Joshua’s community driven research prioritizes partnerships that leverage the resources of higher education to address complex socio-environmental challenges. These include the climate crisis, inequality, and organizational response to extreme events and uncertainty. He has worked with state, llocal governments and federal governents and non-profit and community organizations, and the private sector. Joshua worked on faith community response to the attacks of September 11th and Hurricane Katrina. 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. Joshua conducted research in the Northwest Territories on migration, housing and homelessness. He developed partnerships with many Philadelphia-area organizations, including a partnership with the US Forest Service Philadelphia Field Station to develop youth-driven environmental studies curricula. 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 Cemetery, East Park Revitalization Alliance, and Philadelphia artist Li Sumpter, he developed the Urban Ecology Arts Exchange.
Joshua is currently recording a podcast series, Swamped: What experts do when they no longer know what to do, which focuses on how experts–climate scientists, disaster responders, flood engineers and others–navigate extreme uncertainty. This audio documentary documents narratives of people confronting situations where their training, skills, and understanding are outstripped by the problems they are facing.
Most recently Joshua is putting his energy into the response of educational institutions to climate change and the ways we are preparing students for futures that society itself struggles to imagine. He is a cofounder of Education Ecologies Collective, a network of collaborators facilitating conversations on learning, pedagogy and ecological justice in the context of the climate crisis. He firmly believes that institutions of higher education can play a much greater role in ecological transitions.
