NEOS is made possible by the support of ACYIG Board Members, the ACYIG membership, NEOS authors, and a dedicated editorial team.

NEOS Editorial Board

Anne-Marie Bedard, 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.

Chloe Bozak, Digital Scholarship Intern
Chloe recently graduated with her Bachelor of Social Work from Thompson Rivers University located on the unceded and ancestral territory of the Secwepemc peoples. She is interested in many areas of social work, but she is especially interested in law and policy. Specifically, she is interested in how people who are affected by specific laws and policies can inform said laws and policies as the experts of their own experience. Chloe is hoping to further her education in the area of social justice and to end up in a space where she is able to utilize both her social work education and her passion for law and policy.

Chelsea Cutright, PhD, Assistant Editor and Developmental 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, youth studies, and contemporary Africa. 

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.

Manya Kagan, PhD, Assistant Editor and Developmental Editor
Manya Oriel Kagan is a sociologist of education studying migration and education, specifically in urban contexts. Her research mainly relates to refugee children’s rights employing ethnography, participatory visual methods and mapping techniques but also interested in alternative education and development projects in different contexts. She finished her Ph.D. in the Department of Education at Tamar Golan Center at BEN GURION University in the Negev, on the integration experiences of refugee children in Kampala, Uganda. She will soon take up her position as a postdoctoral researcher at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. She has co-authored a number of articles in journals including Race, Ethnicity and Education and Critique of Anthropology and has co-edited (2019) a book entitled International Development in Africa: Between Practice and Theory [in Hebrew], published by Pardes Publishing House.

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.

Rebecca L. Sanford, PhD, RCSW, Co-Editor
Rebecca is an Associate Teaching Professor in the School of Social Work and Human Service at Thompson Rivers University, situated on the unceded territory of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwépemc’ulucw. Rebecca has over 18 years of experience as a clinical social worker, researcher, administrator, and educator, with specialization in the areas of child and youth mental health, working with children and their families in community-based settings, program development and evaluation, clinical supervision and workforce development, suicide prevention, and intervention, and trauma and traumatic bereavement. Rebecca’s research interests include the impact of exposure to suicide, the suicide bereavement trajectory, disenfranchised grief, and ambiguous loss, and the development and dissemination of interventions for people who are bereaved or otherwise impacted by suicide.

Jennifer Shaw, PhD, Co-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.