Josh Andrew Lerner. Born in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, USA on August 28, 1978. Moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
for a bit, then settled down in Baltimore, Maryland at age
4. I ended up lingering in Baltimore for 14 years, before
departing in 1996 for Wesleyan University, in Connecticut.
At Wesleyan, I explored the reaches of a fine liberal arts
education, but perhaps learned the most by engaging in creative
student activism. After spending half of 1999 in Melbourne,
Australia, I finished my degree in 2000, and swore that I
was done with school for good.
Anxious to delve into practical work and
leave the continent, I signed up for the Peace Corps, in Slovakia.
I lived in the city of Košice for
the next two years, working with a development NGO called
ETP Slovakia and a variety of community groups involved in
student, environmental, and Romany issues. Working in the
development industry and alongside extreme racism and poverty
led me to question my understanding of community development
and my role as an activist. I ended up learning Slovak (and
even improving my Spanish), but most of all, I learned how
much I still didn't know.
Peace Corps left Slovakia in the summer
of 2002, and so did I. Next stop was Toronto, where, despite
my earlier swearing, I returned to school for a Masters in
Urban Planning at the University of Toronto. Looking for more
practical training and theoretical grounding, I ended up getting
more than I bargained for. Although I initially wanted to
be an environmental planner, over the course of two highly
politicizing years I became more interested in transformative
political, social, and economic change, especially in the
form of popular education and participatory budgeting. After
much learning, large quantities of roti, and many extended
trips to New York, I finished my degree and departed Toronto.
In the summer of 2004, Renate and I moved
into a new apartment in Brooklyn. The next day we vacated
it (leaving subletters behind), in favor of a year
of traveling, studying, working, and living in Latin America,
the last six months in Rosario, Argentina. If Toronto politicized
me, Latin America helped me better understand how political
engagement works, doesn't work, and might work. Not coincidentally,
it also encouraged me to pursue a PhD in Politics, focusing
on participatory democracy, at The New School University in
New York, starting September 2005.
So where does that leave me? I can often
be found enjoying peculiar music, movies, books, and friends.
I tend to move around by bike or foot, although I'll opt for
trams, buses, or trains when the distance grows long. I live
to eat and love to cook, more
or less vegan. Despite trying to quit various times, I still
find myself avidly following sports, mostly baseball and basketball.
I enjoy learning languages, although Spanish has now replaced
Slovak. And yes, I probably spend too much time in front of
the computer, but I try to escape to bustling public spaces
or the middle of nowhere whenever possible. For example, now.
