SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS
Investigating the Anthropo-Unseen: Mapping the Paranormal, the Extraordinary and the Unknown
2015 Annual RGS-IBG International Conference, 2-4 September, University of Exeter, UK
Organizers: Paul Kingsbury (Simon Fraser University), Sara MacKian (Open University), and Steve Pile (Open University)
Proposed Session Description:
In the past decade, numerous researchers have observed, as part of a “re-enchantment of the West” (Partridge 2005, 2006), widespread social shifts in terms of people’s relationships to spirituality (MacKian 2012) and paranormality (Jenzen and Munt 2013). While such anomalous realms are ostensibly tacit, fleeting, invisible, and so on, researchers note that they are also profoundly ‘real’ and material insofar as they take place in people’s modes of embodied doing, feeling and thinking. Research, then, on spirituality and paranormality is often faced with the following conundrum: how to investigate, interpret, and re-present that which is unpredictably intangible yet concretely felt in people’s everyday spiritual and paranormal lives.
We are seeking papers that explore the methodological, epistemological and ontological issues that arise from researching the intangible, the immaterial and the invisible. These papers might discuss, for example:
• Spirituality
• Miracles
• The paranormal
• The magical
• The metaphysical
• Affects and emotions
However, we are really open to papers that explore the broad range of issues provoked by investigating the extraordinary in ordinary life.
Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words by 1 February 2015 to:
Paul Kingsbury ([log in to unmask])
Sara MacKian ([log in to unmask])
Steve Pile ([log in to unmask])
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