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Dark Tourism Scholarship: A Critical Review, Philip Stone Dr

Dr Philip Stone

Commonly referred to as dark tourism or thanatourism, the act of touristic travel to sites of or sites associated with death and disaster has gained significant attention with media imaginations and academic scholarship. However, despite a growing body of literature on the representation and tourist experience of deathscapes within the visitor economy, dark tourism as a field of study is still very much in its infancy. Moreover, questions remain of the academic origins of the dark tourism concept as well as its contribution to the broader social scientific study of tourism and death education. Thus, the purpose of my invited …

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Deviance, Dark Tourism And ‘Dark Leisure’: Towards A (Re)Configuration Of Morality And The Taboo In Secular Society, Philip R. Stone

Dr Philip Stone

A taboo is a prohibition placed on exposing what is good as well as what is bad. Indeed, prohibited by authority or social influences, taboos are rooted in an unconscious guilt and insulated from our psychosocial life-worlds by mediating institutions of religion and politics. Yet, in an age of secularisation and liberalisation, new mediating institutions of the taboo are emerging, particularly within contemporary museology. Presently, therefore, a number of time-honoured taboos are increasingly becoming translucent and, as a result, there is a new willingness to tackle inherently ambiguous and problematical interpretations. Consequently, an exhilarating phase of museological development has opened …

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Dark Tourism, Heterotopias And Post-Apocalyptic Places: The Case Of Chernobyl, Philip R. Stone

Dr Philip Stone

On 26 April 1986, during a procedural shut down of reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Ukraine), a catastrophic surge of energy led to a reactor vessel rupture and, subsequently, resulted in the world’s worst nuclear accident. Numbers of deaths from the disaster vary enormously, including from the radioactive fallout that encroached great swathes of Western Europe, to the apparent generational health maladies that now affect local populations. However, despite remaining health and safety concerns, illegal visitor tours to Chernobyl have flourished over the past decade or so. Moreover, during …

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Full-Text Articles in Tourism

Dark Tourism Scholarship: A Critical Review, Philip Stone Dr

Dr Philip Stone

Deviance, Dark Tourism And ‘Dark Leisure’: Towards A (Re)Configuration Of Morality And The Taboo In Secular Society, Philip R. Stone

Dr Philip Stone

Dark Tourism, Heterotopias And Post-Apocalyptic Places: The Case Of Chernobyl, Philip R. Stone

Dr Philip Stone