Dark Tourism as Psychogeography: An Initial Exploration

Abstract

The study of ‘dark tourism’ may be a relatively recent phenomenon, but the practice itself—including commemorative, educational or even leisure visits to places associated with death and/or suffering—is by no means a new social behaviour (Stone 2007). Scholarly examination of dark tourism has raised fundamental lines of multidisciplinary interrogation, not least issues that focus on notions of deviance and moral concerns of consuming or producing ‘death sites’ within the global visitor economy (Stone and Sharpley 2013). Discourse often revolves around visitor motives and tourist engagement (Yuill 2003), as well as issues of how ‘dark heritage’ should be managed (Hartmann 2014). While motivation is of a personal and subjective nature, managing or producing dark tourism sites is fraught with political difficulties and moral quandaries. Importantly however, the (dark) tourist experience at sites of difficult heritage is a process of ‘co-creation’ between visitor site interpretation and individual meaning-making.

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