A few weeks ago, we introduced Kateryna Karpenko as a keynote speaker of the Libori Summer School 2026. Her upcoming lecture sharpens the focus on her core field: ecofeminism in the context of artificial intelligence.

Her work is closely tied to long-standing collaboration with the Center, particularly through the conference series Voices from Ukraine: History of Women Philosophers and Scientists in the Situation of War and Voices from Ukraine: Women Philosophers and Scientists Against War and Ecocide, co-organized with Ruth Edith Hagengruber. These initiatives foreground the conditions of women scholars in wartime and the entanglement of ecology, gender, and conflict.

This research trajectory is also reflected in her publication in the Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists (Vol. 2), where she examines the historical struggle of Ukrainian women for access to higher education.

Abstract: The article examines the conceptualization of the struggle of Ukrainian women for the right to higher education by the Ukrainian historian Liudmyla Smoliar. In the book The Past for the Sake of the Future, she analyzed this topic in a socio-political and cultural context. The researcher noted that under the influence of the social movement of the early 1860s, women were allowed to study at the universities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa. Achievements and victories of the pioneers of this field were interspersed with obstacles and new prohibitions. Economic dependence on parents, and then on husbands, outdated legal norms, and political discrimination forced women to look for ways of self-realization. Summarizing the circumstances in which women had to assert their right to education, the researcher concluded that women gradually achieved convincing success, overcoming numerous obstacles at each stage of the arduous struggle for their rights to higher education.

See all the articles from the second volume here.