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.
Ward Keeler‘s research interests focus on the tenor of social interaction in three Southeast Asian societies: Central Java and Bali (both in Indonesia), and lowland Burma. He is particularly interested in the interface of psychology and anthropology with respect so notions of the self, gender, and hierarchy. Currently, professor Ward is also a fellow at Hansewissenschaftskolleg in Delmenorst.
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.
Julia Khan earned her Ph.D. in anthropology, presenting research at the crossroads of nationalism, self, and emotion, centered on an urban post-Soviet Kazakhstan school. Her focus was adolescent socialization into a national identity through emotional education and tacit politics of emotion within teacher, parent, and student relationships. Her work expanded scholarship on post-Soviet nation-building, revealing affective discourses and their implications for post-Soviet belonging and state-making. Beyond Kazakhstan, her interests span emotion, personhood, affective education, school ethnography, morality, post-socialism, and the state, reflecting a comprehensive approach to understanding individual experiences in the post-Soviet context.
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/
Trained as a clinical psychologist, Dr. Sudarshan R. Kottai’s research thus far has investigated everyday narratives and practices of mental health care and chronicity constructed by official discourses of state and biomedicine. Informed by the politics, history and philosophy of psy disciplines, grapples with questions of philosophical interest in mental health care like why mainstream mental health academia/research/ practice primarily engage in “mirroring” the world rather than in “world-making”. His upcoming book is titled Mental health and critical community care: Perspectives from India. (Web: https://iitpkd.ac.in/people/sudarshan)