Robin Reineke is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores social and political responses to deaths and disappearances. She focuses especially on forensics, and has conducted ethnographic research and forensic anthropological practice in the US-Mexico borderlands for over fifteen years. She is Assistant Research Social Scientist at the Southwest Center and Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology, both at the University of Arizona. She is currently working on her first book, With the Dead, For the Living: Forensic Care in the US-Mexico Borderlands.

Robin’s key works in this field include: 

  • Reineke, Robin C. 2022. “Forensic citizenship among families of missing migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border.” Citizenship Studies 26(1): 21-37. This article addresses the ways in which of the work of families of the missing is often invisible in representations of forensic responses to death on the U.S.-Mexico border, and shows how families of missing migrants impact forensic infrastructure both by learning forensic techniques and through developing relationships with forensic authorities.  

  • Reineke, Robin C. 2019. “Necroviolence and Postmortem Care Along the U.S.-México Border.” In The Border and Its Bodies: The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S.- México Line, edited by Thomas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire, 144-172. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. This chapter in an edited volume discusses how destroyed the remains of migrants are by border policies, and the work of forensic anthropologists to care for these decomposed and mangled human remains.

  • Reineke, Robin C. 2022. “Natural deaths in extraordinary times: Governing COVID dead in southern Arizona.” Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8(1): 67-83. This article discusses how forensic officials in southern Arizona responded to local deaths from the COVID-19 virus at the height of the pandemic. I argue that the pandemic revealed the ways in which the deathcare industry in the United States is an unregulated, decentralised and ambiguous space.