Adam Possamai is Professor of Sociology at Western Sydney University and the Deputy Dean of the School of Social Sciences. He is a former President of the Research Committee 22 on the Sociology of Religion from the International Sociological Association, and of the Australian Association for the Study of Religions. He is the (co)author and (co)editor of more than 20 books and (co)author of more than 100 articles and book chapters. He recently edited with Anthony Blasi the Sage Encyclopaedia of Sociology of Religion (2020) which includes the works of more than 200 international contributors. He was a visiting Professor at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York, and at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He has organised more than 600 papers as Chair of conferences/symposia across 4 continents. He is on the editorial board of Social Compass and has been a member of the ISSR Award Committees for the best student paper and best monograph in the sociology of religion. He is an engaged academic who is regularly sought out by journalists for comments on religious and social issues. He is concerned about the impact of research metrics on our discipline and on its researchers and is currently doing some research on this topic. He is Belgo-Australian and bilingual in English and French.

David Koussens is a full professor at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Sherbrooke where he holds the Research Chair in Law, Religion and Secularism. Trained in law in France and Quebec, he holds a doctorate in sociology from the Université du Québec à Montréal. He was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2010-2011) and a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre de recherche en éthique of the Université de Montréal (2011). His work analyzes the plurality of discourses on religion and secularism, as well as their legal mediations in several francophone societies (Quebec, France, Belgium). He conducts his research at the Centre de recherche Sociétés, Droit et Religion de l'Université de Sherbrooke (SoDRUS) and at the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la diversité et la démocratie (CRIDAQ). He is also a foreign associate member of the CNRS Groupe-Société-Religion-Laïcité. His publications include L'épreuve de la neutralité (Bruylant, 2015) and Secularism(s) in Contemporary France (Springer, 2023). He has co-edited a dozen books including: Le paradoxe évangélique (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2022); Religion, Law and the Politics of Ethical Diversity (Routledge, 2021); Étudier la religion au Québec (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2020) ; Nouveaux vocabulaires de la laïcité (Classiques Garnier, 2020). His work has been recognized with several awards including an IDEX from the Université de Bordeaux (2016-2017) and the Prix Tremplin en recherche et en création from the Université of Sherbrooke (2017). At Université of Sherbrooke, David Koussens established and directed the Centre d'études du religieux contemporain (2015-2017; 2018-2020), as well as directed the Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke (2015-2016). He has also been an invited professor or a visiting scholar at several foreign universities including the Università Ca'Foscari Venezia, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of California, Berkeley, the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the Université de Bordeaux, and the Université Saint-Louis-Bruxelles. He was president of the Société Québécoise pour l’étude de la Religion (2016-2020). He has served as vice president of the Canadian Corporation for Religious Studies since 2020.

Agreed to continue on a second mandate. First mandate ending 2023.

Agreed to continue on a second mandate. First mandate ending 2023.

Victor Albert holds a PhD in sociology (thesis defended at the University Paris 8 in 2022) with an interdisciplinary training in several human and social sciences. In 2012 he obtained an undergraduate degree in Political Science and in 2014 he completed a master’s degree in Euromediterranian Relations. Both his research activity and academic trajectory have taken place between France and Spain, focusing on the intersection of religion, urban space, and politics. Currently, he is attached to the Gender, Work and Mobility (GTM) team of the Center for Sociological and Political Research of Paris (CRESPPA) and associated with the sociology of religions research team (ISOR) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), where he participated in several collective research projects. He is also a board member of the thematic network "Sociology and Religions" of the French Sociological Association (AFS). His academic experience also includes several teaching activities at the Université Toulouse 2 – Jean Jaurès, at the Université Paris 8 or at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC).

Stefania Palmisano, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Religion at the University of Turin, Italy, where she teaches the sociology of religion and the sociology of organization. She was Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University and Visiting Research Fellow, Department of Religion, Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Wolverhampton University. She is a member of the editorial board of Social Compass, Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review, Journal for the Study of Spirituality, Frontiers in Sociology and Fieldwork in Religion. In addition, she is co-ordinator of the research centre CRAFT (Contemporary Religion and Faiths in Transition) based in the Department of Culture, Politics and Society at Turin University. Her research includes religious experience in mainstream religions, alternative spiritualities, New Religious Movements, women and religion and the relationship between spirituality and care in the Italian healthcare system. She is the author of Exploring New Monastic Communities: The Re-invention of Tradition (Ashgate, 2015), co-editor with Isabelle Jonveaux of Monasticism in Modern Times (Routledge, 2016), co-editor with Nicola Pannofino of Invention of Tradition and Syncretism in Contemporary Religions: Sacred Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and (with Nicola Pannofino) Contemporary Spiritualities: Enchanted Worlds of Nature, Wellbeing and Mystery in Italy (Routledge, 2020).

