NEWS RELEASE about EducationEnvironmentFoodGenderIdeasLabourMigrationPeace/WarPolice/PrisonsPovertySexualitySolidarity posted on September 21, 2013 by Comrade Black
Wild Children - Domesticated Dreams
: Book & Speaking Tour for Layla AbdelRahim
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.
We are still booking dates. If you wish to organize a speaking engagement with Layla in your community please get in contact: prideandunity@hotmail.com
Tour dates so far:
Tuesday October 8, 5:30-7:00
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Surrey BC, Unceded Coast Salish Territories
Crime and Reward from an Anarcho-primitivist Perspective.
Saturday October 12, Venue TBA
Vancouver BC, Unceded Coast Salish Territories
The Insidious and Resilient Narratives of Domestication: Pitfalls to Watch for in Autonomous Learning Zones.
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.
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.
Still seeking dates in Portland, Olympia, Eugene, and Seattle.
- poster artwork drawn by Ljuba Miltsova at age 12
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)
http://layla.miltsov.org/
The Wikipedia entry about Layla Abdel Rahim
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layla_AbdelRahim
Full presentation descriptions:
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Crime and Reward from an Anarcho-primitivist Perspective.
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 within 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.
The Insidious and Resilient Narratives of Domestication: Pitfalls to Watch for in Autonomous Learning Zones.
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.
What’s in a Class? On Reproduction of Gender, Species, and Ethnicity as Categories for Labour and Consumption.
https://www.facebook.com/events/169052663280221/?ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular
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.
The Ship of Fools as a Place of Spectacle, Healing, and Education where the Wild are Sent to Die.
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.
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