Overview
- Focuses on the ways in which social interaction contributes to paranormal interpretations of events
- Draws on draw an empirical approach to conversation analysis
- Elaborates the linkage between individual experiences and social support structures for paranormal experiences
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
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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Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Making Sense of the Paranormal
Book Subtitle: The Interactional Construction of Unexplained Experiences
Authors: Rachael Ironside, Robin Wooffitt
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88407-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-88406-2Published: 04 January 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-88407-9Published: 03 January 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 144
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Sociolinguistics, Personality and Social Psychology, Sociology of Religion, Social Sciences, general