suffering, or the consumed will interfere with the project Civilisation.
In this conversation, Layla will discuss the underlying premises in scientific thinking about the world as a system of domestication of human and nonhuman resources for production, reproduction, consumption, and ultimately devastation.
(6) Sunday, 13th October, 2013
Purple Thistle, Vancouver, B.C.
Title:
The Insidious and Resilient Narratives of Domestication: Pitfalls to Watch for in Autonomous Learning Zones
Abstract:
What better weekend than ‘Thanksgiving’ to Join Layla AbdelRahim on her book tour for ‘Wild Children-Domesticated Dreams’, as she talks about colonization, domestication, and the challenge of not reproducing these mechanisms as we strive towards de-schooling.
Not only has the hierarchical project of domestication and civilization existed for the past ten thousand years, it has been expanding globally, engulfing more and more territories and bringing the world to a state nearing the brink of collapse of biodiversity and self-sustainability. This colonizing project has not been accepted passively. It has met strong ideological, epistemological, socio-economic, and physical resistance on both individual and social levels. Nonetheless, civilization has reached an epidemic level largely owing to its misconstruction of “knowledge” about human nature and the world. In her research, Layla AbdelRahim applies concepts from biology, anthropology, ethology, and sociology to examine the mechanisms by which socio-cultural narratives and material cultures reproduce themselves through domesticated bodies, minds, and desires. In this workshop, Layla will identify these mechanisms of perpetuating domesticated “unknowledge” and will engage a discussion on resistance to its narrative.
(7) Tuesday, 22nd October, 2013
New Moon Collective, Olympia, WA
Title:
Children at the Forefront of the War of Civilization over Colonization of Resources
Abstract:
Battling their own oppression and fighting against unjust systems for the wider public good, Anarchist and other activist parents often do not have the time to allot to rewilding their own parenting culture and thus relegate the task of child rearing to institutions or other civilized child-care. In this workshop, Layla will address the questions raised in her latest book, Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education (Fernwood Publishing, 2013) pertaining to the real cost of parenting and child-rearing and the implications of the civilized predatory socio-environmental relationships on children, their culture, and thereby on the world.
(8) Wednesday, 23rd October, 2013
Black Coffee Coop, Seattle, WA
A talk on Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education (Fernwood, 2013).
(9) Friday, 25th October, 2013
Red and Black Café, Portland, OR
A talk on Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education (Fernwood, 2013).
(10) Tuesday, 29th October, 2013.
Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana
A talk on Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education (Fernwood, 2013).
Filed in: Uncategorized.
[…] We feature an interview with Layla AbdelRahim, an anthropologist, a writer, a researcher and a public speaker and holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Montreal, Quebec. Layla is currently on a speaking tour in the Cascadian bioregion. […]