2026

When and where

Date: Thursday, 28th of May, 2026 , starts 3 pm

Place:  Skleněná louka

Registered talks

• Sebastian Kheml
  The Goddess of the Most Noxious Odor: From Thesis Chapter to a (Forthcoming?) Article
  My presentation for the PhD Afternoon event will focus on how to transform a portion of the dissertation into a short, engaging, and readable text while ensuring it includes all the necessary information. I will provide a brief overview of my research on the goddess Mefitis and her potential connection to malaria, then discuss the challenges I faced while rewriting this topic for what I hope will be an upcoming article.
• Anton Timmermann Østerlund
  Armed Conflict, Religion, and Mental Well-Being
  The talk will be on the associations between armed conflicts, religion, and mental well-being. I will shortly present some theoretical assumptions on this relationship, some new empirical opportunities, and my current issue with establishing a causal model to investigate the relationship in a more robust way.
• Alexandra Ružičková
  Religion, Morality, and Learning How to Help
  I will present my dissertation research on prosocial reinforcement learning, based on data collected on Mauritius and analyzed with advanced computational models. As we complete the analyses and move toward writing the research report, I am learning the specifics of reinforcement learning theory. In the talk, I will outline these learning curves and other challenges that arise when turning complex experimental work into a publishable study.
• Ondřej Pazdírek
  Publication Delays and the Mitigation of Associated Despair in Doctoral Contexts
  This contribution ventures to offer a few remarks on the traversal of the process of publishing the mandatory doctoral article as one of the liminal ordeals of doctoral studies, reflecting both upon the eschatological dispensation under which scholarly publishing operates and the abyssal dread of a doctoral student cast before the titanic temporal expanse and inscrutability of the gauntlet, while tentatively postulating some potential sanity-salvaging strategies.
• Matouš Mokrý
  Selected Problems of Archival Research on 20th- and 21st-century Religiosities
  My talk will summarize the recent developments of my dissertation research. More precisely, I will tackle selected aspects of archival research on 20th- and 21st-century religiosities and the Order of Nine Angles (ONA) in particular. After discussing issues of source-finding, I will turn my attention to the fact that issues of dating are not peculiar to the research of pre-modern documents.
• Anese Shabani Vikaei
  Beyond Punishment: How Religious Believers Use Contempt to Enforce Social Norms
  While punishment sustains social norms and cooperation, it is personally costly and therefore vulnerable to free-riding. Previous research has proposed that beliefs in moralizing gods reduce these costs by offloading punishment to supernatural agents. However, such offloading is vulnerable to invasion by free-riders who feign belief while avoiding enforcement of norm transgressions. We argue that believers therefore complement supernatural punishment with contempt toward transgressors. Expressed through exclusion, social coldness, and withdrawal of support, contempt represents a low-cost yet powerful and understudied mechanism of norm enforcement.
• Filiz Kahraman
  Current Status of My Study, from Case Study to Much Bigger Discussion
  My case study, exploring how the discourse of Cemalnur Sargut empowers women, is slowly taking a new turn into helping me ask whether this empowerment is class-based. I am also working on whether Western spirituality discourse is similar to Sargut's discourse, which is adding a new discussion to my study.
• Michal Saidl
  Personalizace akademické herního režimu
  V příspěvku představím práci na aktuálním článku, který se týká „personalizace hraní“ jako jedné dimenze play, při které dochází u hraní videoher. Zároveň zmíním nezdary a útrapy, které mě doprovázely od začátku semestru (např. negativní efekty volného času), i věci, které mě při zkoumání bavily a pozitivně formovaly (např. analýza komentovaných herních videí). V poslední řadě nastíním budoucí výzvy (doktorská zkouška, dopisování teoretické části disertační práce a rozhovory).