About Karin
Have you ever had that nagging feeling that things just don't add up? This feeling has been a driving force in my life. Resisting the persistent pressure to accept certain uneasy narratives about society as truth, I have pursued a more fundamentally critical perspective throughout the various shifts in my career path. Having gained such a perspective over time, and realizing how deeply messed up mainstream society is, it has also become harder to participate as if it's all normal and acceptable... I have now embraced my identity as an activist and an anarchist and my priority is to maximize my commitment to develop and practice these roles.
Here's a quick overview of what I have been up to since high school:
I got an MSc in biology from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands (1999) and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US (2012). My dissertation research focused on moral negotiations in conservation and development around a national park in Uganda, a site with an intense history of violent and manipulative neocolonial governance. Not only did my research make me realize that capitalism and colonialism penetrate and corrupt every aspect human life on this planet, but also that universities themselves are intertwined and complicit. With some rare exceptions of relatively free scholarship here and there, universities are generally subservient to capital.
Unable to land the prestigious professorship position, in part due to universities using graduate students for cheap labor and ending up overproducing PhDs who compete with each other for increasingly scarce academic job openings, I returned to the Netherlands in 2013 where I had to start again from scratch. Inspired by ideas about self-sufficiency, I made a switch to entrepreneurship, and launched a business called Kusala in 2014 to produce sustainable artisinal soaps using natural and circular ingredients. Between 2019 and 2023, Kusala was based in the circular economy hub BlueCity Rotterdam, where various beautiful collaborations emerged. However, I came to the conclusion that small social entrepreneurship is next to impossible in our harsh capitalist landscape. I decided to end soap production in the fall of 2023, started dismantling Kusala, and commited myself to research and activism for system change.
Although I applied for a few jobs with various research institutes, I became increasingly skeptical of the possibility to combine a professional career with a pure pursuit of radical social change, without getting misguided by personal ambitions and/or by the capitalist expectations of employers and funders. This motivated me to apply for and accept a parttime job in financial administration in late spring 2024. Being able to support myself by working three days a week for a job that is fascinating, but doesn't absorb all my time and energy, buys me the freedom to study, write, and organize in whichever way I choose to for the rest of the week. I am a member of the Extinction Rebellion Netherlands: Justice Now! community, and regularly participate in actions by various activist groups for climate and/or social justice, and for a free Palestine.
Starting Fist & Fern is an experiment to merge the various components of my background and interests, not just research and activism, but also small social entrepreneurship. As an anarchist, I believe in the importance of self-governance and the spirit and skills of entrepreneurship are incredibly valuable for this purpose. Our dependence on huge international companies that are driven by the pursuit of profits for shareholders, is making us incredibly vulnerable. Small producers have been outcompeted and it is probably not possible to revive them in any serious and healthy way in the current capitalist landscape, but I think we need to keep practicing creativity, self-sufficiency, and artisanship wherever we can, and to do so in ways that serve the pursuit of social and environmental justice in a post-capitalist world.
You can read more about my professional trajectory and my reflections on the various obstacles I encountered in the blog post Frustrated Idealisms. You can also find me here on Linkedin.