Members’ Directory

Amine Aktekin is a researcher who is eager to understand memory politics in the context of intergenerational transition and spatial imagination with the help of fieldwork methodologies. Strongly believing in the motto of “taking people seriously”, she is much interested in social memory, memory politics, cultural transmission, and spatial imagination. Currently, she works for a research institute which is one of the considerable sector-based entities in Türkiye as a researcher and coordinator. 

Yael Assor is an anthropologist who studies how culturally-dependent moral views shape healthcare policy-making procedures. Assor gained her Ph.D. at UCLA’s Department of Anthropology, where she studied how an ideal of “objectivity” as ethically appropriate conduct shapes the decisions made at the Israeli Public Committee for the Enhancement of the Medical Services Basket (known in Israel as Va’adat Sal Hatrufot). Currently, Assor is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Haifa’s Department of Anthropology, where she develops her new research on the ethical assumptions underlying the notion of “medical effectiveness” in cost-effectiveness analysis. Assor’s studies have appeared in leading anthropological and bioethical journals.

Kathrin Bauer is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. Her Ph.D. project examines attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in different Colombian communities to highlight the sociocultural embeddedness of the phenomenon. Among her research interests are neurodiversity, mental health, emotion regulation and neuroanthropology.

Colette Berbesque is an evolutionary anthropologist with particular research interests in human ecology, the evolution of the hominin diet, and the evolution of cooperation, prestige, and hierarchy. For more than a decade, her research has included fieldwork with the Hadza of Tanzania, one of the last extant hunter-gatherer populations. Through analysis of behavioural data from the Hadza as well as from other hunter-gatherer groups, she investigates aspects of human evolution, including: strategies of food procurement and provisioning, cooperation, reputation, and sexual selection and gender.

Giuseppe Bolotta is a socio-cultural anthropologist and psychologist. He has conducted research in Thailand and Sierra Leone on marginalised childhoods, (religious) NGOs, and the cultural politics of child-focused humanitarianism. He is currently Contract Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Milano-Bicocca’s Department of Sociology and Social Research and Research Associate of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute.

Ariel Cascio is trained as an anthropologist and currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in pragmatic health ethics. Her research focuses on social issues related to autism spectrum conditions, especially identity, subjectivity, and biopolitics. She has conducted research on these issues in Italy, France, Germany, the US, and Canada. Dr. Cascio is currently based in North America, but she choosed to join the ENPA because most of her research has taken place in Europe (Italy, mostly).

Rosa Cordillera Castillo is a Filipina sociocultural anthropologist. Her dissertation (2017, FU Berlin), an ethnography of Maguindanaon adherents of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Southern Philippines, explores the workings of imagination in the formation of subjectivities and in the (un)making of the Bangsamoro imagined community by giving attention to imagination’s links with memory, temporality, emotions, and action. Her current research among Filipino supporters of Rodrigo Duterte, Alternative für Deutschland, and Donald Trump in the Philippines, Germany, and the United States respectively, looks at how social categories are conceptualized, discussed, and deployed by these Filipinos in their understandings of, and stances towards, certain pressing issues in the Philippines and in their countries of residence abroad.

Website: https://www.iaaw.hu-berlin.de/en/region/southeastasia/sea/history/staff/rosa-castillo

Liana Chase is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at SOAS University of London and hold a M.Sc. in social and transcultural psychiatry from McGill University. Her research is situated at the intersection of anthropology and psychiatry, engaging ethnographic methods to generate insights into processes of suffering, healing, and care in humanitarian settings. Her current research looks at the post-earthquake mental health response in Nepal.

https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff132223.php

Dimitri Chubinidze received his Ph.D. in psychological anthropology from Tbilisi State University (“Georgian Proverbs & Cultural Models of Adaptive Behavior, 2018).  During his dissertation project, D. Chubinidze was trained in psychological anthropology at Emory University and UC San Diego.

Dimitri Chubinidze’s research interests include the study of theoretical and methodological issues of cultural cognition with a central focus on cultural models of person and action, ritualized behavior, problem-solving and adaptive behavior strategies, metaphorical reasoning, meaning-making, theory of mind, psychology of set (Einstellung) and extrospection.

