Profile

Biography

In 2010, Rachael graduated from the University of Aberdeen with an MA Management Studies. During her time at University she became involved with a number of extra-curricular activities; including forming and running, as President, a student run Careers Society, sitting on the Employability Committee and working as the Student Marketing Manager for the Careers Service. In 2010, she was awarded National On-Campus Student Employee of the Year by NASES, as an acknowledgement of her contributions to these roles. Further to this, Rachael established her own business in 2009, running historical ghost walks in the city centre of Aberdeen, as well as voluntarily running a non-profit group dedicated to researching reports of paranormal experiences. This led to her dissertation titled; “Revelations of the Spiritual Consumer: An exploration of the search for meaning and purpose within consumer culture”, and inevitably sparked an interest in anomalous experiences and her current research interest in the social interaction between groups seeking a paranormal experience.

Research

Overview

Following on from over five years continuous involvement, volunteering, working and interacting with amateur paranormal research groups, Rachael intends to bring a sociological perspective to the study of this popular cultural phenomenon. Interested primarily in collective rather than individual experiences, her research focuses on the interactions that occur between members of a group, as an anomalous experience is facilitated and occurs. This involves looking at a variety of communication methods used by groups that are intended to aid conversing with a spirit world.

Rachael will be using a corpus of video data collected from over 4 years involvement running an amateur paranormal research group. This data, collected prior to any acknowledgement that it would be used for this purpose, acts as a rich naturalistic data set that occurs in situ. Adopting a CA perspective to transcription and analysis, the research intends to identify important social interactions that are used to facilitate, accommodate and verify anomalous experiences.

Amateur paranormal research groups are a modern cultural phenomenon routed in a strong innate motivation that exists within society to communicate with extra-mundane agencies. Exploration of the interactions with these groups will contribute not only to the growing body of research surrounding anomalous experiences, but also to issues of group dynamics, conversation and interactional studies. Rachael, therefore, intends to remove the question of the validity of paranormal experiences from her research, and focus on the sociological dimensions of group interaction within this setting, contributing to a new perspective of enquiry within this field.