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.

Advisor for the visual ethnography section of HEAL Network. Roger Canals 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.

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,

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 Fabian Graham joined the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore in December 2018. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology, and two master’s degrees, one in ‘Taiwan Studies’ and the second in ‘Social Anthropological Analysis’. Previously a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany, based on research in Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan, his first monograph, Voices from the Underworld: Hell deity worship in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia has recently been published.

Helmar Kurz studied Ethnology, Religious Sciences, and Archaeology at the University of Muenster/Germany from 2003-2009. Since 2011, he has been lecturer and researcher at the Department of Social & Cultural Anthropology in Muenster, focusing the field of Trans/Cultural Psychiatry at the intersection of Sensory, Religious & Medical Anthropology. From 2015-2018, he participated in the DFG-funded project “Diversification of Mental Health – Therapeutic Spaces of Brazilian Spiritism” and is currently preparing a related PhD-thesis. He engages in the editorial board of CURARE – Journal of Medical Anthropology and has edited a special volume on the “Aesthetics of Healing: Working with the Senses in Therapeutic Contexts” (Curare 42, 3+4).

Santiago López-Pavillard is a cultural anthropologist, holding a doctorate from the Complutense University of Madrid with the thesis Life as a healing process: shamanic practices of the Upper Amazon related to ayahuasca in Spain, of which a version titled Shamans, ayahuasca and healing has been published (Madrid: High Council for Scientific Research, 2018). He is a founding member of the Anthropology of Religion and Spirituality Thematic Group (ARESIMA) at the Madrid Institute of Anthropology and president of the Eleusis Association for the study of states of consciousness. 

Eugenia Roussou (PhD in Social Anthropology, UCL, University of London) is a Senior Researcher at the Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA), ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal. She was previously a post-doctoral researcher at CRIA, with two projects funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), and a visiting researcher at Panteion University of Athens, Greece. She is the co-Reviews Editor of Religion and Society, the Treasurer of ISARS (International Society for Academic Research on Shamanism) and the co-coordinator of NAR-CRIA (Network for the Anthropology of Religion). She is the author of the book Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The Evil Eye in Greece (2021, Bloomsbury), and the co-editor of Expressions of Religion: Ethnography, Performance and the Senses (2019, Lit-Verlag).

Prof. Dr. Bettina E. Schmidt, DPhil (habil.), PhD, MA, Professor in study of religions and anthropology of religion at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK. Her main areas of research interests are Latin American and Caribbean religions, identity, and wellbeing. Her academic interests include religious experience, anthropology of religion, diaspora, and medical anthropology. Among her most important recent publications are Spirit and Trance in Brazil: An Anthropology of Religious Experiences (2016, Bloomsbury),Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City (2008, Ashgate), Handbook of Contemporary Brazilian Religions (co-edited, 2016, Brill) and Spirituality and Wellbeing: Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of religious experience and health (co-edited, 2020, Equinox).

Dr. Tamara Turner works at the intersection of psychological anthropology, musical and performance practice, and affect studies. She specializes in North African Sufism, anthropology of religion & medicine, and the links between cultural notions of affect, consciousness, and mental-emotional health particularly in Algeria and Morocco. Her doctoral thesis was the first ethnomusicological research to thoroughly document the musical repertoire, practice, and history of Algerian diwan, a nocturnal trance ritual of the Bilaliyya Sufi Order that emerged out of the trans-Saharan slave trade. As a musician as well as a scholar, she studied with ritual musicians and experts, attending and documenting diwan rituals across Algeria