Producing the Public in Arab Societies: Media Working Group

Layal Ftouni is a writer and lecturer at the University of Westminster. Her research, titled Dismantling or Reproducing the Orientalist Canon? examines Neo-Orientalism in contemporary visual arts. She has presented her research in a number of different forums including Iniva, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Ruskin School of Art -University of Oxford, and the University of Copenhagen.

Layal is also the co-founder of Arab Cultural Studies Group and a member of the Stuart Hall Library Research Network at Iniva. She is currently working on a book co-edited with Tarik Sabry titledArab Subcultures: Transformations in Theory and Practice (I.B. Tauris). Her recent publications include a chapter titled “Rethinking Gender Studies: Towards an Arab Feminist Epistemology” in Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field edited by Tarik Sabry. Her interests include, Gender Studies, Contemporary Arab and Middle Eastern Art, postcolonial theory, and theory and criticism of art.