About Usinform2025-07-24T15:19:02+00:00

Who we are

We are an independent educational charity providing information about minority religions and sects which is as accurate, up-to-date and as evidence-based as possible.

We exist to prevent harm based on misinformation about minority religions and sects by bringing the insights and methods of academic research into the public domain.

Our name Inform is an acronym for “Information Network Focus On Religious Movements.” For more information about our background and links to articles on our work see the entry on Inform in the Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements.

People

Inform’s Management
Committee

The Management Committee is responsible for monitoring progress and making day-to-day decisions, including the appointment of staff.

Aled Thomas, PhD Chair of the Management Committee

Aled is a Teaching Fellow in the Study of Religion at the University of Leeds. His research interests include fluid forms of contemporary religion, ‘cultic’ discourses, and theory and methods in the study of religion. His work places an emphasis on religion as an aspect of everyday life. Aled is the author of Free Zone Scientology: Contesting the Boundaries of a New Religion (Bloomsbury 2021) and co-editor of ‘Cult’ Rhetoric in the 21st Century: Deconstructing the Study of New Religious Movements (Bloomsbury 2024).

Aled has taught students at the Open University and University of Wolverhampton, before joining the University of Leeds in 2022, where he teaches subjects including research methods in the study of religion, the sociology of religion, religion and gender, and approaches to the academic study of religion. He is also Web Officer at the British Association for the Study of Religions and has presented papers on his research at conferences in the UK, Europe, and USA.

Professor Emerita Kim Knott, PhD Chair of the Board of Governors

Professor Emerita of Religious and Secular Studies, Lancaster University. From 2015-20, Professor Knott was Deputy Director of the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST) and led a research programme focused on actors and ideologies in social context.

Her research interests include ideological transmission and learning; the interrogation of religious and political spaces; spatial metaphors in religious and political discourse; the ‘secular sacred’; material religion; and religion, migration and diasporas.

Edward Graham-Hyde, PhD Treasurer

Edd is the treasurer of Inform, a senior researcher with Church Army and an associate lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire. His doctoral research investigated the role of empowerment in the conversion of adherents into minority religions. His current research interests include ‘cultic’ discourses, empowerment studies, theological and sociological approaches to evangelism and the mapping of contemporary Christian church growth in the UK and Ireland. Edd is the co-editor of ‘Cult’ Rhetoric in the 21st Century: Deconstructing the Study of New Religious Movements (Bloomsbury 2024) and an assistant editor for the forthcoming Bloomsbury series ‘Religion at the Boundaries’.

Edd has been teaching at the University of Central Lancashire for over 10 years across a variety of subjects including sociology, public services, and religion, culture & society. He is particularly passionate about the role of religious studies in widening participation within FE and HE, advocating for this on the recent Theology and Religious Studies Benchmark Submission (2022) with QAA. Edd has been a continued vocal supporter of implementing compulsory religious studies in secondary education as a cross-curricular subject.

Susannah Crockford, PhD

is a lecturer in anthropology at Exeter University, specialising in environmental and medical anthropology and the anthropology of religion. Within Exeter University, she is an affiliate of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, the Magic Centre, and the Global Systems Institute. She has been associated with Inform since 2017 and joined the Board of Governors in 2023.

Her monograph Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona (2021 University of Chicago Press) was a Finalist for the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Analytic-Descriptive Studies in 2022. Her research is currently focusing on a multi-sited ethnography of climate change and exploring the ethics and politics of wellness, health, and immunity in south-west England.

Inform’s Staff

Suzanne Newcombe, PhD
Honorary Director

Suzanne is Honorary Director of Inform and a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University. She has worked at Inform in various capacities since 2002, responding to complex enquiries, giving media interviews on print, radio and televisions, updating the database, co-authoring commissioned reports, giving training to government departments and talks to schools. Her particular areas of expertise include movements with origins or inspirations from Asian and Indian traditions and contemporary groups which are interested in prophecy and the end of the world. Between 2015-2020 she worked at Inform as a post-doctoral research fellow on AYURYOG, a European Research Council Horizon 2020 grant looking at the entangled Histories of Yoga, Ayurveda and Alchemy in South Asia.

