Contact
Biography
After years of traveling and studying, Fuad returned to Malaysia in 2011 for a foray into Malaysian media and civil society, focusing particularly on interfaith dialogue to work alongside Malaysia's many minority faith communities.
He was also the founder and instructor of Sekolah Falsafah, a grassroots initiative aimed to promote Western Philosophy to a wider Bahasa-speaking audience which was held across 12 weeks in 2014 and 2015.
He is currently a trainee at the Centre for Lacanian Analysis.
Prior to academia, Fuad was a member of Projek Dialog where he was responsible for designing various media driven initiatives to encourage intercultural engagement among Malaysians. These included Pesta Filem Kita, which showcased the power of film to foster cross-cultural understanding and Leveraging Media for Advocacy Objectives, which explored the power of memes and Tik Tok to promote advocacy. He was also the producer for Fatah Dan Farah, in which he worked with Faisal Tehrani and Arif Rafhan Othman, to publish a web-graphic novel to promote diversity in Malaysia.
His six years at BFM radio saw him host Night School, a weekly show on BFM radio that made academic and theoretical discourse accessible for the general public and Digital Desires, which explored the impact of social media on human relationships. He has been quoted in the Edge, Channel News Asia, Foreign Affairs and the Star.
Expertise Summary
Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory, Marxism. Some of his publications have been translated to French and Portuguese.
Teaching Summary
Fuad has taught the following courses:
Undergraduate:
Cultures of Everyday Life, Communications Technology, Transnational Media, Media and Communications Theory Digital Communications and Media, Writing for the Media. Postgraduate: Mass Media, Post-Colonial Theory, Issues and Challenges in Contemporary Media
Research Summary
Ahmad Fuad Rahmat's interests bring together psychoanalysis, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and decolonial-Marxist critique to interrogate the spectral, material, and geopolitical dimensions of the… read more
Recent Publications
Current Research
Ahmad Fuad Rahmat's interests bring together psychoanalysis, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and decolonial-Marxist critique to interrogate the spectral, material, and geopolitical dimensions of the unconscious. Much of his writings challenge Eurocentric psychoanalytic paradigms by centering colonial histories, racial capitalism, and non-Western epistemologies as constitutive of psychic life. His book Decolonization and Psychoanalysis: The Underside of Signification (Routledge, 2025) identifies the decolonial potential in Lacanian theory by considering the materiality of speech as the site where colonial violence could be theorized to further expand the site and conceptual possibilities of psychoanalytic thinking.
Beyond the book, Fuad's psychoanalytic interventions are grounded in cultural critique: from Kleinian "settler unconscious" mapped onto maternal geographies (2024), to hip-hop as "peripheral psychoanalysis" that voices symptomal resistance from the margins (2024). His analysis of Malay comedy's "politics of labour" (2023) and Lacanian witnessing against psychoanalytic form (2023) reveal how aesthetic practices encode and rupture ideological structures. Most recently, his article "Demons as Decolonial Hyperobjects" (Open Philosophy, 2025) fuses OOO with hauntology to theorize demons-not as metaphors, but as hyperobjects that materialize the uneven temporalities of colonial trauma across bodies, landscapes, and media.
Fuad integrates TikTok, podcasts, and digital media into his pedagogical praxis, treating real-time mediafication as both object and method. His 7 years as a podcaster, media producer, and project manager for art exhibitions, film festivals, and webcomics inform his commitment to conceptual rigour that is materially embedded, publicly engaged, and aesthetically experimental. He innovates the boundary between academic theory and lived media practice.