By Sari Katajala-Peltomaa · Raisa Maria Toivo

Experience resonates well in both current political and academic cultures in the 2020s, and in the years leading up to this decade. The concept has an appeal in populist rhetoric: since experience in its everyday meaning seems to put forward the events and occurrences in the life of the indi- vidual “small person”, it seems to validate those events as the basis for political and societal discourses. Academic circles, on the other hand, have been interested in deconstructing and, perhaps, transcending the populist usages of experience in the analysis of the “post-truth era”. Is experience a methodology of the 2020s? It at least seems to be gaining considerable traction. As we feel that a conceptual development needs to be a part of any “turn”, we aim at developing an analytical methodology of a history of experience within the sphere of lived religion.

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF EXPERIENCE, 2022, 321p.