Sarah Harvey, PhD
Senior Research Officer

Sarah has been a researcher at Inform since 2001 and responds to many of the enquiries that Inform receives, helps maintain the database of religious movements and manages Inform commissioned projects. She has written several profiles for the Inform-CenSAMM collaborative project. She is particularly interested in Pagan religions, new Christian movements, and millennial movements. She has co-edited two volumes in the Routledge-Inform book series, including a volume on prophecy and another on counselling. Sarah’s PhD thesis is entitled ‘A Nicer Birth: Negotiating the Ideal and the Practical in Natural Birth’, in the School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Manchester in Comparative Religion and Social Anthropology and a Masters degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science in Social Research Methods (Sociology). Click here for information on her publications.

Silke Steidinger, MSc, UKCP reg.
Research Officer

Silke has been Research Officer at Inform since 2006. At Inform, the primary focus of her work is researching religious groups for the Inform database and cataloguing the Inform library and has written several profiles for the CenSAMM-Inform collaboration. She also responds to enquiries and recently co-edited and contributed a chapter to the Inform-Routledge volume on New Religious Movements and Counselling (2017). Other publications include chapters on death in New Religious Movements. In 2004, she received an MSc in Religion in Contemporary Society (Sociology) from the London School of Economics, the focus of her dissertation being on death in New Religious Movements. In 1999, she received a BA (Hons) in Religious Studies from King’s College London. She is also a UKCP registered attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist working for the NHS and in private practice. In 2018 she graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Information Experience Design. Click here for information on her publications.

Warwick Hawkins
Office Manager

Warwick joined Inform as part-time office manager in December 2017. He is the only non-academic member of the team, having been a career civil servant for 28 years. As head of the faith communities engagement team in the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, he used to manage the department’s relationship with Inform. As well as bringing valuable experience of the working of government, Warwick leads on financial management, correspondence and event organising. After taking early retirement from the civil service he started his own social enterprise, Faith in Society, which aims to build the capacity of faith groups to be involved in civil society. This work continues to bring him into contact with representative bodies, places of worship and charities from a wide variety of faith traditions – contacts and expertise which he is pleased to bring to his work with Inform.

Erin Clark, MA, Intern / Associate Researcher

Erin holds both an MA in Religion, and a BA in Philosophy, Religion and Ethics from the University of Leeds. Her research interests include the interface of religiosity and technology, and the study of new religious movements, specifically the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She also helps oversee CityTheology, a publication from Leeds Church Institute, and works as an Education Outreach Fellow for the university, encouraging students from working class backgrounds to pursue higher education.

Sarah Charles, PhD
Inform Researcher

Sarah joined Inform in March 2023 as part of the John Templeton Foundation project ‘New Religiosity and the Digital Study of Eudaimonia’. She was previously a visiting scholar at Coventry University’s Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations, where she also completed her Templeton Religion Trust-funded doctoral degree on the psychobiology of ritual social bonding. Her research seeks to understand the psycho-biosocial mechanisms underlying social bonding and other well-being benefits that occur when taking part in group activities. Her work has involved placebo-controlled RCTs, experimental work in controlled conditions, and large multi-national field studies applied to research on ritual participants’ social bonding, pain perception, affective state, and quality of life across multiple religious and secular rituals; these have included Christian Mass and Sunday Assembly, Hatha Yoga, and Brazilian Umbada. Upon completing her PhD, she has worked on projects helping to understand the potential well-being outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic for families of children with neurogenetic disorders (hosted at King’s College London) and how group membership, especially group-type diversity, leads to changes in well-being outcomes over time (hosted at Nottingham Trent University). In these roles, she has helped create a measurement for testing social bonding and routinely tests hypotheses regarding well-being. Dr. Charles is also the media officer for the International Association for the Psychology of Religion; this role’s responsibilities include editing the IAPR Newsletter which provides her access to a large, international network of psychologists of religion, including those who study NRMs.

Affiliated Researchers

Ross Downing, MPhil., MLitt., Inform Affiliate Researcher

Ross holds a BA in the Study of Religions from the University of Gothenburg. His BA focused on analysing success in jihad from the Taliban perspective. He received a Masters, from the University of the Highlands & Islands, focusing on the reception of Old Norse mythology.His second Masters, also in the study of religions, was based on extensive fieldwork in right wing extremist responses to the Pagan temple in Iceland. In 2019 he published the paper ‘Hashtag Heathens: Contemporary Germanic Pagan Feminine Visuals on Instagram’ for Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. Ross has acted as consultant and specialist with Inform for several years. He was selected as Inform’s editor and project director for the academic anthology ‘Germanic and Slavic Paganisms: security threats and resiliency’ (2024), the second book in Inform’s Religion at the Boundaries series with Bloomsbury. He is developing P/CVE work in and around Paganisms.

