Biography

Joshua has worked on religious response to the attacks of September 11th and Hurricane Katrina, studying the formation of disaster expertise (“disaster religious and spiritual care”) in what he calls the current “New Age of Anxiety.” He has worked with Nunatsiavut Inuit communities in northern Labrador on inequality, dispossession, community wellbeing, migration and identity in the context of recent land claim settlements and large-scale resource extraction. He has also conducted research in the Northwest Territories on migration, housing and homelessness. Joshua's focus on action research, collaborative research methods, and community-engaged research has lead him to work with a number of Philadelphia-area community and environmental organizations, including a partnership with the US Forest Service Philadelphia Field Station to develop youth-driven environmental studies curricula. His work on anthropology of mental health has focused on the production of knowledge in the context of disaster, intersections of spirituality/religion and mental health, and community response to disaster, environmental ruptures, and inequality. He is committed to combining research and teaching. He piloted a field school with students from Haverford College, University of Massachusetts and Inupiaq Alaskan youth in Northwest Alaska. Through the Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives, a program funded by the  Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in collaboration with the North Philly Peace Park, Friends of Mt. Moriah Cemetary, East Park Revitalization Alliance, and Philadelphia artist Li Sumpter, he developed the Urban Ecology Arts Exchange. Joshua also focuses on the response of educational institutions to climate change, and the ways we are (or are not) preparing students for futures that society itself struggles to imagine.