Layal Ftouni

researcher and educator

Layal Ftouni is an assistant professor of gender studies and critical theory at the Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University, Utrecht. Her teaching is transdisciplinary, crossing fields of gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, political theory, visual studies, and critical race studies.

In 2020, Ftouni was awarded the Dutch Research Council (NWO) VENI grant (2022) to undertake a new research project entitled Ecologies of Violence: Affirmations of Life at the Frontiers of Survival. The research explores the politics of life and living at the boundaries with death—both human and environmental—in conditions of war and settler colonialism, focusing on Syria and Palestine. She is also currently working on a journal issue entitled Radical Kinship: Solidarity and Ethico-Political Belonging for Darkmatter (2023). The journal addresses the urgency of intersectional solidarity and coalitional politics in our current global political conjuncture. In the face of increasing normalization of right-wing ideologies, racism, and enduring settler colonialism; as well as global calamities, both human and environmental, the journal asks what a left politics that refuses single-issue struggles and that is orientated toward utopian futures might look like.