Daniel Renfrew, Ph.D.
Daniel Renfrew is an associate professor of Anthropology. He received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Binghamton University, State University of New York in 2007. Dr. Renfrew joined the WVU faculty in Fall 2008 after a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Towson University.
Dr. Renfrew’s research interests span the environmental, urban, critical medical and political anthropology sub-fields, and his research draws from and contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on political ecology, social movements, science and technology studies, and Latin American studies. His research has focused in particular on anthropological and political ecological analyses of environmental conflicts. Throughout his career he has published widely on issues related to: urban industrial contamination and environmental justice; global cities and urban socio-spatial restructuring; social and workers’ movements; water politics surrounding privatization; neoliberalism, resource extraction and environmental conflicts in Latin America and the United States; sports, race and nationalism; and the art and politics of Uruguayan Carnival. Dr. Renfrew’s ongoing research agenda traces three general overlapping themes: 1) toxics, health and environmental justice; 2) environmental politics and subjectivity; and 3) science and the politics of expertise.
Selected Publications
(Forthcoming, expected August 2018) Live without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay. Book manuscript under contract with The University of California Press.
2017 Daniel Renfrew, “Spectral Science: Tracing the Conflict Zones of Uruguayan Lead Poisoning,” Culture, Theory and Critique 58(4), special issue “Invisible Harm,” edited by Donna Goldstein. DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2017.1356739
2017 Daniel Renfrew and Carlos Santos, “Mega-Mining Sovereignty: Landscapes of Power and Protest in Uruguay’s New Extractivist Frontier” in ExtrACTION: Impacts, Engagements, and Alternative Futures, edited by Kirk Jalbert, Anna Willow, David Casagrande, and Stephanie Paladino, London/New York: Routledge, pp. 31-45.
2016 Daniel Renfrew and Genesis Snyder, “Introduction” to Mobilizing Race: Borders, Translations, Movements. City & Society 28(3): 271-275. Special issue section edited by Daniel Renfrew and Genesis Snyder.
2014 Jacob Matz and Daniel Renfrew, “Selling ‘Fracking’: Energy in Depth and the Marcellus Shale,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture. DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2014.929157
2013 Daniel Renfrew, “We are not Marginals: The Cultural Politics of Lead Poisoning in Montevideo, Uruguay” Latin American Perspectives Issue 189, Vol. 40 (2): 202-217.
Courses Taught
SOCA 254 Cultural Anthropology
SOCA 350 Latin American Cultures
SOCA 457 Social Movements
SOCA 458 Environmental Anthropology
SOCA 459 Anthropological Thought
SOCA 693 Environmental Anthropology
SOCA 693K Advanced Social Movement
SOCA 693R Advanced Environmental Anthropology