Terence Heng is a photographer and sociologist. He is currently Reader in Sociology at the University of Liverpool, where he is also an Associate with the the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life. Working on intersections between creative practice, cultural geographies and visual sociology, he investigates the making of sacred space, spirit mediumship and diasporic identities.

His research has been featured in journals like Area, The Sociological Review, Cultural Geographies, Visual Communication and Sociological Research Online. To date, he has published 4 books, including Visual Methods in the Field: Photography for the Social Sciences (Routledge 2016), Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces (Routledge 2020) and Diasporas, Weddings and the Trajectories of Ethnicity (Routledge 2020), and more recently a new co-edited collection of visual and academic essays, Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global-City (Routledge 2024). He is currently co-editing a new book, Photographic Collections as Visual Method, - a series of academic and creative work on photographic archives, due out in 2025.

In 2015, he was the inaugural winner of the International Visual Sociology Association’s Prosser Award for outstanding work by beginning scholars in visual methodologies. In 2017, he was awarded the Sociological Review's 2015 Prize for Outstanding Scholarship for his article An Appropriation of Ashes - a study of ethnic identity negotiation through everyday religious rituals.