Board of Directors and Executive Committee

AAGE is a 501c3 registered nonprofit organization operating under AAGE bylaws.

Executive Committee Members

The Executive Committee is responsible for the day-to-day operations of AAGE.

Felicity Aulino, President (2024-2026)

Felicity Aulino is Five-College Associate Professor based in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a medical anthropologist, trained also in public health education and ethnographic filmmaking, with primary area specialization in Thailand and an overall research focus on care. Her book Rituals of Care: Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand (Cornell University Press, 2019), explores habituated practices of providing for others, along with the philosophical roots and transformative potential of such ordinary acts of care.

Alexandra Crampton, President-to-be (2025-2026) 

Alexandra Crampton is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Social Welfare and Justice in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is a life member of AAGE and is grateful for AAGE’s open access journal and publication of her articles addressing alarmist discourse on witchcraft accusations against older women in Ghana (“No Peace in the House,” Vol. 34, No. 2,2013) and how anthropology can reframe population aging discourse as the study of social bodies (“Population Aging as the Social Body,” Vol. 34, No. 3, 2013). She has served on the Margret Clarke Student Paper Prize Committee and will lead the Jacob Climo Student Travel Award Committee for 2026. She enjoys convening and collaborating through AAGE to organize AAA and AAGE panels, and is currently co-editing a book with Clauda Huang to revise Carroll Estes political economy critique given contemporary anthropological research.

Cortney Hughes Rinker, Treasurer (2023-2028)

Cortney is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University and the Director of the Global Affairs Program, an interdisciplinary unit in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences that also offers a degree program at Mason Korea. She is a previous Editor-in-Chief of AAGE’s journal Anthropology & Aging. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine with emphases in Feminist Studies and Medicine, Science, and Technology Studies. Her teaching and research interests are in medical anthropology, Islam, aging and end-of-life care, public policy, reproduction, Middle East Studies, development, science and technology, and applied anthropology. She conducted long-term research (2005-2009) on reproductive healthcare among working-class women in Rabat, Morocco, which turned into her book Islam, Development, and Urban Women’s Reproductive Practices (Routledge, 2013). Her second book Actively Dying: The Creation of Muslim Identities through End-of-Life Care in the United States (Routledge, 2021) examines the diverse experiences of Muslim patients and families in the Washington, D.C. area as they interact with the health care system during serious illness and end-of-life care.

Mérida Rúa, Secretary (2025-2027)

Mérida M. Rúa is a faculty member in the Latina and Latino Studies Program at Northwestern University. Her current research, “Elderhood in the Puerto Rican Diaspora,” examines issues and themes at the intersection of aging and urban life, with particular attention to the daily lives and socio-spatial and expressive cultural practices of older Latinas and Latinos in Chicago. In connection with this, she co-edited a special-themed issue of the journal Latino Studies (19, no. 4, 2021) on the art of Latina and Latino Elderhood, featuring contributions from scholars across ethnic studies, health sciences, social sciences, policy, and the humanities and arts.

Kimberly Shay, Student Representative (2025-2027)

Kimberly Shay is a social-cultural Anthropology PhD candidate and pre-doctoral trainee at the Institute of Gerontology at Wayne State University in Detroit. My current research interests revolve around sociality, informal social support and the generative aspects of volunteering in later life. I am particularly interested in how community, personhood and agency are maintained in later life and the ways older adults adapt to creatively integrate informal social support and care into volunteering communities. In my free time, I regularly volunteer with local groups focused on transmitting history, the historical struggle for women’s rights and promoting civic engagement in the community. I also volunteer to help organize fundraising events which support scholarships for high school seniors who are engaged in volunteering for civic and environmental issues. Last academic year, we were able to fund over $4000 dollars scholarships.

Rachel Seymour, Social Media Coordinator (2025-2027)

Rachel Seymour is a social-cultural Anthropology PhD student at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her current research interests concern aging and care in the American Midwest. She is interested in who has access to equitable care, who is responsible for providing care, and how care labor is performed in low-income retirement communities. In her free time, she volunteers for her local Area Agency on Aging. She is a caring companion, where she regularly visits homebound seniors. She also assists in their nutrition program as a Meals on Wheels driver, delivering meals weekly to seniors experiencing isolation. In 2023, she was able to collaborate with her local Area Agency on Aging to create a Community Engaged Ethnographic Film surrounding their nutrition program which highlights both volunteer and social worker experiences.

Anthropology and Aging, Editorial Team

Iza Kavedžija, Editor-in-Chief

Iza Kavedžija is an Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on aging, wellbeing, and the life course, grounded in long‑term ethnographic fieldwork in Japan. She is the author of Making Meaningful Lives: Tales from an Aging Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) and The Process of Wellbeing: Conviviality, Care and Creativity (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which develop an anthropological perspective on meaning, care, conviviality, and wellbeing among older adults. Her work also includes research with younger populations, including contemporary artists, with a focus on motivation, purpose, and life choices across the life course.

Meghánn Catherine Ward, Associate Editor

Dr Ward is an interdisciplinary gerontologist who specializes in dementia, well-being, arts engagement, and human/health geography. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Health and Society Knowledge Exchange (HASKE) team at the University of Cumbria, England, where she conducts health and social care service evaluations for local organizations, mental-health services, and national health providers.