I am a faculty member at the Center for Religious Studies and Comparative Research, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. I have been particularly interested in exorcism rituals characteristic of different religions. In 2021 I participated in the Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation Course that was organized by the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum of Rome in collaboration with the Group for Socio-Religious Research and Information (GRIS). My PhD thesis deals with the problem of how verbal strategies rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are being used in the contemporary Neo-Pentecostal communities based in Poland and Italy and how language may serve as a trigger, modulator, and mediator of one’s spiritual rebirth.

Paula Bronson is a Ph.D. researcher at University College London (UCL) in Social Anthropology. Her research field site was in a remote Tamang village in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal. A practicing pain specialist physiotherapist trained in the US, her doctoral research involved a clinical ethnography looking at villagers’ chronic pain coping and resilience in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquakes. This work introduced her to the traditional healing practices of the local shamans, Bompos, who have a central place in her work. She published a chapter called “Try Feeding the Ghost More” in Other Worlds, Other Bodies: Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing, edited by Emily Pierini, Alberto Groisman, & Diana Espirito Santo (2023, Berghahn.)

Roger canals is the advisor for the visual ethnography section of the HEAL Network. He works as associate professor at the University of Barcelona. Specialist in visual anthropology and Afro-American religions, he holds a Phd from the EHESS of Paris. Roger Canals has published numerous articles in journals like Visual Studies, L’Homme, Hau or Ethnos. He is also the author of the book A Goddess in Motion. Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza (Berghahn Books, 2017). He has made several ethnographic films, internationally awarded, most of them on religiosity and visual culture. Some of his titles are: The Many Faces of a Venezuelan Goddess (2007), Bea wants to know (2010), A Goddess in Motion (2016) and Chasing Shadows (2019), made in collaboration with Ramon Sarró and Marina Temudo.

Dr. Erminia Colucci is Associate Professor in Visual and Cultural Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Middlesex University London (UK) and a registered Clinical and Community Psychologist (Italy). Her main area of research and training is in Cultural and Global Mental Health (PhD in Cultural Psychiatry), and Applied Cross-Cultural Psychology and Visual Anthropology (MPhil in Ethnographic Documentary), with a focus on low-middle income countries and immigrant and refugee populations. Erminia is passionate about using arts-based and visual methods in her research, teaching and advocacy activities. Erminia is the founder of Movie-ment and Chair of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry SIG on Arts, Mental Health and Human Rights.

She has won several competitive grants including currently two ESRC/AHRC-GCRF projects: one as Principal Investigator - Using collaborative visual research methods to understand experiences of mental illness,

I am an associate professor of anthropology and religious studies at Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto, Japan). My main research area is contemporary Japan, but I carried out ethnographic research also in Italy and Austria. My fields of inquiry include experiences with spirits and social suffering, especially in relation to the perception of space and place (particularly places related to death and the afterlife, as well as haunted places), rumors and discrimination, construction of social memory and “tradition”, tourism and commodification, spirit/demonic possession, exorcism and religious/spiritual healing. From a theoretical perspective, I focus on the anthropology of the body, the perception of the environment, affect and emotions. 

Trained in Anthropology and African Studies at Sapienza University of Rome and SOAS University of London, Cecilia’s research interests lie at the intersection of medical anthropology and the anthropology of religion. Since 2013, she has been carrying out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in southwestern Ghana, working on the articulations of psychiatry and religious/ spiritual healing. Her recently defended PhD dissertation, titled Im | possibilities of Collaboration. Community Psychiatry and Spiritual Healing in Rural Southwestern Ghana looked at ‘collaboration’ experiences between different practitioners and questioned the ways in which this kind of ‘collaboration’ is framed at the national 

Dr Gould is a cultural anthropologist studying dying and death, Buddhism, technology, and social change. Her research spans new traditions and technologies of death rites, the lifecycle of religious materials, and modern minimalist movements. Dr Gould holds a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne and a MSc from Oxford University. For her doctoral research, she worked in Japanese Buddhist altar stores, to investigate how cultural traditions around death can themselves ‘die’, be replaced, or transformed. The research will be published in “When Death Falls Apart”, out with University of Chicago Press in 2023.