He teaches courses on Intro to Anthropology, Psychological Anthropology, Cultural Cognition, Cognitive Psychology, Attitude Theory, Social and Evolutionary Psychology.

Currently, Dimitri Chubinidze is the head of the Scientific Research & Development Department at the faculty of psychology & educational sciences, TSU; Invited lecturer at Tbilisi State University, Free university of Tbilisi and Agricultural University of Georgia; member of the working group Study of Psychological Set & Attitude Correction at Tbilisi State Medical University and the executive manager of the international Georgian Psychological Journal.

Joanna‘s research focuses on the ways in which subjectivity and ethical values inform changing understandings of health, wellbeing, political process and community organisation, and she is developing a new research agenda focusing on joy. Joanna is the author of Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and change in Thai monastic life (2010) and Making a Mindful Nation: Mental health and governance in the 21^st century (2023). She is the coeditor of An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange (2023), Mindfulness and Culture (2022), Unsettling Anthropologies of Care (2020), The State We’re In: Reflecting on Democracy’s Troubles (2016), Detachment: Essays on the limits of relational thinking (2015) and Southeast Asian Perspectives on Power (2012).

Florin Cristea is a PhD candidate at the Insitute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. His current research combines methods and epistemologies stemming from psychological and medical anthropology and focuses on the emotional dimension of mental illnesses. In his previous work he surveyed diagnostic uncertainty and clinical experience. He has conducted a six-month research in a psycho-social reintegration center in Romania, and a three-month research in a mental hospital in Tanga, Tanzania. He is a member of the working group Psychological Anthropology of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

James Davies graduated from the University of Oxford in 2006 with a D.Phil in Social and Medical anthropology. He is a Reader in Social Anthropology and Mental Health at the University of Roehampton and a qualified psychotherapist. His books include The Making of Psychotherapists: an anthropological analysis, and the bestseller Cracked: why psychiatry is doing more harm than good. He edited Emotions in the Field: the psychology and anthropology of fieldwork experience and The Sedated Society: the causes and harms of our psychiatric drug epidemic. He is co-founder of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, which is now secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence (https://prescribeddrug.org/).

Along with Dr. Keir Martin and Dr. Thomas Stodulka, Dr. James Davies founded this network (ENPA) in January 2018.

Leandro Durazzo holds a PhD in Anthropology (UFRN, Brazil) and researches Indigenous Ethnology, territoriality, ritual, language revitalization, education and traditional practices. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at UFRN’s Program in Psychology, working on territorialities, traditional peoples and health policies. He is also a coordinator for obPALA (the Observatory for Latin American Environmental Psychology, UFRN). As a UNESCO consultant (2021-2022), he developed a diagnosis on Indigenous health in Rio Grande do Norte, a work envised to further design public policies.

António Fonseca is a Portuguese psychologist and became associate professor of Psychology at the Catholic University of Portugal (UCP) after his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Porto (Portugal). He is a member of the Centre for Research in Human Development (CEDH-UCP) and a consultant for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. His areas of interest are human development, the psychology of aging, psychological well-being and counseling, health and quality of life. He believes that enhancing ageing in place responses is a major challenge for society addressing the needs of older people based on where they live.

Vladimer Lado Gamsakhurdia has obtained PhD degree in psychological anthropology from Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University in 2016 and has been holding the position of assistant professor there ever since.

Vladimer Gamsakhurdia worked as a visiting research fellow at the universities of Luxembourg, Aalborg, Fribourg, Basque Country and at CHD department, at the university of Chicago.

His research is focused on the idea of dialogicality, sociocultural changes and ‘Self’s’ adaptation to it. He is currently concentrated on the development of the theory of proculturation.

