Editorial Interns

Kymberley “Kym” Chu is an Anthropology PhD student at Princeton University. Previously, she interned at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and worked as a freelance journalist in Malaysia covering environmental histories of displacement. Her doctoral research focuses on One Health as an anthropocentric construct and considers how animal diseases such as African Swine Fever are addressed in different workplaces geographically adjacent to palm oil plantations. Kym plans to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on the lives of domesticated and wild pigs in Malaysia, who are usually villainized as “colonial pests.” She hopes to write more on animal histories shaped by capitalism and colonialism.

Alexandra Dantzer is a second year PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Alexandra Dantzer’s dissertation research is an ethnographic study of insomnia in Belgrade, Serbia. She is particularly interested in the ways in which diverse encounters with sleeplessness map onto the broader experience of temporality of the late-capitalism changes in Serbia. In her research the changing politics of sleep, and the experience of people caught amid these shifts serve as a prism for investigating the connection between the macro-processes of economic and ethical change and subjectivity. Before starting her PhD Alexandra was engaged in Visual Anthropology as a film-maker, but also writing theoretically about film in general. In addition to that she is fascinated with sound studies, soundscapes and the diverse ways in which people interact and shape their sonic environments. In her research she is using diverse methods, such as sleep diaries, vlogs, graphic time-mapping etc. Her broader interests revolve around questions of subjectivity and selfhood, temporality, political anthropology, phenomenology, experimental methods in anthropology.

Paige Edmiston is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on how digital technologies are impacting the U.S. medical system and the implications of this “digital health transformation” for access and equity. She is currently working on a project about the first patient-led, open-source nonprofit to seek the Food and Drug Administration’s clearance for a medical device. Prior to graduate school, Paige worked with startup companies developing new medical devices and digital health technologies. Originally from Seattle, she received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington.

Christina Kefala is a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam (Department of Anthropology) under the ChinaWhite project. Her research focuses on whiteness in China’s transnational and entrepreneurship sector. Her project focuses on different aspects of entrepreneurship and whiteness in China such as female entrepreneurs, sustainable start-ups, tech start-ups and creative businesses. The study area of her research consists of Shanghai city, a familiar place to her as she obtained her master’s degree in Sociology from Fudan University in Shanghai, China. Originally from Greece she holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. Christina’s other interests include photography, ethnographic filmmaking and traveling.

Aminata Ndow is a second year PhD Student in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Originally from Belgium, she holds a BA in History from the University of Antwerp and a MA in History from Ghent University. Growing up in Belgium to a Belgian mother and a Gambian father prompted her to co-found Black History Month Belgium during her time at University. Her research interests include violence and trauma, death and dying, mourning and bereavement, human rights, transitional justice, memory politics, exhumation politics, post-conflict coexistence, civil society, civilian resistance and epistemology, and research ethics. Aminata’s current research broadly explores the dictatorship and transitional justice era in The Gambia (1994-present). Specifically, she studies the affective and political responses to summary executions and enforced disappearances in The Gambia. In her free time, she enjoys plant-based cooking, exploring museums and art galleries, vintage and second-hand shopping, watching old, independent and/or foreign films, and spending time in nature.

Verónica Sousa is an Azorean-American PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. She has her BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, her Master’s in Anthropology with a certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies from The New School for Social Research, and she studied Anthropology at Princeton University prior to her doctoral program in Portugal. Her doctoral research project concerns the negotiations between care and harm with a focus on the politics of touch in elder care during the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath in Lisbon nursing homes. She is interested in how age, gender, sexuality, race, disability, and class are entangled in these negotiations, and how institutionalization and medical technologies mediate social relationships therein.

Salwa Tareen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. Her research explores the interplay between religion, ethics, and the politics of care in South Asia. Salwa’s dissertation focuses on how residents of Karachi, Pakistan utilize charitable giving to address everyday disasters of infrastructure and governance. Salwa’s academic and creative writing can be found in The Muslim World, The Aerogram, Protest Magazine, among other places. She is also serving as the 2025 AES Graduate Student Representative to the AES Board.

Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Currently, she is in her seventh year and is writing her dissertation on the elderly abandoned in Lima, Peru. Magdalena’s work explores how older adults in the Peruvian capital come up with inventive ways to craft their lives in the midst of family abandonment, a neoliberal global order that renders them as expendable, and structural violence due to the poverty and marginalization these men and women experience. Before being a student at the University of Michigan, she studied Religion at Harvard Divinity School. She also holds a BA in Hispanic Literature from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Perú, in Lima, from where she originally is.