Anna Kira Hippert, MA, Intern/Assistant Research Officer

Anna joined Inform for an internship in April 2021. She is a PhD candidate located at the CERES – Center for Religious Studies in Bochum, Germany. In her Bachelor’s she studied Art History and Study of Religion and holds a Master’s degree in the Study of Religion. Besides the American religious landscape as well as Niche Evangelicalism, notably “Cowboy Christianity”, Anna focuses on New Religious Movements (The Church of Scientology and The Raelian Movement). The main emphasis of her dissertation is on media self-presentation of NRMs via images on websites, along with the accompanying connection between online and offline. Since April 2021, she has been helping Inform with manifold tasks, such as creating fact sheets for specific an NRMs and working on the database. Anna also supports inform with visits from Germany to the office, as well as adding a new perspective of NRMs by introducing the dimension of materiality and images to the research.

Ruth Westoby, PhD, Inform Affiliate Researcher

Ruth is academic researcher in yoga and Asian Religions and a yoga practitioner. She studies yoga through Sanskrit textual sources and interviews exploring, amongst many topics, the materiality of the body and sexuality from a critical theoretical perspective. As part of her AHRC-funded Doctoral Training Partnership Ruth undertook a placement with Inform in 2023.

Ruth holds a PhD from SOAS University of London on ‘The body in early haṭha yoga’, supervised by James Mallinson and Richard Williams. Ruth is working on two book projects from her doctoral thesis that passed without corrections in 2024. Ruth is Visiting Lecturer in Asian Religions at Roehampton University, teaching postgraduate theory and method in the study of religion and undergraduate courses on Asian religions, cultures and ethics, contemporary issues in global religions, being human and religion, ecology and politics. Ruth has published early research findings in the peer-reviewed Religions of South Asia and numerous public articles. Ruth serves on the steering committee for the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies and on the Yoga in Theory and Practice Unit of the American Academy of Religions. Ruth collaborated with the Haṭha Yoga Project’s ‘embodied philology’, interpreting postures from an 18th-century text teaching a precursor of modern yoga, the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati, in 2016 and 2017. In 2010 she received an MA in Indian Religions from SOAS, University of London, with Distinction.

Stephen Christopher, Inform Affiliate Researcher

Stephen is an anthropologist of religion working in India, Japan and Vietnam. Between 2025-27, he is co-Lead of the John Templeton Foundation project “New Religiosity and the Digital Study of Eudaimonia”, which creates a new poll type for the Database of Religious History and integrates archival data from Inform and fieldwork data from hundreds of new religious groups in five global areas to explore the possible relationships between new religions and well-being. Since receiving a PhD in anthropology from Syracuse University in 2018, he has published about new religions, tribal ecologies, affirmative action, black magic, esotericism, sexuality, manga and Tibetan Buddhism. He completed a Marie Curie postdoc at the University of Copenhagen (2022-24) and a JSPS postdoc at Kyoto University (2019). He is the co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Contemporary Buddhism and an Asia editor at the Database of Religious History (DRH). Stephen has taught at Beijing Normal University, Vietnam National University, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Denki Tsushin University, University of Bremen, Pitt in the Himalayas, Syracuse University, Semester at Sea and Appalachian State University.

David William Kim, PhD, Inform Affiliate Researcher

David William Kim is an Associate Professor of Modern Asian History, Kookmin University, Seoul, a Mission Specialist, at the Institute for Space, Australian National University, Canberra. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society UK, a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society UK, an Editor for Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion Series, and the Editor of the Book Series, East Asian Religions and Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK). He was a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University (2023–2024). Kim is the Chair for the ANU Religion Committee, Australian National University and the Committee Member for the UNESCO World Heritage Commission, Korea Government. Kim’s teaching and research cover interdisciplinary subjects of socio-cultural changes, including colonial transformation, Asian culture, ethnic identity, women and religion, new religious movements, East Asian religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Shintoism), Korean Christianity, and spirituality and space science.

