NEOS Volume 12: Issue 1 Author Bios

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Anastasia Badder
Anastasia Badder is a Doctoral Candidate in Education at the University of Luxembourg.  Her current work focuses on language, the secular, and Jewishness in Luxembourg.  She completed her MA in Anthropology at the University of Auckland, where her thesis project explored whiteness, transnationalism, and Jewishness in New Zealand.

Smruthi Bala Kannan
Smruthi’s research explores discourses of cleanliness, sanitation, and hygiene in and around schools. Centering adolescent children’s lived experiences of these discourses in Tamil Nadu, India, her work looks into ways in which ideas of modernity and childhood are negotiated through body, material, and space. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers – Camden.

Kristen Cheney
Dr. Cheney is Associate Professor of Children & Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Netherlands. Her most recent research examines the impact of the global ‘orphan industrial complex’ — including orphan tourism, childcare institutions, and intercountry adoption — on child protection in developing countries. She has also led several studies using youth participatory research to explore issues of youth sexual and reproductive health.

Rebecca Davis
Rebecca Davis graduated from the University of Luxembourg in 2019 with a Master’s degree in Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts with a dissertation on morality and goodness among American evangelical teenage girls. She is currently teaching at an international primary school in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

David Fazzino 
David Fazzino is a cultural anthropologist trained in law and agroecology.  His research interests include environmental anthropology, structural violence, intellectual property rights, food and energy policy, and medical anthropology.  

Rashmi Kumari
Rashmi is a PhD candidate at the Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers – Camden. Her dissertation research seeks to explore the ways in which the figure of the indigenous girl in India emerges in the discursive convergence of violence and development. Focusing on the political and social constructions of indigenous childhoods, especially girlhoods of youth living amidst political violence in Central India, Rashmi is interested in locating the ways in which indigenous girls engage with the discourses on violence and development. Rashmi currently serves as Student Representative for ACYIG creating avenues and facilitating undergraduate and graduate student participation.

Jennifer M. McGuire
Jennifer M. McGuire is an assistant professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto. Her research and teaching interests include deaf education, sign language acquisition, disability media studies, and the academic and social inclusion of children/youth with disabilities.

Christos Panagiotopoulos
Christos Panagiotopoulos is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Cornell University (US) and an invited French Government Scholar at EHESS/CNRS (France). He works at the intersections of psychological and medical anthropology, and the anthropology of ethics and morality, with an interest in mental health, psychotherapy and subjectivity. His doctoral thesis focuses on conflicting models of care within the juvenile rehabilitation system in France.

Vijitha Rajan
Vijitha Rajan is currently a doctoral student at the Department of Education, University of Delhi, India. She is also a Commonwealth Scholar (2018-19), funded by the Government of the United Kingdom, at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, UK.