Predoctoral Students

Josh Reno

Josh Reno Josh Reno is a second year graduate student in the Department of Anthropology. His research interests include waste and concepts of pollution, material culture, youth violence, and the nation. His other interests include Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. He received a B.A. in anthropology and psychology from Cornell University in 2002.

Josh plans to conduct his fieldwork on the waste trade that emerged across the U.S./Canadian border in the 1990s. Encouraged by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the waste trade has made the state of Michigan the country's second leading importer of foreign trash. These recent developments have sparked intense political controversy. To investigate this complex phenomenon, Josh plans to follow the garbage itself and the meaning it possesses as it moves from domestic consumption across national borders into local landfills. In particular, he hopes to investigate the relationships between waste and waste-work and the communities and families of South-Eastern Michigan.

While at Cornell, Josh conducted research on non-urban school shootings in the United States, with a particular focus on a "near"-school shooting that occurred in upstate New York in 2001. Central to this work was a belief that media trends are patterned by dynamic interactions between public culture and everyday life. School shootings did not emerge spontaneously from place to place, for example, but were actively shaped by public commentary and interpretation. Josh was especially interested in the ways in which youth perpetrators internalized and enacted public scripts about school shooting that were heavily circulated in the national media.

Josh is also currently the managing editor of Michigan Discussions in Anthropology (MDIA), the student-run, departmental journal of four-field anthropology. More information on MDIA can be accessed from their official website: http://www.umich.edu/~mdia