Luminiţa Mandache

Luminiţa-Anda Mandache is a Ph.D. Candidate in Socio-cultural Anthropology at the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona. Her research analyzes different grassroots strategies and discourses of problem-solving, implemented in a context of structural poverty and drug-related violence, at the periphery of the northeastern city of Fortaleza. Her research interests focus on Latin America but also Eastern Europe, poverty, social movements, activism, urban violence, and alternative economies.

Monika Wanis

I am originally from Cairo, Egypt but have lived in Columbus, Ohio for the past 20 years. I have traveled to over 20 different countries and I speak Arabic, English, Spanish, and Russian. As an undergraduate student I studied Anthropology, Psychology, Integrative Medicine and Neuroscience. My undergraduate Honors Thesis project was conducted in the Clinical Psychology department at The Ohio State University. It was a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study examining the neural correlates of emotion regulation in older and younger adults.

I am the Treasurer of the Anthropology Club, a graduate teaching assistant in the department of Anthropology, and the Executive Vice President of the Graduate Student Association at the University of Alabama. I am also a second year Biocultural Medical Anthropology masters student interested in cross cultural differences in health seeking behaviors. I study traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine in order to understand why people seek traditional healers and alternative therapies as opposed to biomedical practitioners and biomedical practices. My goal is to continue exploring various healing modalities from particularly the middle east, with the hope of integrating a holistic, well rounded approach to Western healthcare frameworks.