Anne Sigfrid Grønseth is Professor in Social Anthropology at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer, where she directs the Research Migration and Diversity Studies. Lost Selves and Lonely Persons: Experiences of Illness and Well-Being among Tamil Refugees in Norway (2010) is her major work. Her research has expanded to include asylum-seekers and child care protection services with concern for belonging and wellbeing, self and personhood, dwelling and being, rituals and performance, while also engaging methodology and modes of knowledge. These interests are represented in her edited volumes The Ethics of Knowledge Creation (2017, with Lisette Josephides), Being Human, Being Migrant (2013), and Mutuality and Empathy (2010, with Dona Lee Davis).

https://www.inn.no/om-hoegskolen/ansatte/anne-gronseth

Editor of Nordic Journal of Social Research (NJSR)

http://journals.hioa.no/index.php/njsr

Sibel Aksu Güngör received her Ph.D. degree at Yeditepe University, Turkey. In her dissertation, she discussed the relationship between cognitive processes, culture, and the material world. She is a lecturer in Psychological and Cognitive Anthropology. She is the founder of PUHU Research and Consultancy (www.puhu.com). PUHU develops projects that offer solutions with the awareness of the relationship between cognitive processes and social issues. The team of PUHU produces interdisciplinary content that contributes to the fields of anthropology, psychology, and coaching.

Hagar Hazaz Berger is a Ph.D candidate at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. She is also a Lecturer at the Occupational Therapy School at the Hebrew University and at College of Management Academic Studies and nursing Schools. She is interested in meaning, identity, protest, searching for meaning, everyday life, suffering, and emotions.

Her current research project is searching for meaning and identity construction during social protest. Hagar is a co-founder of the Israel Psychological anthropology section in the Israeli Anthropological Association and a co-editor of the Israeli sociological Association newsletter.

Gil Hizi is a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow in anthropology in the Global South Study Centre at the University of Cologne (PhD University of Sydney, 2018). He studies social change in China with the focus on concepts of personhood, interpersonal ethics and emotions. His field research has been mostly based in psychotherapeutic centres and extracurricular programmes of personal development. Gil has published his work in journals of Anthropology and Asian Studies, including Ethos, Social Analysis, Asian Studies Review, and Hau.

Using a novel approach to existing methods in cognitive anthropology, Mirjam Holleman developed an intra-culturally sensitive yet cross-culturally replicable and comparative way of measuring attitudes toward people with physical disabilities in order to assess the social integration of this group in the mental maps of non-disabled citizens and in society. Her field research in Poland provides a pilot study for these methodologies, which she hopes to apply on a larger and more comparative scale in other regions throughout Europe.

Professor Janis H. Jenkins is a psychological anthropologist who has worked in the field throughout her academic career.  She has conducted research on the primacy of lived experience in relation to cultural orientation, structural violence, emotion, gender, and mental illness.  She has theorized the centrality of struggle, rather than symptoms, for “extraordinary conditions” of psychosis, depression, anxiety, and trauma.

Within the U.S., she is currently President-Elect of the Society for Psychological Anthropology.  For more information and publications:

http://anthro.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/faculty-profiles/janis-jenkins.html

Suzana Jovičić studied Psychological and Psychiatric Anthropology (MSc) at the Brunel University, London and received her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Vienna with a dissertation situated within digital/design and psychological anthropology and based on an ethnographic study among Viennese youths. She specializes in digital technologies, persuasive design and collaborative and interdisciplinary research. She is currently a post-doc and lecturer at the University of Vienna.

Suzana is ENPA co-convenor.

Anni Kajanus is an Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. Her research explores human cooperation, competition and conflict in China and the UK. A social anthropologist, Anni has also trained in experimental methods at the Department of Psychology, Harvard. Her work combines methods and approaches from anthropology and developmental psychology, to ground research in an in-depth understanding of children’s learning environments, while adding systematic elements that enable comparisons across age groups and populations; and to produce questions and findings that have bearing across cognitive and social sciences.

Link to work profile:
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/anni-kajanus

Niina Ketola is a Master’s student in Social Anthropology with a focus on lived experience of psychological distress. Her M.A. thesis concerned the phenomenological and ontological dimensions of terminal cancer among hospice patients in Finland. Going forward, she has an interest in Indigenous articulations of mental illness and distress, as well as Indigenous psychiatric healing modalities in the MENA region. She has lived experience of OCD and depression, and explores their role in affective scholarship.

