Terhi Utriainen is the team leader of WP5. She is Professor in the Study of Religions at the University of Helsinki Faculty of Theology and holds the Title of Docent in Gender Studies. Her research interests include ethnography of lived and vernacular religion, gender and embodiment, ritual studies, death, dying and suffering. She has recently directed, e.g., the project Learning from New Religion and Spirituality, funded by Research Council of Finland. She is co-editor of, e.g., Post-secular Society, Finnish Women Making Religion: Between Ancestors and Angels and The Relational Dynamics of Enchantment and Sacralization: Changing the Terms of the Religion versus Secularity Debate. She is a co-editor of the Handbook on Contemporary Death Rituals in Europe (forthcoming). Utriainen is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Roosa Haimila is a postdoctoral researcher in the study of religion. Her research has focused on responses to existential concern in secular worldviews. Haimila’s doctoral thesis (2023) explored how science-oriented individuals utilise belief in science and supernatural explanations to answer ‘the big questions’, such as ones concerning death and suffering. After her PhD, Haimila has studied attitudes towards (non-)religious groups and the diversity of secular moralities. Her work has combined approaches in humanities to existential psychology and the cognitive science of religion.
In MePhiS, Haimila’s work aims to produce new empirical knowledge and methodological tools to investigate people’s responses to death and suffering. She will explore how non-religious individuals in Finland make meaning of death and serious illness – and why people might turn to different kinds of secular meanings. Haimila will also continue leading a project investigating how people in different countries respond to women’s protest in Iran, and how digitalised activist art can influence these responses (ARTACT 2026–2029, funding: Kone Foundation). These lines of work will utilise qualitative methods (such as interviews), building on the findings to construct tools for quantitative research. Haimila will also continue her collaborations investigating the impact of death reminders and (other) threats to meaning on belief in science and supernatural beliefs. Her work therefore taps into the diversity of meliorist and other approaches in people’s everyday responses (with a focus on responses to death, serious illness, and inequality), shedding light on their cultural and psychological underpinnings.
Katri Ratia is a scholar of religion and ritual, a folklorist, an ethnographer, and a teacher. Her areas of expertise are ritual studies, ethnography, vernacular religion, magic, material religion, ritual embodiment, folklore and folk religion, contemporary spirituality, and sociology of religion.
Linda Toratti is a doctoral researcher in the study of religion. Her work focuses on the functions of collective vernacular rituals and is motivated by fundamental questions about how interconnectedness shapes subjective realities and what makes a good (shared) human life possible.
Within MePhiS, Toratti’s research forms part of the empirical investigation into discourses and practices responding to suffering in the contemporary world. Through ethnographic case studies in grassroots contexts of Helsinki, she explores what kind of framings of suffering are intertwined with the communally oriented motivations. Her aim is to examine how the rituals of self-organized (religious and secular) communities function as platforms for creating a shared sense of morality.