Milosz Kowalski

I am an anthropology research student currently funded by the Churchill College—AHRC studentship at the University of Cambridge. I received my MPhil in Social Anthropological Research in 2025 from Cambridge, where I also completed a BA in Social Anthropology in 2024. My doctoral research is a continuation of my Master’s study, focusing upon Spiritualist mediumship in the United Kingdom. I will be supervised by Prof Joel Robbins. The project will be based upon ethnographic fieldwork among Spiritualists, in particular within mediumship training circles. Theoretically, I am interested in mediums’ own understandings of “mediation” as a religious project. Spiritualism is a highly eclectic belief-system, and mediums exhibit pliable and multiple understandings of how spirit-communication occurs. Their understandings are highly dynamic and resist a coherent narrative, unfolding in relation to immanent practice. This research reflects to my longstanding interest in the eclecticism of Western spiritual beliefs, and how this might inform anthropological understandings of contemporary religious practice. More broadly, then, I am interested in how human beings navigate belief in contradictory ideas. In our contemporary ‘post-truth’ society, developing knowledge on how people work with unreconciled ideas and ambiguous ‘truths’ can help inform academic insight into religion, social action, political life, and more.