Since my PhD research (2005), my research focuses on how religion is learnt, exploring, from an ethnographic perspective, the mutual influence between cognitive, sensory, emotional and social dimensions of religious learning. I am currently developing a new research in medical anthropology, working with patients suffering from a skin disease called psoriasis. I am interested in the first place in patient's experiential knowledge of illness. Through ethnographic methods, my aim is to show how psoriasis changes the way these persons relate to themselves (body, mind, emotions) and to others in their daily lives, as well as how, through their therapeutic journey, their learn to develop coping strategies despite chronic symptoms.

Denise Lombardi is an Italian anthropologist associated to CRAFT (Contemporary religions and Faith in Transition) at Università degli Studi di Torino and GSRL (Groupe Société Religions et Laïcités) in Paris. Her research concerns health in public hospitals, the importance of the religious and/or spiritual dimension in hospitals, conventional and alternative psychotherapies and contemporary spiritual practices with special attention to Neo-Shamanism and healing rituals in western societies. She was awarded a PhD by École Pratique des Hautes Études PSL Sorbonne in 2016 with a dissertation about Neo-Shamanism in France and Italy, as a therapeutic and spiritual healing practice. 

I am an anthropologist and full professor at the Institute of Religious Studies of Université of Montreal. I currently work on new spiritualities and on the healing dimension of holistic practices that I address through ethnographic studies anthropological and experiential approaches. My research aims at contributing to the development of the field of health humanities. I have published and edited numerous books and special reviews on religious conversions as well as the intersection between spiritualities and healing (see New spiritualities and the cultures of well-being, Springer, 2022).

Cristina Rocha is Professor of anthropology and the Director of the Religion and Society Research Cluster, Western Sydney University, Australia. She is presently a fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (2021-2022). She is a former President of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion (2018-2019) and co-edits the Journal of Global Buddhism and the Religion in the Americas Brill series. Her research focuses on the intersections of globalisation, mobility and religion. Her publications include, among other books: John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing (Oxford University Press, 2017), Honourable Mention 2019 Geertz Prize, Society for the Anthropology of Religion (AAA); The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions (with M. Vásquez, Brill, 2013); Buddhism in Australia (with M. Barker, Routledge, 2010); Zen in Brazil: The Quest for Cosmopolitan Modernity (Hawaii University Press, 2006).

PhD in Anthropology. Full Professor at University of Messina. Member of the board of the Italian Society of Medical Anthropology and member of the editorial board of the journal AM. Rivista della Società italiana di antropologia medica and L’Uomo. Visiting professorships: Keio University of Tokyo (Japan); Federal University of Stavropol (Russia); Mekelle University (Ethiopia). Fieldwork in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Italy.

Paul Stoller is a Permanent Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies/FAU-Erlangen and Professor of Anthropology at West Chester University. In his more than 35 years of anthropological research and writing, Stoller has conducted ethnographic research Songhay religion, magic, sorcery and spirit possession practices in Niger and the life of West African street traders in New York City. Stoller’s work encompasses the study of economic exchange, religion, ethnographic film, and the human quest for well being in turbulent times. In his most recent work he investigates how indigenous wisdom can not only enhance social well-being but also help to heal a troubled world.

My approach has been to find the largest and most relevant societal problems at each time and to find innovative solutions to them. These have included opioid addiction, violence, the COVID-19 pandemic, and mental disorders such as treatment-resistant depression, early and long-term emotional traumatization (C-PTSD), psychoses, bipolar disorder, sexual abuse, and domestic violence. In addition, I have worked with research on emotions/affects/artificial intelligence, algorithm research/computer science, and the arts.