Iwona Kaliszewska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in the University of Warsaw. She has been researching the North Caucasus since 2004. She has authored numerous publications about the Caucasus and co-directed a documentary about a Dagestani female wrestler entitled “The Strongwoman” (2014). Her study focused on Islamic radicalism and everyday politics in Dagestan and Chechnya and resulted in two books: “Veiled and Unveiled in Chechnya and Daghestan” co-authored with Maciej Falkowski (2016) and “For Putin and For Sharia: Dagestani Muslims about Russia and the Islamic State” (2016). She is currently working on a project “Medical Landscapes in Dagestan and Chechnya during Covid-19 Pandemics”.

Email: iwona.kaliszewska[at]gmail.com

Florian Mühlfried is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Ilia State University. He has been a Lecturer at the Tbilisi State University, a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, a Visiting Professor at UNICAMP, Brazil, and an Assistant Professor at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. His publications include the monographs Mistrust: A Global Perspective (2019) and Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia (2014), the edited volume Mistrust: Ethnographic Approximations (2018), and the co-edited volumes Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces: Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus (2018) and Exploring the Edge of Empire: Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia (2011).

Email: ethno.kaukasus[at]gmail.com

Lili Di Puppo is Assistant Professor of Sociology at HSE University, Moscow. Her research focuses on religion and ethnicity, pilgrimage and sacred sites, the interconnection between memory, place and identity and nature and the sacred in Eurasia. She has done fieldwork in Russia's Volga-Ural region and in Georgia. She has co-edited two special issues on Islam in Russia. Her work has been published in Ethnicities, East European Politics, the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, Contemporary Islam and Global Crime. She is co-editor of the book “Peripheral Methodologies: Unlearning, Not-Knowing and Ethnographic Limits” (Routledge, 2021).

Email: ldipuppo[at]hse.ru

Jesko Schmoller is a Research Fellow at the Chair for Transregional Central Asian Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, and a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Comparative History and Political Studies at Perm State University, Russia. He works on Muslim pilgrimage, saint veneration and Sufism in the Russian Urals and Kazakhstan. Further interests of his are the interrelations of religious, ethnic and national identities as well as the spatial dimensions of Islam.

Email: jeskoschmoller[at]gmail.com

Hannah Theaker is Lecturer in History and Politics at the University of Plymouth and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford China Centre. Her research explores religion, ethnicity, environment and violence in China’s northwestern provinces, with a particular interest in Islam and Sufism in China. Her book project, China’s Forgotten Partition, explores the legacies of the mass resettlements of Muslim population that followed the 1860s Great Northwestern Rebellion in China.

Email: hannah.theaker[at]gmail.com

Mustafa Şen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. His main areas of interest are sociology of religion, economic sociology and contemporary Central Asia. His current research is concerned with state-religion relations in Turkey and the activities of official and non-official Turkish Islamic organizations in Europe and Central Asia. His publications include: “A Background for Understanding the Gülen Community”, Soziale Welt, the special issue on “Islam as an Arena of Conflicts in Europe, 2007, 17, 327-346. “Transformation of Turkish Islamism and the Rise of Justice and Development Party”, Turkish Studies Journal, 2010, Vol.: 11, Number: 1, pp.: 59-84. “The AKP Rule and the Directorate of Religious Affairs,” in Nikos Christofis (ed.) Erdoğan’s ‘New’ Turkey: Attempted Coup D’état and the Acceleration of Political Crisis, (2020) Routledge: London and New York, pp.: 40-57. “The Case of the Alevi in Turkey and the Challenges to Liberal Multiculturalism” with Aret Karademir, Journal of Southeast European and Balkan Studies, 2021. “Advanced Marginality and Criminalization: the Case of Altındağ,” with Boran Ali Mercan, Turkish Studies, 2021.

Email: senmusti[at]metu.edu.tr

Anna Sehnalova is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and a Lecturer at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in the City of New York, along with pursuing her second doctorate at the University of Oxford. Anna’s research interests particularly are Tibetan cultural reflections of the environment, landscape and wildlife, ranging from non-Buddhist mountain and ancestor cults and their socio-political roles and interactions with Buddhism, to medicine and botany, as well as ritual. Approaching these topics, she has worked on medico-ritual practices within monastic tantric traditions, Bon, local histories in East Tibet, treasure cults of Tibetan Buddhism, pilgrimage, and current processes of modernisation of religious practice. Her work relies on both ethnography and historical and contemporary textual sources.

Email: anna.sehnalova13[at]gmail.com

Rabia Harmanşah is a Research Fellow at the Department of Middle Eastern and South East Asian Studies in the University of Cologne. Her main interests are political anthropology, nationalism, ethno-religious conflict, memory studies, religion, political violence and displacement, material culture with area emphasis on Cyprus, Turkey and Eastern Europe. She is currently working on her new research project on the islands of Imbros and Rhodes, titled Mapping the Forgotten Landscape: People, Power and Belonging.

Email: rharmans[at]uni-koeln.de