David W. Kim has published 11 books and 86 peer review articles, including Silk Road Footprints: Transnational Transmission of Sacred Thoughts and Historical Legacy (2025), Socio-Anthropological Approaches to Religion: Environmental Hope (2024), Sacred Sites and Sacred Stories Across Cultures (2021), The Words of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas (2021), Daesoon Jinrihoe in Modern Korea: The Emergence, Transformation, and Transmission of a New Religion (2020), Colonial Transformation and Asian Religions in Modern History (2018), Religious Encounters in Transcultural Society: Collison, Alteration, and Transmission (2017), and Religious Transformation in Modern Asia: A Transnational Movement (2015).

Honorary Research Fellows

Professor Eileen Barker

Founder of Inform; Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics. Sociologist of Religion, she has been researching minority religions and the responses to which they give rise since the early 1970s. Her study of conversion to the Unification Church for her PhD, led to an interest in a wide variety of movements, and she has personally studied, to greater or lesser degree, over 150 different groups. As the first-generation movements aged, she became interested in the changes, particularly the arrival of second-generation members and those who leave the movements. For the past twelve years, she’s been interested in differences between ‘cult-watching’ groups and the dynamics within and between these groups and the religions. She has over 300 publications, translated into 27 languages. She travels extensively for research purposes, particularly in North America, Europe and Japan, and, since collapse of the Berlin Wall, in Eastern Europe and, more recently, China. She was the first non-American to be elected President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Click here for information on some of her publications.

Professor Jean La Fontaine, PhD

Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Jean carried out anthropological fieldwork in eastern Uganda, later in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and finally in England, where she has studied the sexual abuse of children and the effects of beliefs in spirit possession and in witchcraft. Jean has long been interested in ritual and has publications on initiation and on witchcraft. From 1992-94, as an Honorary Research Fellow of Inform, who managed the project, she undertook research for the Dept. of Health into the allegations of satanic ritual abuse in England. Her report in 1994 was expanded into the book, Speak of the Devil. She then turned to a study of children in the African diaspora who were accused of witchcraft. She edited the Inform publication entitled The Devil’s Children: From Spirit Possession to Witchcraft, New Allegations That Affect Children. Her most recent publication, Witches and Demons, is a collection of essays on witchcraft and beliefs that incite to abuse and murder. Click here for information on some of her publications.

Bernard Doherty, PhD

Doctor Bernard Doherty has been an honorary research fellow with Inform since 2015. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and a sessional lecturer in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University. He has previously taught at the Australian Catholic University. Bernard is currently course director in the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University. Bernard is also a researcher in the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology (PaCT) and an adjunct lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Notre Dame (Sydney). His research interests are wide ranging and include early Christian and Australian religious history, New Religions and the media, New Religions and public policy, religion and politics, religious sectarianism, and the study of the development of religious pluralism in post-WWII Australia. Bernard has published in a number of journals including the Journal of Religious History, Nova Religio, the International Journal for the Study of New Religions, the Alternative Spirituality and Religions Review, Phronema, and the Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society.

Our Offer

Inform acts as a unique bridge
between academic expertise and
practical application.

We provide impartial, accurate and up to date information specifically tailored to meet the needs of a wide-range of audiences (from individuals through to Government Bodies); all with a focus on providing this information in the service of tackling real world challenges and empowering people to make informed decisions.

Our work is supported by our expertise in the social sciences, our publications and collaborative research secure our reputation as thought-leaders in this area; uniquely able to offer expert and contextualised knowledge through our thorough understanding of this subject-matter and the legacy of our work with minority religions and sects spanning thirty years’ experience.

We are equally at home running training for social workers as we are producing new research in this field.

What we do and how we do it

Our work spans every level of society; from the personal; responding directly to enquiries about minority religions and sects from individuals, through to the institutional/societal; advising key Government Bodies.

The primary roles we fulfil sit in 4 key areas:

1. Expert information

in the form of a dedicated enquiry service, responding to the specific context and needs of each enquirer.

2. Research

undertaken collaboratively with other organisations and groups.

See Partnerships

3. Academic publications

See publications

4. Public Engagement

via seminars/events and training for organisations like the Police and Social Workers.

Inform is a registered charity, no. 801729. Company no. 2346855. Terms and Conditions