Rachael Ironside

Rachael Ironside is an Associate Professor and Course Leader for the BA (Hons) Events Management at Robert Gordon University's Aberdeen Business School. She specializes in dark tourism, folklore, and supernatural studies, focusing on how these phenomena intersect with heritage, place, and cultural narratives. Her research explores visitor interactions with sites of dark heritage, including prison museums and haunted locations, using conversation analysis and ethnographic methods.

Education: MSc Management Studies (University of Aberdeen, 2010) and PhD Sociology (University of York, 2016). Her doctoral work examined collective experience production within paranormal research groups.

Research interests include:

• Dark Tourism & Supernatural Landscapes
• Storytelling as Cultural Preservation
• Paranormal Experience Interpretation
• Digital Placemaking in Rural Communities

Key projects include developing digital folklore trails in Orkney and evaluating sustainable tourism strategies. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and co-authored Making Sense of the Paranormal (2021) and Folklore, People and Places (2023).

Awards include editorial board roles, peer review accolades, and recognition for teaching innovation. She supervises PhD students on topics ranging from paranormal media representation to climate migration impacts.