Böcker av Robin Wooffitt

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.

Presents the study of the verbal interaction between the various kinds of psychic practitioners and their clients. Using conversation analysis, this book examines the structure of the interaction, focusing on the ways in which psychic practitioners establish the genuineness of their claimed paranormal powers.

The authors argue it is essential to examine the linguistic and communicative practices that are used in the production of introspective data, and thereby make an important contribution to debates about how scientists may study experience that are relevant to a wide range of disciplines. 200 pp.

Shows how the methods and findings of conversation and discourse analysis may inform the development of empirical research questions. It will therefore be an invaluable resource for social science students on courses which require them to undertake practical or empirical exercises.