Blog Archives

Professor Aleš Črnič, Ph.D. in Social Sciences, is Professor of Religious Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Ljubljana). His scientific interest focuses mainly on religious pluralism, religious freedom, religion and public school, new religious and spiritual movements, and on social and cultural aspects of vegetarianism and veganism.

He published three books (in Slovenian): Religion and School in 2021, The Vibe of Aquarius – New Religious and Spiritual Movements in 2012, and In the Name of Krishna in 2005.

He was the initiator of Regional Religious Studies Network and has been its coordinator since its establishment in 2019. He used to be member of the Board, Secretary General and Vice-President of ISORECEA – International Study of Religion in Central and Eastern Europe Association. For 15 years he was president of the Slovenian Sociological Association Section for Sociology of Religion (which he initiated).

Katja K. Ošljak is a researcher of communication and digital media and founder of the VSAK Institute for Digital Education. Since 2020, she has participated as a researcher in the Youth’s Media Repertoires research project at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, where she is studying the reconceptualization of media education in the context of digital culture as part of her doctoral studies. She is currently a member of several research projects, including Recovira – Digitization and European Religious Communities Responding to the Pandemic and Mentoring relationships in the processes of scientific collaboration and knowledge production. Previously, she was a research associate at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, and participated in the international project Subject Formation and Digital Culture. She has authored or co-authored several studies in Slovenian, English and German, mainly investigating the relationships between digital media, young people, digital literacy and media education.

Simona Kuntarič Zupanc, M.A., graduated from the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Art, University of Ljubljana in 2018. She continued with Masters studies in the fields of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. In 2022, she presented a masters thesis titled “The Social Meanings of Water: Ground and Surface Water (Sources), Pathways and their Infrastructure in the Village of Ašbarū, Morocco”.

During her studies, she participated in two Erasmus+ student exchanges at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology (Free University Berlin, Germany) and at the department of Gender studies and Cultural Studies (Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University in Fez, Morocco). In 2017, she was awarded a DAAD (Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst) scholarship for a six-week study placement in Cairo. In 2020, she was the recipient of a scholarship from the Ibn Battuta Foundation for summer language training at the Qalam wa Lawh Centre in Rabat. In 2021, also with Erasmus+, she independently carried out a 6-month field study with an indigenous community in Morocco.