People

Owen Abbott is Lecturer in Social Sciences at Cardiff University, UK. He authored The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice, which was awarded the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Prize 2020 for best first, sole-authored book. His second sole-authored book Social Theorists of Morality: Essays on Moral Agency explores a wide range of contributions of social accounts of moral agency, using these to assess the parameters of a sociologically-sound theory of moral agency. His original restorative work on Du Bois’s studies of morality has been esteemed by the American Sociological Association’s Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity section. Abbott also co-authored Masking in the Pandemic: Materiality, Interaction, and Moral Practice. 

He has recently completed a Leverhulme Trust-funded empirical project exploring forgiving and not forgiving in personal relationships, continuing his interest in the moral dynamics of personal lives. 

Kathya Araujo has a PhD in American Studies (University of Santiago de Chile). She is Full Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IDEA) of the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Director of the Núcleo Interuniversitario Individuos, Lazo Social y Asimetrías de Poder (NIUMAP), and a trained psychoanalyst. Her main research fields are authority, social bond, individuation, sociology of moralities, social theory and psychoanalysis. She has been invited as visiting professor and guest researcher to several universities in North and South America and Europe, among them the Free University of Berlin and the EHESS of Paris. Her research work has received grants from several national and international funders. Currently she conducts research on social moralities and on authority. She is author of a significant number of articles in prestigious indexed journals. Additionally, she has authored over 20 influential books. Her last published books are El miedo a los subordinados (Fear from Subordinate, LOM, 2016), Cómo estudiar la autoridad (Ed. USACH, 2021) and The Circuit of Detachment in Chile (Cambridge University Press, 2022, Spanish version published in 2025. 

She serves currently as Advisor to the Ministerial Advisory Council of the Ministry of Science Technology, Knowledge and Innovation of Chile. She is also member of the Board of the Research Committee Sociological Theory of the International Sociological Association (ISA).

Anna Strhan is Reader in Sociology at the University of York, UK, where she leads the Culture, Values, and Practices Research Cluster and co-directs the Religion & Spirituality in Society & Culture (RASSC) Lab. Her most research project is a Leverhulme Trust funded multi-sited ethnographic study exploring the contested place and significance of values and their connection to religion and the affective politics of belonging in everyday school worlds. 

Anna is the author of a number of books, including Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England (Princeton University Press, co-authored with Rachael Shillitoe), Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (Oxford University Press),  which was shortlisted for the BBC/British Sociological Association Thinking Allowed Ethnography Award, and Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility (Wiley-Blackwell). She is also the co-editor of several books, including Where is the Good in the World? Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy (Berghahn) and Religion and the Global City (Bloomsbury Academic). Her research has appeared in popular media outlets such as The Guardian and BBC Radio 4. She currently serves as Secretary for the Association for the Sociology of Religion.