Keywords: phenomenology; terminal illness; Indigenous psychiatry; affective scholarship; mental illness and distress.

Eleni Kotsira holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews (UK) and a First-Class Honours BA in Social Anthropology from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Greece).

Since March 2021, Eleni works as a Senior Social Researcher at Alma Economics, an organisation advising governments and charities on policies and services to help the most vulnerable, where she leads an amazing team of Social Researchers. She also serves as the Designated Safeguarding Lead for all research activities undertaken by the organisation.

Eleni is also a poetry editor with Otherwise Magazine, an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK), and a founding member of the Association of Social Anthropologists Greece.

Currently she sits on the ENPA Task Force on Public Psychological Anthropology (November 2023 – July 2024).

You can find out more about Eleni’s research and professional expertise, as well as publications and other outputs here: https://elenikotsira.wordpress.com/

And you can read her writing blog here: https://poetic-movements.blogspot.com/

Naomi Leite is a Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. A psychological and cultural anthropologist, her work focuses on identity, identification, belonging, and exclusion across domains and scales of sociality, from the interpersonal to the institutional to the most abstractly imagined. She has a strong interest in cultural logics and modes of reasoning, lived experience, and the social, cultural, and intersubjective constitution of self, especially in relation to prevailing systems of social classification. Much of her work has explored these themes in tourism encounters, a context ripe for alternative expressions of self and enactments of transcultural (dis)identification. All of these topics come together in her first book, Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging (University of California Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Stirling Prize for Best Publication in Psychological Anthropology. She also co-edited The Ethnography of Tourism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) and is the winner of the Bruner Book Prize, Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group, American Anthropological Association, 2020.

Her new research, a comparative project involving sites in three countries, turns to informal sociality, belonging, and exclusion in tacitly or explicitly “inclusive” institutions—therapeutic communities, counterextremist youth programs, retreat centers—with an eye to differing models, experiences, and outcomes of “inclusion,” as well as institutional and interpersonal mechanisms that foster or hinder its fruition. Dr. Leite also has ongoing projects in the areas of rationality and metacognition; cultural logics and enactments of kinship and peoplehood; and intersubjectivity and vulnerability in ethnographic practice.

Kenneth Little is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Toronto. Most generally his research focuses on the critical turn in anthropology to affect, social creativity, and performativity. Currently, he is conducting long-term research on the rise of the tourist state in Belize. His work attends to how tourism becomes a significant modality through which contemporary everyday life in Belize is organized and how tourist encounters open imaginative spaces that stimulate new subject productions, highlight new aspects of social relations and interactions with nature that actively ensure new “fantasies of becoming.” He is also committed to developing a generative poetics of tourism encounter that understands writing as inseparable from our engagement in the world; writing ethnography as an occurant art. Favouring a non-representationalist, assemblages, productivist-materialist approach to critical tourism studies, as a way of augmenting a dialectical, representationalist one, means developing ethnographic work in tourism studies that is meant to engage the anthropology of tourism with a literature that it mostly doesn’t think with, namely critical post-humanist debates concerned with how encounters “matter” and how matter is thought and constituted through entanglements, refrains, knots, and figures of human and non-human bodies, affects, objects, and practices. He most recently completed a book on this subject entitled On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise: Affect, Tourism, Belize, Berghahn Books 2020.

Joe Long leads a programme of applied research in services for autistic people in Scotland. His research concerns the ways that autism knowledge is generated and mobilized, and how clinical, policy, and practice discourses shape the experience of autistic people. Joe is committed to collaborative ethnography that meaningfully involves supported autistic people and support practitioners. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Aberdeen and was previously a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

Ivana Maček is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, and a licensed psychotherapist. Since 1990s, she has done research, written, and lectured on mass political violence in Bosnia and Hercegovina, comparative genocide, anthropological methods with special focus on the non-symbolic communication, engagement of Swedish professionals in global warzones, as well as memory and intergenerational transmission of war experiences within Bosnian families in Sweden. Her major international publications are Sarajevo Under Siege (PENN 2009), and Engaging Violence (Routledge 2014).

https://www.socant.su.se/english/research/our-researchers/ivana-maček

David Mosse is a Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS with current research interests in the anthropology of mental life, distress and survival, and in mental healthcare systems, therapeutic practices and public policy in the UK and South Asia. This includes ethnographic and public engagement in approaches to psychiatric crisis and suicide prevention across cultures.

