Overview

This book is a study of how people collaboratively interpret events or experiences as having paranormal features, or as evidence of spiritual agency. The authors study recordings of paranormal research groups as they conduct real life investigations into allegedly haunted spaces and the analyses describe how, through their talk and embodied actions, participants collaboratively negotiate the paranormal status of the events they experience.By drawing on the study of the social organisation in everyday interaction, they show how paranormal interpretations may be proposed, contested and negotiated through conversational and embodied practices of the group.  The book contributes to the sociology of anomalous experience, and explores its relevance  to other social science topics such as dark tourism, participation in religious spaces and practices, and the attribution of agency. This book will therefore be of interest to academics and postgraduate researchers of languageand social interaction; discourse and communication, cultural studies; social psychology, sociology of religious experience; parapsychology, communication and psychotherapy.

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9783030884062

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Reviews

Making Sense of the Paranormal makes an important contribution to sociological and interactionist research on the paranormal ... . Making Sense of the Paranormal offers original insights into how meaning emerges through the interplay talk, embodied actions, and objects in physical settings that are also significant to this meaning making activity. (Marc A. Eaton, Symbolic Interaction, September 17, 2022)

Author Information

Rachael Ironside is Senior Lecturer at Robert Gordon University, Scotland. Her research interests include social interaction and anomalous experience. She has also published more widely on the role of supernatural folklore and how it impacts our experience and understanding of place and cultural heritage.  Robin Wooffitt is Professor of Sociology at the University of York, UK. He is interested in language, interaction, and anomalous experiences. He is author or co-author of eight books.

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