Matthew Adams is a doctoral researcher employing psychological and cybernetic approaches to the experience of minorities and marginalized communities in China. Matthew’s research interests are in emergent technologies that affect sociality (AR/VR and ‘metaverse’, HCI, AI, and algorithmic systems in social media), the anthropology of emotion, visual and digital anthropology and sociology, and the use of psychoanalytic methods in social research. Since completing his master’s degree in psychological and psychiatric anthropology, Matthew has conducted research with virtual communities in VR, on massively-multiplayer video games, and on social media, and in the UK, US, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
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.
Lydia Maria Arantes, Mag. Dr. phil., is interested in (textile) craft practices, material culture, anthropology of numbers, STS, sensory ethnography, ethno-psychoanalysis and reflexive ethnography. In her latest book she carves out sensory, material, mathematical, social, historical, economic and gender dimensions of contemporary knitting. Her next project will deal with the textile industry in western Austria, where she aims at looking into negotiations / reconciliations of digitisation and sustainability as well as emerging (practices of) knowledge in a rapidly changing field (of production).
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.
Nadia Augustyniak is a postdoctoral researcher with the Irritation and Human Sociality Group at the University of Helsinki. She received her PhD in anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research has explored the expansion of mental health counseling services in Sri Lanka, tracing how ethical understandings of care, family ideologies, and gender and class relations shape therapeutic practice and its social effects. Her broader interests include family life and intimacy; material and social dimensions of well-being; morality and ethics; phenomenological anthropology; gender and labor; and feminist ethnography.