Decolonizing Ecofeminism: Gender, Extraction, and the Politics of Green Transition

Seminar by Dr. Sanna Karhu, University of Helsinki.

As governments face growing pressure to abandon fossil fuels, they increasingly turn to technological and market-based “green” solutions. This shift has accelerated the extraction of resources from the Global South for the benefit of “green” industries in the North, reiterating the logic of colonial capitalism. Similar patterns also unfold across Indigenous lands in the North, including Sámi territories in Fennoscandia. As many scholars (e.g., Lang et al. 2024) have shown, contemporary environmental politics, rather than safeguarding ecosystems, primarily sustain capital and reproduce colonial hierarchies. In this talk, I suggest that by turning to decolonial ecofeminism we can develop critical theoretical tools to expose and question these power relations.

I situate my argument within the renewed visibility of ecofeminism – a field long marginalized within feminist theory and gender studies but now reemerging amid the escalating ecological crisis. I suggest that this reappearance calls for a reevaluation of ecofeminism through a decolonial lens. While ecofeminism has often been criticized for its whiteness and Eurocentrism, many foundational thinkers (e.g., Shiva) offered powerful critiques of Western colonialism. Revisiting these earlier insights, I argue that they remain important to ecofeminist interrogations of the green transition today but must be revised in ways that do not reiterate static conceptions of gender. Drawing on the expanding body of work in decolonial ecofeminist theory, I provide a philosophical defense of decolonial critique as a central strand of contemporary ecofeminist thought.

About Sanna Karhu

Sanna Karhu is a philosopher and feminist scholar currently based in Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Their research focuses on feminist philosophy, political philosophy, queer theory, ecofeminism, and critical animal studies, and their work has appeared in journals such as Signs and Hypatia. Karhu is the co-author of the forthcoming book What Is Ecofeminism? (Polity Press) and serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Finnish gender studies journal Sukupuolentutkimus–Genusforskning. They are also working on a book project on Judith Butler and nonviolence.

Registration

For registration: petek.onur@hum.ku.dk

There will be coffee/tea and cake after the seminar.