HRTS faculty profile: Robin Reineke
Dr. Robin Reineke is a member of the Human Rights Practice faculty and in fall semester 2023 session 2 (October-December) will be teaching HRTS 496b/596b: Cutting-Edge Advances in Human Rights Practice -- Documenting Human Rights Abuses Through Forensic Anthropology. This course is open to all UA undergrad and graduate students on Main Campus, Arizona Online, and International Direct. For more information, please contact Dr. Reineke at rreineke@arizona.edu.
Robin Reineke, Ph.D. is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores social and political responses to deaths and disappearances. She focuses especially on forensic responses, and has conducted ethnographic research and forensic anthropological practice in the US-Mexico borderlands for over fifteen years. Dr. Reineke is a faculty member of the Human Rights Practice Program at the University of Arizona.
From 2006 – 2020, she spent significant time working with the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, doing ethnographic research and forensic anthropological practice to address unidentified human remains and missing persons in the borderlands. These initiatives included the development of the nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, the Colibrí Center for Human Rights, which she co-founded and directed from 2013 – 2019.
Dr. Reineke is currently working on her first book, With the Dead, For the Living: Forensic Care in the US-Mexico Borderlands, which is an ethnography about forensic human identification in southern Arizona. Together with Dr. Natalia Mendoza Rockwell, Dr. Reineke is currently working on a binational research project, Forensic Citizenship in the Borderlands, which is a visual, oral history, and ethnographic project is focused on understanding civilian forensic expertise and critical practice on both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border.
Dr. Reineke is Assistant Research Social Scientist at the Southwest Center and Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology, both at the University of Arizona.