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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, 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 anthropocentrism utilitarian functions.

Her books Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation: Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness (Routledge 2012) 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.

Education
AbdelRahim received her Ph.D. from 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.

Thought
AbdelRahim traces the root of all oppression to the ontological premises of domestication that define the raison d'être of living and non-living beings in terms of consumption and co-existence in a hierarchy of food chain. Drawing on paleontology, ethology, and biological anthropology, she challenges the precepts in the narrative of anthropology that constructs the human as predator and consumer. This critique extends to civilized economic and socio-political cultures and their affect on the environment as well as on systems of education and parenting. Her examination of civilized and wild narratives is relevant to a variety of domains and disciplines, such as philosophy of science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, environmental economics, education, literary theory.

Media appearances
AbdelRahim is featured in anOther Story of Progress, a documentary film by Thomas Toivonen, as one of leading contemporary anarcho-primitivism philosophers.