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.
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This study investigates existential authenticity, which focuses on how the tourist object helps (re-)discover one’s own true self, at Santa Claus Office, Rovaniemi (Finland). It aims at providing a better understanding of existential authenticity in the context of tourism, consumer behavior and hospitality management
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In this chapter, we present a perspective on the professionalisation of students in higher vocational education, which relates their life orientation to professional and societal values and beliefs. In a teaching programme at HU UAS Utrecht, inspired by Biesta’s notion of a pedagogy of interruption, students are prompted to articulate personal answers to philosophical and existential questions about the good life and doing good work, to prepare them for becoming reflective professionals. The concept of life orientation primarily draws on the narrative philosophies of Ricoeur and Taylor. These two philosophers relate ethics to identity, and describe how answers to moral and existential questions are a part of identity formation. Dialogical Self Theory helps us to understand how personal values interfere with professional and societal beliefs. We present two cases about a critical professional situation which bring students to reflection, and show how students’ life orientations influence their professional decisions within different contexts.
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