I was pleased to learn of a forthcoming academic volume exploring the paranormal by Rachael Ironside and Robin Wooffitt. Ironside posted the book cover on Facebook, but no other information is available yet. It is titled Making Sense of the Paranormal: The Interactional Construction of Unexplained Experiences. This book should come out through Palgrave MacMillan in November, and more information will be shared as it becomes available. Here’s the back cover description:

This book is a study of how people collaboratively interpret events or experiences as having paranormal features, or are 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 events they experience. By drawing on the study of the social organization in everyday interaction, we show how paranormal conversational and embodied practices of the group. In this, the book contributes to the sociology of anomalous experience. Although this study focuses on paranormal investigation groups, we explore the relevance of our findings for social science topics such as dark tourism, participation in religious spaces and practices, and the attribution of agency. This book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate researchers of language and social interaction, discourse and communication, cultural studies; social psychology, sociology of religious experience, parapsychology, communication and psychotherapy.

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, including Conversation Analysis (with Ian Hutchby, 2008), and Telling Tales of the Unexpected: The Organization of Factual Discourse (1992).