Title
Making Sense of Dark Tourism: Typologies, Motivations, and Future Development of Theory
Document Type
Book Section
Publication Date
9-7-2020
Publication Title
Tourism, Terrorism and Security
Publisher
Emerald Publishing
First page number:
103
Last page number:
114
Abstract
Over the years, dark tourism as a theory has become very heterogenous. It has come to mean a lot of different things, according to the vantage points chosen for analysis. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the research that has been conducted on the topic of dark tourism including what the accepted definitions are, where it originated from, subcategories of the topic, and tourist motivations for visiting such sites. A discussion regarding the role of cultural differences in perceiving the phenomenon of dark tourism is also included. Dark tourist experience is qualitatively different from that of the leisure tourists, and the theories and frameworks available in the extant tourism literature to understand leisure tourism are insufficient to capture its essence. This means, more foundational conceptualisations and radical theory building are called for – rather than incrementally tweaking the existing ones.
Keywords
Dark tourism; History; Theory; Death; Destruction; Nature; Culture; Motivation; Terror; Security
Disciplines
Social and Behavioral Sciences | Sociology | Tourism
Language
English
Repository Citation
Mitchell, V.,
Henthorne, T. L.,
George, B.
(2020).
Making Sense of Dark Tourism: Typologies, Motivations, and Future Development of Theory.
Tourism, Terrorism and Security
103-114.
Emerald Publishing.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83867-905-720201007