Course Creation
OpenLearn Online Course
Lead: Suzanne Newcombe (Co-PI)
Platform: The Open University’s OpenLearn (14M annual users)
Focus: Religion, belief and worldviews
Target Audience: Secondary teachers and healthcare professionals
Inform Seminar
In Year Three, The Open University and Inform staff will host a seminar at King’s College London to promote wider distribution of project findings by reaching out to a variety of professionals and journalists who cover religion in the UK. Recordings of seminar presentations will be made freely available on YouTube and partner websites.
Panel Discussion at the Inform Seminar on Immortality: Beliefs and Practices held at King’s College London in 2018.
Conferences and Colloquia
| Date | Conference, Workshop, Invited Lecture or Exhibition | Location | Presentation |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 8, 2026 | British Sociological Association Annual Conference | Manchester, UK | “Roots of New Religiosity: From A Search in Secret India, through Sheilaism to Saint Culture” |
| March 13, 2026 | RelSicCom Online Programme for UK and German PhD Students Workshop on Adding to the Database of Religious History and New Religiosity Poll | Online | Workshop leader |
| December 1, 2025 | Guest Lecture for Cults, Sects and NRM Class | King's College London | "New Religiosity" |
| November 25, 2025 | Distinguished Guest Lecture Anthropos India | Delhi | "New Religions, New Research: A South Asia Initiative" |
| Nov 21-24, 2025 | American Academy of Religion | Boston, Massachusetts, USA | Exhibition for the Database of Religious History featuring the New Religiosity Poll |
| Nov 21-22, 2025 | 19th Annual Conference on Asian Studies: Truths, Tensions, Technologies | Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic | "Quantitative Hypotheses Testing of New Religiosity and Human Flourishing/Social Tension." |
| Nov 14-16, 2025 | Traces of the Past, Horizons of the Future: Exploring Japan at the Crossroads of Humanities, Technology and Global Dialogue | Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia | "Social Tension and Eudaimonia in Japanese New Religions: A New Digital Humanities Approach" |
| September 2025 | British Association for the Study of Religion (BASR) Annual Conference | UK | "Religion as a Social Problem in Britain: New Religiosity and Cults" |
| August 26, 2025 | International Association for the History of Religions | Kraków, Poland | "Navigating Contested Spaces: INFORM as the Bridge Between Minority Religions, Institutions, and Everyday People" |
| Oct 2-4, 2025 | Japanese Studies Association of Australia | University of New England New South Wales | "The minoritization of Japanese New Religions: A large-scale, mixed-data approach." |
| Oct 14-16, 2024 | 18th Annual International Conference | University of Warsaw, Poland | "A Digital Humanities Database of Japanese New Religions" |
| Jul 8-12, 2025 | European Academy of Religion’s Eighth Annual Conference EuARe2025. Religion and Socio-Cultural Transformation: European Perspectives and Beyond | University of Vienna | "Jehovah's Witnesses in Europe: New Data, New Perspectives, New Expectations." |
| Sep 1-3, 2023 | Japan: Pre-modern, Modern and Contemporary | Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania | "A Mixed-Methods Study of Japanese Minority Religions" |
| Jun 28-30, 2023 | New Directions in the Humanities | Sorbonne University, France | "Computationally Driven Analysis of New Religions" |
| Jun 21-22, 2023 | Religion & Spirituality in Society | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece | "Exploring the Cultural Evolution of Religion through Contemporary Practice" |
| Sep 21-23, 2022 | Cultural Evolution Society Conference | Aarhus University, Denmark | "Large-Scale Cultural Databases: The Challenges Ahead" |