Lene Kühle is a sociologist of religion and professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her research focuses on the intersection of religion, politics, law, and society. Her PhD (2004) used Bourdieu’s concept of a religious field to discuss the emergence of religious diversity in Denmark and included a focus on religion in prison. Her later work has included mappings of mosques in Denmark (2006, 2017), research on radicalization (2011) and the establishment of CARD, a network for the critical analysis of religious diversity. Her recent work focuses on religion and law as well as Islamic Finance. She is also working on the relationship between scholars and media.

Agreed to continue on a second mandate. First mandate ending 2023.

Dr Emanuelle Degli Esposti is currently based at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge, where she specialises in the politics of religious imaginaries and the encounter between minority religions and liberal secularism. She holds a doctorate and MSc from SOAS, University of London, and a BA from Oxford University.

Marat Shterin is Professor of the Sociology of Religion at King’s College London. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science where he received the Robert McKenzie prize for the best PhD of the year. His academic interests involve the relationship between sociological theory and the study of religion, with special reference to religious minorities, politics and law. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Religion, State & Society. He has contributed to a range of international projects and assessment studies and appeared in many TV and radio interviews in the UK and beyond. The latest among his numerous publications is a co-edited volume Islam in Russia: Religion, Politics and Society (2023)

Conrad Hackett is the senior demographer and associate director of research at Pew Research Center. He leads a Pew team studying the international demography of religion and is an author of many ambitious studies, such as Modeling the Future of Religion in America, Religion’s Relationship to Happiness, Civic Engagement and Health Around the World, Europe’s Growing Muslim Population, Religion and Education Around the World, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 and The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World. He is also a visiting research professor at the University of Maryland’s Population Research Center.

In 2022, Conrad started an international Sociology of Religion Slack community, which now includes more than 1,300 social scientists. Please email if you’d like to join the Slack group.

Conrad has served as a board member of the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR), the Religious Research Association (RRA) and the Sociology of Religion committee (RC22) of the International Sociological Association. He organized conferences at Pew Research Center on Survey Research and the Study of Religion in East Asia and on Advancing the Demographic Study of Religion. He was a program chair for RRA, is currently on the program committee for RC22’s upcoming Melbourne conference and he led the international travel award committee of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. He is on the editorial board of Sociology of Religion and the Review of Religious Research. Conrad has been attending SISR/ISSR since 2011 and is the organizer of three sessions in the upcoming Taipei conference.

Here are embedded links to his Twitter, Mastodon and Google Scholar accounts.

Marian Burchardt is Professor of Sociology at Leipzig University, senior research partner of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and associate fellow of the Humanities Center of Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”.

Marian has broad-ranging research interests in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, urban sociology and theories of modernity. His work mainly draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods.

In the sociology of religion, he has particularly contributed to the following research fields:

• secularism, secularity and secularisation
• religous belonging, citizenship and law
• urban religion
• religion, gender and sexuality
• religion and cultural heritage

He is the author of Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). Marian is strongly committed to the agenda of global sociology.

I am a cultural sociologist (PhD) with a solid background in qualitative research focusing on the intersection of contemporary religious movements, (anti-) gender activism, and socially transformative processes. Over the past decade, I have been appointed visiting scholar and research fellow in multiple organizations such as the African Centre for Migration and Society at Witwatersrand University, the International Migration Institute at University of Oxford in (2015), Sonke Gender Justice (2017), and the Institute for STEMM in Culture and Society at the University of Birmingham (2022). My professional trajectory also includes collaborations with development agencies and non-governmental organizations in South Africa, Switzerland, Spain, Togo, and the Congo (DRC).  I am currently a postdoctoral fellow funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science based at the Research Center in Sociology of Culture and Religion (ISOR) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.