Call for abstracts: Dark Tourism: Memory, Pilgrimage and the Digital Realm
(May 2022, Edinburgh Napier University)
The Tourism Department (the Business School) and the School of Arts and Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University are delighted to announce details of a dark tourism research symposium, which will take place at the Craiglockhart Campus at Edinburgh Napier University and online on May 5
th, 2022.
A growing interest in dark tourism as a recognised special category of tourism behaviour continues to attract the attention of academics from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies and anthropology. Recent contributors to the field have looked at contexts such as
gulag tourism in Kazakhstan, edutainment interpretation at
‘lighter’ dark tourism attractions, the ethics and politics of digital displays in police museums, and the use of netnographic research methods to understand the motives and reactions of visitors to iconic
Holocaust heritage sites.
This interdisciplinary symposium led by Professor Anne Schwan, Dr Craig Wight, and Dr Phiona Stanley seeks to bring together academics from a range of backgrounds to share ideas and recent research achievements as well as foster conversations between academic researchers and tourism or creative practitioners.
Speakers include:
Kat Brogan (Managing Director, Mercat Tours Edinburgh)
Professor John Lennon (Glasgow Caledonian University)
Professors Justin Piché (University of Ottawa) and Kevin Walby (University of Winnipeg)
Dr Brianna Wyatt (Oxford Brooks University)
The symposium organizers welcome theoretical or applied research contributions in the form of structured abstracts on the following topics:
- Digital dark tourism, including, but not limited to netnographic research and the uses of social media and web 2.0 in dark tourism
- Dark tourism and memory
- Visitor motives and visitor interpretation
- Ethics and social justice in relation to dark tourism sites
- Prisons and other penal history sites as examples of dark tourism
- Creative practice artefacts involving dark tourism, e.g. films/photographs/installations
- Dark tourism, mobilities and pilgrimage
- Novel research methodological approaches and dark tourism
Deadline for abstract submissions: 1st February 2022
Please send your 250-word abstract and a short biographical statement (no more than 100 words) to darktourism@napier.ac.uk.