Jana Kopelent-Rehak

Dr. Jana Kopelent-Rehak, cultural anthropologist, photographer and filmmaker is currently a faculty and researcher at the University of Maryland. Her research embraces a range of issues such as climate change and aging in coastal social ecology, urban space and social inequality, political life, violence, social suffering and social justice. Her most recent work is examining changing socioecology on Smith Island in Maryland, with a focus on climate, cultural heritage, and aging.

Her urban anthropology work, since 2006, is based on an engagement with communities in Baltimore, addressing urban environment, public art, housing, health and social inequality. In the Czech Republic, she worked with ecological refugees from Chernobyl and published a book Recovering Face (Rehak 2012) about Czech Political Prisoners, addressing social processes in post-socialist Central Eastern Europe, followed by co-collaborative publication The Politics of Joking (Kopelent-Rehak and Trnka 2019) is an original contribution to an anthropological study of humor in political life.