Petra Andersson is a Swedish researcher and philosopher specializing in environmental ethics, animal ethics, and equine culture. She earned her PhD in 2007 with a dissertation in environmental ethics and has since pursued interdisciplinary research bridging the humanities and social sciences. After her doctorate, she worked at Chalmers University of Technology, coordinating and initiating research in industrial recycling.
Currently, she collaborates with the Gothenburg Environmental Science Centre (GMV), focusing on strategies to help the Västra Götaland Region achieve its fossil-free goals. Her equine-related research includes studies on horse welfare, media portrayals of “horse girls,” and how gender shapes the depiction of elite riders in sports journalism.
She is part of the project Equine Cultures in Transition, funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation, which explores how perceptions of horses influence ethical views on human–animal relationships. Andersson is an active public communicator, writing regularly as the “house philosopher” for Hippson Magazine and as a columnist for hippson.se.
She lectures widely on topics related to horse welfare, ethics and environmental issues, and contributes to the Network for Social Science and Humanities Horse Research, which aims to strengthen and promote research in this field. She has taught philosophy and education at several Swedish universities since 1998 and now mainly supervises theses and gives lectures on environment and sustainable development.