NEOS is made possible by the support of ACYIG Board Members, the ACYIG membership, NEOS authors, and a dedicated editorial team.
NEOS Editorial Board
Alana Walls (she/her) Assistant Editor and Website Coordinator is a PhD candidate in anthropology and a master’s student in the Gender, Race, and Identity (GRI) Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. She received a master’s degree in education from Hunter College in New York City and taught in public schools for twelve years before returning to graduate school to pursue her doctorate. Her research interests include youth, education, sexuality, and gender, with a specific focus on community engaged research methods. For her GRI master’s program, Alana conducted community engaged participatory research with a grassroots collective of local educators, parents, and community members working to open an independent charter high school. As part of her doctoral research, she is currently investigating the intersection of policy and gender/sexual development at a middle school.
Alexea Howard, MA, Assistant Editor and Peer-Review Coordinator Alexea Howard, M.A., is an independent researcher and scholar whose degrees are in Anthropology (BA Honors from the University of California, Los Angeles and multi-award winning graduate scholar from California State University, Long Beach) with further education in Psychology and Addiction Studies. Alexea specializes in medical and psychological anthropology and her approach to research is interdisciplinary and mixed-methods in nature, blending frameworks and methods from medical and psychological anthropology, psychology, and public health. Her current research interests include perceptions and understandings of health and illness, maternal health and mental health. Alexea teaches as an adjunct professor in Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology’s Psychology Division. She also develops and teaches independent studies courses and research projects for community college students in California and internationally. In addition to teaching and her work with NEOS, Alexea serves her local community as a task force member and coordinator for an NGO focused on increasing literacy rates and enthusiasm for reading in elementary students at underserved schools in Los Angeles. She also provides support and consultation on research, evaluation, curriculum building, and strategic initiatives for NGOs, institutions of higher-education, individuals, and budding programs.
Anne-Marie Bedard, MA, Developmental Editor My name is Anne Marie Bedard and I’m very happy to be a new developmental editor with the NEOS team. I recently graduated with a Master of Arts in Psychology from Pepperdine University. I’m currently completing an internship in clinical therapy, with the goal of obtaining my license to practice as a professional clinician. I’m also working as an adjunct instructor of Psychology at the community college level. I am a lifelong resident of the state of Michigan, where I’m a very active member of my church’s music program, singing and playing the piano. I can also be found interacting with several wonderful cats when it pleases them to allow me to do so.
Anurag Shukla, PhD, Assistant Editor Anurag Shukla is currently a director of education at Brhat Education Foundation. He has been a public policy researcher for a decade now. He has completed his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) and has been a visiting scholar at Hiroshima University, Japan. He has an MPhil from the University of Delhi where he researched the symbolic and cultural violence on tribals in Jharkhand (India). He has worked previously with organizations such as Pratham, Azim Premji Foundation, CFAR, Times Group, and Business Standard. He has also published research papers in international journals such as the London Review of Education, Education Technology Research and Development, Teacher Plus, etc. He is interested in the anthropology of education, work, youth, and childhood, along with exploring the colonial/imperial roots of modern sociology/anthropology.
Chang Liu, PhD, Developmental Editor Chang Liu is a clinical assistant professor from the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on how young children learn to become culturally and socially appropriate members of their society and how preschools play their role in this process. As a scholar from the global South, she also interrogates how and why globally circulating ECEC policies and practices originating in the global North and West are taken up, rejected, and localized in other countries and communities. Her work has appeared in leading journals such as Comparative Education Review, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, and Ethos. She is also one of the co-founders of Nonsignificance, an independent, non-profit podcast focusing on gender, family, childhood, childrearing, and education issues in general.
Chelsea Cutright, PhD, Co-Editor Chelsea Cutright (she/her) is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies and Anthropology at Centre College. She has a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Kentucky. Her teaching and research interests include gender, sports for development, and youth studies.
Jennifer Shaw, PhD, Assistant Editor Jenny is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Faculty of Arts at Thompson Rivers University, within Secwépemc’ulucw. She has a PhD in Anthropology from Simon Fraser University and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Victoria. Jenny’s research explores the intergenerational implications of immigration and labor policies in Canada, focusing on Filipinx youths’ experiences of long-term family separation and reunification. Her research also concerns migrant domestic labor and gendered forms of work across borders. As a multimodal ethnographer, she employs photography, drawing, song, and poetry in her research as avenues for youth-centered expressions. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Children & Society, Anthropology of Work Review, and Global Studies of Childhood.
Manya Kagan, PhD, Co-Editor Manya Oriel Kagan is currently a postdoctoral researcher fellow at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a PhD in education and her interests lie at the nexus of migration, urban (in)justices,
Sean Heath, PhD, Assistant Editor Sean is a Social Anthropologist specializing in water, the senses, wellbeing, and the politics of bodily movement. He received his PhD in 2022 from the University of Brighton where heconducted research with age-group competitive swimmers in the UK, which examined the sensory aspects of immersion in water and the sociality of club swimming and how these affect youths’ wellbeing. Currently, he holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship at KU Leuven studying water stewardship and the environmental politics of wellbeing in the entangled relationships between arctic waters, the senses, and place. Between cold-water dips and outdoor swims, he has also examined the emplaced entanglements between the material, social, and emotional experiences of outdoor swimming in “natural”environments in Canada, the UK, and Norway. His work has been published in the leading journals The Senses and Society, Body and Society, HUMOR, and the edited volume High Performance Youth Swimming.”