I received my BA in Anthropology from McGill University in 2013. I then spent two years as a student and teacher at the Wilderness Awareness School in Washington State. There I learned to put my anthropological training into rewilding practice. Returning to academia, I received an MSc in People and Environment (Anthropology) at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Presently, I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences (Renewable Resources) at McGill University as part of the Leadership for the Ecozoic program.

My dissertation, “Cultural Rewilding: An Ethnographic Study of the Nature Connection Movement”, focuses upon this growing subculture by examining the ways in which these groups are attempting to ‘rewild’ their (human) cultures. By so doing, I am looking to tease out how both classic anthropological questions, knowledge, and categories are taken up, asked and answered by this emerging trend. This includes a re-assesment of the conflicted concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, the charged history and implications of hunter-gatherer studies, the prospect of ‘new animisms’, ecosemiotics and the possibilities for an anthropology beyond the human, and theories of political ontology. By attending, and corresponding with, the manners by which these groups engage with each other and the more-than-human world, through animal tracking, wild harvesting, cultural rituals of connection, and so on, I examine their rewilding praxis and the implications for personal, as well as cultural change amidst a time of ecological catastrophes, and seeming deracination.

I have as well taken forays into work on a law beyond the human, the genre of horror as seen through an animist lens, among other related endeavors of thinking animacy otherwise.

My supervisors are Prof. Elena Bennett (Natural Resource Sciences) and Prof. Eduardo Kohn (Anthropology). Prof. Peter G. Brown, my previous supervisory who is now retired, sits on my committee.

You can contact me at joshua.sterlin[at]mail.mcgill.ca