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Sustainable tourism, happiness & dark tourism

Consuming dark sites via street art : murals at Chernobyl.

This paper aims to extend dark tourism scholarship concerned with existential aspects of the human nature and the power of ‘dark places’ to provoke our thinking about the meaning and purpose of human existence. Our main focus is on the artistic expressions in the form of murals that have emerged in the years following the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, questioning the significance and meanings they have for the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, in the context of tourists' perceptions and, more generally, in the context of our being in the world. To that end, we deconstruct the tourist experience of dark sites through knitting together dark tourism, existentialism and street art.

Have we illuminated the dark? Shifting perspectives on dark tourism

It is almost 20 years since the idea of dark tourism was introduced into tourism studies, which was still predominantly viewed as a fun-based activity with a potential for a beneficent cross-cultural understanding. The suggestion that it could have dark attributes was both novel and shocking. Once introduced, the idea offered new insights into the tourist experience. It promised to open up new connections with many facets of human sensation and behaviour and also an intellectual framework to assist the management of multi-used tourism sites. This paper will examine the promise of the idea as it evolved through the work of numerous scholars who developed and refined the concept and discovered new applications for it and will explain how the focus, which initially was to identify and catalogue dark sites, has shifted towards the motivation, subsequent experience and consequent behaviour of the tourist in relation to the sites.

Editorial special issue in Dark Tourism

This special issue of Journal of Heritage Tourism on dark tourism aims to encourage and advance theoretical, conceptual, and empirical research on dark tourism. The call for papers was inspired by the editor’s theoretical and research interest in dark tourism studies. The collection of articles in this special issue provides original, innovative and international tourism research that is embedded in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological thought in the study of dark tourism. Finally, this editorial will address a few lines of future research directions focusing on the experience and emotions of visitors at ‘dark tourism’ sites.

Moving from pilgrimage to "dark" tourism: leveraging tourism in Palestine

Traveling to places associated with death is not a new phenomenon. People have long been drawn, purposefully or otherwise, towards sites, attractions, and events linked in one way or another with death, suffering, violence, or disaster. War-related attractions, though diverse, are a subset of the totality of tourist sites associated with death and suffering. This article aims to assess how "dark" tourism may play a role in leveraging tourism in Palestine, which has largely relied on pilgrimage tourism in the past. This article investigates the potential for developing this form of tourism, since Palestine has been undergoing death, suffering, violence, or disaster through political tension and instability since 1948 and arguably for a generation earlier, but has not yet developed a strategy for tourism development that considers this type of tourism.

Dark Tourism Studies

This book provides original, innovative, and international tourism research that is embedded in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological thought in the study of dark tourism.It is almost 25 years since the idea of dark tourism was introduced and presented into the field of tourism studies. The impact of this idea was greater, which attracted a great deal of attention from different researchers and practitioners with a good range of disciplines and farther tourism studies. This edited volume aims to capture a glimpse of the types of cutting-edge thinking and academic research in the domain of dark tourism studies as well as encourage and advance theoretical, conceptual, and empirical research on dark tourism. The book also addresses several future research directions focusing on the experience and emotions of visitors at ‘dark tourism’ sites.This book will be valuable reading for students, researchers and academics interested in dark tourism. Other interested stakeholders including those in the tourism industry, government bodies and community groups will also find this volume relevant.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Heritage Tourism