Milosz Kowalski (2025)

I am a PhD researcher at the department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Churchill College. I completed my BA in Social Anthropology at Cambridge in 2024, followed by an MPhil in Social Anthropological Research, also at Cambridge, awarded in 2025.

My doctoral research, building directly from my MPhil, is based on fieldwork among British Spiritualists. My work is situated at a crossroads between ‘ontological’ and ‘mediational’ approaches to religious life. I am interested in how contemporary Spiritualists understand communication with those in the Spirit-World in the context of collective mediumship rituals. Spiritualism is located in a distinctive history of ‘alternative modernity,’ fusing together notions of pure, evidential mediation (providing proof) and more mystical conceptions of vibrations, entanglement, and universal energy. My work seeks to understand how these concepts meet in practice and discourse, in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of modernity and mediation. I am also interested in how kinship is reproduced through encounters with spirits and via the potential participation of mediums in life-histories. Relatedly, I seek to further understand how care, community, and ethics are sustained in this unique environment, against the backdrop of a declining British welfare state and a crisis of wellbeing in the UK.