Johanna Oksala is a philosopher working in the fields of political philosophy, feminist philosophy, environmental philosophy, Foucault, and phenomenology.

She is currently the Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. Before coming to LUC, she taught at Pratt Institute (NY, USA), New School for Social Research (NY, USA), University of Helsinki (Finland), and University of Dundee (Scotland, UK).

Oksala is the author of six books and over fifty refereed journal articles and book chapters. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She is on the editorial board of several academic journals, and has given over a hundred conference papers and invited talks internationally.

Oksala’s books include: Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge UP, 2005), How to Read Foucault (Granta, 2007), Foucault, Politics, and Violence (Northwestern UP, 2012), Political Philosophy: All That Matters (Hodder and Stoughton, 2013), Feminist Experiences (Northwestern UP, 2016), Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern UP, 2023).

You can find out more about her publications here and about the academic talks she has given here. Her complete CV is available on request.

Oksala’s most recent book, Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (2023) brings together feminist and ecological approaches to solving the global environmental crisis that the capitalist economic system has created. The key contention is that in the face of ecological catastrophe, neither feminists nor environmentalists have the option of merely supporting an environmental politics that would preserve an imagined nature somewhere outside capitalism. The political goal must be more radical: to challenge the capitalist economic system itself and the mechanisms by which it expropriates life on the planet.