Ryan Juskus, Graduate Assistant

Please note: Ryan has left the "Religious Studies" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

I am a PhD candidate in the Christian Theological Studies track of the Graduate Program in Religion. My research engages theological ethics, religious studies, and political ecology in the modern Americas. I use textual and ethnographic methods to research relationships between people, God, and the non-human world in order to make critically constructive contributions to scholarship on religion and theology as they intersect with environmental studies, science, politics, economics, and ethics.

A number of questions I ask in my scholarship are:

• How do people theologically conceptualize and politicize their relation to "nature"?
• In what ways do theology and religion shape "secular" spheres such as science and public life?
• How does "nature" become available as an extractable, usable, and wastable resource?
• How should we rethink political and social relations when human life is embedded in associations that are more than human?
• How can the disciplines of theology and political ecology challenge and repair one another?
• How might it be possible to promote ecologies of life while participating in a resource-based political economy that sacrifices others' lives and lands?

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Keywords:

Ethics • Political ecology • Theology

Recent Publications

1. Basurto, X; Virdin, J; Smith, H; Juskus, R, Strengthening Governance of Small-Scale Fisheries: An Initial Assessment of Theory and Practice. (2017)
2. Juskus, R, Extracting Faith, Cultivating Faith: Andean Lessons on Decolonizing Christian Environmentalism, in Rooted and Grounded Essays on Land and Christian Discipleship, edited by Harker, RD; Bertsche Johnson, J (January, 2016), pp. 192-207, Wipf and Stock Publishers, ISBN 1498235549