Phantometrics with Laura Bui

Phantometrics is a four-part lecture series presented by Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Chartered Psychologist, Dr Laura Bui, this autumn at the Dead Ink bookshop in Liverpool. The series intends to explore the relationship between scientific crime research and the study of the paranormal to address the question: how do we know what we know?

Sophie Parkes-Nield caught up with Laura to find out more, and to understand why folklorists might also find this lecture series captivating.

Phantometrics: a new four-part lecture series courtesy of Dr Laura Bui and Dead Ink

What a great title for a lecture series! Where does the name come from?

All credit goes to Michael Lacey at Dead Ink Books for coming up with the name! I really like it too. It’s catchy and concise – it immediately indicates that the series will be about the spooky and mysterious with science threaded through.

I’m curious to know how the series came about. Have you always been interested in that relationship between the study of crime and the paranormal?

It had never occurred to me the two could even be linked, but years ago, in a book called The Future of Criminology, I learned that Donald West, the original investigator of the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, was a psychical researcher. His background in psychical research forced him to be rigorous in his scientific investigations into deviance, but also sceptical of the findings so that he would further test for alternative explanations. It was because, in research on the paranormal or the supernatural, West noticed investigators were often uncritical of their findings, especially when it supported the existence of these phenomena. People want to believe what they want to believe, and if you want to find proof of something, you will find it.

There might be an assumption that studies of the paranormal fall outside of science. How can science help us in our understanding of the paranormal?

It depends on how those studies were conducted. If the scientific process wasn’t involved, then those studies are unscientific. But I think what you’re getting at is that there is this view that exploring anything related to the paranormal is unscientific, regardless of whether the study is scientific? Yes, there is a stigma. Even I feel a bit uneasy right now discussing the paranormal publicly and for the series. It does feel unscientific and it goes against society’s reverence of science. Part of the issue is that there is a long history of scientific illiteracy in paranormal investigations. Also religion, new age type of understandings, and folklore, which are difficult to verify with any accuracy, are bound up with it, and science relies on the observable and measurable. But there is contemporary work like in parapsychology that uses science to understand aspects of the paranormal like extra-sensory perception and near-death experiences. The heyday of seances in the US and parts of Europe, which was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was seen as an exclusive middle class activity that drew in well-known intellectuals to engage in the occult. But it attracted respected scientists of the time because the phenomena that they witnessed during these, like ectoplasm and telekinesis, were seen as ripe possibilities to advance our understanding of the world significantly, and science was and is the best tool to do so.

Folklore often reveals the cultural propensities and anxieties of a society. What do you think the popularity of true crime shows and our interests in serial killers and murder mysteries says about our society?

The first lecture is actually about this: our attraction to mystery. There’s a sense of wonder I think we still crave, that life still can be magical as we may have found it as children, but we more or less lose that or get it beaten out of us when we’re older. Having said that, the sort of mysteries you and I are focused on right now wouldn’t really be characterised as that, but it is still a fascination with the unknown. In this case, these may reveal anxieties about a desire for control. The fascination may be stemming from uneasiness with uncertainty, which includes phenomena like serial killers and murder mysteries that we do not understand. There’s a need to explain it so that it makes sense to us – why did this happen? What made someone become like that? So, Phantometrics is focused on that explaining part, drawing parallels between the study of crime and study of the paranormal, to reflect on how we go about trying to understand phenomena that are ‘invisible’ to us.

In the National Folklore Survey for England, we are asking about whether people living in England today believe in a wide range of what we have termed ‘the unexplained and unexpected’, phenomena such as ghosts, angels, demons, telekinesis, and possession. How prevalent do you think these beliefs might be?

My answer would be speculative, though I wouldn’t be surprised if these beliefs were prevalent. But I do find it interesting that you are trying to gauge the extent to which people believe in phenomena categorised as ‘unexplained and unexpected’. Are these termed as ‘unexplained’ because there isn’t supporting scientific evidence for them, and are they ‘unexpected’ because commonly, we would not expect others to believe in these because they are unexplained? I’m interested in that categorisation. It seems to touch upon the fact that there’s quite a lot in our world that is still unexplained, and even if we think we have the explanation for a certain phenomenon, it can still be tentative.

Phantometrics consists of four hour-long sessions, one on 16, 23 and 30 October, with the final session taking place on 6 November. Each session includes a Q&A following the lecture, and refreshments are provided. To buy a season ticket for all four lectures, or for individual events, please visit the Dead Ink Bookshop website here.

Dr. Laura Bui is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology, a Chartered Psychologist, and an author. She works on topics related to the psychology of violence, metascience, and cross-cultural studies, but her main research interests are scientific knowledge production on crime and comparisons between supposed opposites. Laura has a storied academic career and has co-authored the book Crime in Japan: A Psychological Perspective (2019) and contributed to Test Signal, Dead Ink’s ground-breaking anthology of the best contemporary northern writing.