He is currently involved in Open Dialogue as a model of mental healthcare as practitioner and ethnographer. At SOAS he teaches modules on Mind, Culture & Psychiatry.

https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff31472.php

Latest book: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520273498

Recent open access article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X18301943

Recent article:https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418797718

Marjorie Murray is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Principal Researcher at the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research CIIR. She is interested in parenting, early socialization and care; aspiration and its temporalities; and material culture and consumption. Her current research project studies parenting and care in Santiago de Chile, focusing on the ways in which social aspirations, territorial and cultural flows take place together with an intensification of normativity and social demands upon parenting.

Sevasti-Melissa Nolas is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research areas include: human agency and lived experience, childhood, youth and family lives, civic and political practices across the life course, and publics creating methodologies. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC funded Connectors Study and the co-editor of entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

http://www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/nolas-sevasti-melissa/

Co-Director https://childhoodpublics.org

Co-Editor https://entanglementsjournal.org/

Samuele Poletti‘s doctoral research is focused on the perception(s) of death in the Sinja Valley of Jumla District (Western Nepal), and how this may shed light upon the ways in which people make sense of existence. Besides resorting to the classic instrument of academic writing, he is interested in the possibilities that photography may offer as a complementary means to the ethnographic description, not least by virtue of a communicative immediacy not always possible in the written text. He is member of: Swiss Anthropological Association; American Anthropological Association (AAA);  Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS); Britain-Nepal Academic Council (BNAC).

http://www.samuelepoletti.com

Dr. Keira Pratt-Boyden is an anthropologist working across projects related to health service improvement and transformation, health experiences and social justice. Her PhD thesis explored modes of listening and ways of being among mental health activists in London as means of healing from mental distress and experiences of conventional biomedical approaches to treatment. Her current project as a postdoctoral researcher explores black adoptee children’s experiences of care in social care settings. Her research and interests in psychological anthropology include mental-health activism, worldbuilding as healing, critical phenomenology, and public and activist/engaged anthropology.

Dora Rebelo is a Psychologist (since 2000) and has been working mostly within humanitarian contexts, in different countries, supporting innovative community mental health projects.

Since 2017, Dora started a PhD in ISCTE-IUL (Lisbon). She is also a researcher at the Center for Anthropology Research (CRIA) in Portugal. Her PhD research focuses on informal solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers on the move. She is interested in questions of reciprocity, political activism, but also the relationships established between volunteers and activists and people on the move.

Simultaneously, Dora is interested in developing a dialogue between psychology and anthropology, focusing on fieldwork, positionally and intersubjectivities

Antonius C.G.M. Robben is a Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He received a Ph.D. (1986) from the University of California, Berkeley, and has conducted fieldwork on fishermen in northeast Brazil, and political violence, enforced disappearances, and socio-cultural traumas in Argentina. His monographs include Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005), which won the Textor Prize from the American Anthropological Association in 2006 for Excellence in Anthropology, and Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018).

http://www.uu.nl/staff/trobben

Peter Safronov is a philosopher who is now a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research combines political philosophy, anthropology, and media studies, employing computational and ethnographic methodologies to explore care and caring interactions online. His current project focuses on the formation of affective collectivities via social media and AI-assisted technologies.

Annemarie Samuels is an assistant professor at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. She has extensive ethnographic research experience in Indonesia on the topics of narratives, morality, care, HIV/AIDS and disaster and a broad interest in psychological anthropology, narrative studies, the anthropology of silence, phenomenology, and medical anthropology. Her monograph titled “After the tsunami: disaster narratives and the remaking of everyday life in Aceh” is forthcoming with the University of Hawai’i press.

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/annemarie-samuels#tab-1

Marco Sassoon has a background in psychology, medical anthropology, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. His current PhD project at the University of Cologne investigates the effects of repressive border enforcement on individual and community psychosocial health in Dakar, Senegal. His research interests include the embodiment of structural inequalities in health experiences, the production of biopolitical knowledge in plural medical landscapes, and creative resilience strategies developed by marginalized actors. He is also a therapist and activist in Sportello TiAscolto, a critically-inspired healthcare service in Italy.

Keywords: decoloniality, biopower, critical border studies, mental health, resilience

Mario Schmidt currently works on his postdoc project “On the quality of quantity: ethnographic and experimental-economic research on the effect of culture on the cognitive perception and classification of monetary amounts in Western Kenya”. The project builds upon his year-long fieldwork experience in Kenya and is situated at the intersection of economic anthropology and behavioral economics. His main interest lies in understanding cultural and cognitive classification of numbers, quantities and amounts with a special, but not exclusive, focus on money.

a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities, University of Cologne

Recent Publications

• Article on Gambling and Football Betting in Kenya (Journal of Eastern African Studies)
• Special Issue on “Quantity and Quality in Economic Anthropology” (published in Social Analysis)
• Article on Socio-Economic Inclusion and “Bitter Money” in Western Kenya (published in Africa)
• Discussion of Anthropology as Conceptual Puzzle-Solving (published in HAU)

Michal Sipos is a social anthropologist (PhD, 2016). His scholarly interests revolve around political anthropology, phenomenological anthropology and refugee studies. He is also interested in research methods and ethics in ethnography of violence. As a part of his doctoral studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, he carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Chechen war refugees in eastern Poland.

Latest publications: https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2276

https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1409106

Lavinia Ţânculescu-Popa is a Lecturer in Hyperion University, Psychology Department, as well as an Associate Lecturer in National University of Administrative and Political Studies, Bucharest, Romania. She worked with organizations in Romania and abroad for more than 19 years, out of which 10 years as part of the two of the world’s four largest audit and consulting companies’ teams (PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte Consulting). She holds a PhD in Psychology and a MA in Cultural Studies and Anthropology. She is a certified Jungian Analyst and Supervisor in Jungian Psychotherapy, as well as an ICF Accredited Coach, working both with individuals and groups, in business and personal coaching. Her research interests are in the field of emotions and behaviors (in general, and in organizations, in particular) as well as in personality in its broader sense and its importance in sleep, rest, developing potential and genders’ roles.

Website: http://snspa.ro/lavinia-tanculescu/

For ENPA, Lavinia is the person in charge with the Members Directory.

Paola Tiné is a Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide (South Australia). Her doctoral work was in ethnopsychological study of the emic notion of ‘mutual understanding’ in domestic settings among an emerging middle class in the Nepali city of Bhaktapur. Building upon fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork research in 2018-2019, it asks the question of how Newar middle-class people are revising domestic relations and moralities in the pursuit of well-being and how household members conceive of domestic duties and ultimately build their sense of moral selves through a redefinition of the Hindu concept of dharma. Dr. Tine’s current research focuses on the use of participant drawing to explore emotional states, particularly in contexts of distress

Dr. Toma studied medicine at UMF “Carol Davila” and then, he approached anthropology, graduating from a masters degree in the field. He obtained his Ph.D. in Psychiatry. In 2000, he initiated a research program in Medical Anthropology in IAFR and has developed numerous research projects in the field of “Medical Humanities” – a field of boundary that combines concepts and methods from medical anthropology and history of medicine. He is currently collaborating with Dr. Sabina Stan, from Dublin City University, in a project on cross-border migration and medical tourism in the European Union.

Panos Tsitsanoudis (he/him), holds a degree in Psychology (BA) from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a Master’s degree (MA) in Gender studies, from the Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of Aegean, in Lesvos, Greece. His research areas and methods are varying between psychoanalysis, affect theory, critical psychology and social anthropology. At the moment, he is pursuing his PhD research, working in the intersections of intimacy, (hetero)sexuality, femicidal violence and gendered death, from a critical psychological anthropological perspective.

Tzanetou Vasia is a psychological anthropologist at Society of Social Psychiatry and Mental Health and Adult educator. She is interested in the Biopsychosocial Therapy Approach , Neuroanthropology and Education. Her work focuses on developing and implementing interventions to improve the psychological wellbeing and resilience in vulnerable populations.

Eva van Roekel is Assistant Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at VU Amsterdam. For more than a decade she has worked and lived in Latin America. Her areas of interest are violence, trauma, emotion and visual anthropology. Her current research project is about military subjectivities and changing warfare. Besides her scholarly publications she makes documentaries and writes short stories. More of her work can be found at:  http://www.dokumento.org

Anita von Poser is a Professor of Psychological Anthropology with a specific focus on “Migration, Psyche, Aging” at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. She is also Principal Investigator of an anthropological-psychiatric project within the Berlin-based Collaborative Research Center 1171 “Affective Societies”. Her major interests pertain to the fields of psychological anthropology and phenomenological anthropology, the anthropology of aging, care, belonging, and im-/mobility, and the anthropology of social relationships and foodways. She has conducted long-term ethnographic research both in rural and urban lifeworlds of Papua New Guinea as well as entangled spaces of Berlin and Vietnam. Her single- and co-authored publications include Foodways and Empathy (Berghahn 2013), Care as Process (Ethics and Social Welfare 2017), and The Power of Shared Embodiment (Culture, Medicine, Psychiatry 2020).

https://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/ethnologie/forschung/arbeitsstellen/anthropologie_der_emotionen/personen/poser-anita/index.html

https://www.sfb-affective-societies.de/en/teilprojekte/A/A02/index.html

Editor of the Book Series EmotionCultures (together with Birgitt Röttger-Rössler) https://www.transcript-verlag.de/reihen/ethnologie-und-kulturanthropologie/emotionskulturen-emotioncultures/?f=12320

Brady Wagoner received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he started his research on memory, imagination, social change and environmental communication. His studies of remembering include the analysis of conversations, narratives, reenactments and most recently how people relate to different kinds of memorial sites. He is associate editor of the journals Culture & Psychology and Peace & Conflict. His books include The Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s Psychology in Reconstruction (CUP, 2017), Handbook of Culture and Memory (OUP, 2018)

Nicole Weydmann is Research Associate at Jacobs University in Bremen. Her current research project is investigating concepts and approaches underlying healing ideologies of new rightist movements in Germany and Austria. She received her Ph.D. in psychology at Jacobs University Bremen. In her doctoral studies she focused on concepts and approaches underlying the use of traditional and complementary medicine in urban Indonesia / Yogyakarta (‘Healing is not just dealing with your body’, 2019). Besides her substantive focus on traditional and alternative medicine in Southeast Asia, Nicole has a major focus on reflexive research methodologies, highlighting the formative influences of researchers on different steps of meaning making.

Recent publication: Weydmann, Nicole (2019). ‘Healing is not just dealing with your body‘ – A Reflexive Grounded Theory Study Exploring Women’s Concepts and Approaches Underlying the Use of Traditional and Complementary Medicine in Indonesia. Berlin: Regiospectra.

Edda Willamowski is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. In 2022, she received her doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on the relationship between mental health, forced migration, and spatial perception in the lives of elderly Vietnamese refugees.

Her interests pertain to the fields of psychological anthropology, phenomenological anthropology, anthropology of silence, affect and emotion, refugee and migration studies, and the critical anthropology of trauma. Regionally, she concentrates on transnational lifeworlds between Vietnam, Germany, and the USA. She has worked interdisciplinary, engaged, and collaborative with colleagues from the psy-scientists. Since 2019, she has been co-spokesperson of the Psychological Anthropology working group of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Konstantinos Zorbas (MLitt St. Andrews, PhD Cambridge) is a social anthropologist with research interests in Siberian shamanism. He studied shamans and an epidemic of curse affliction in Tuva Republic, Russia. His work has been published in the Journal of Anthropological Research and in the International Journal for Shamanistic Research.