Walking the Falls: Dark tourism and the significance of movement on the political tour of West Belfast

Skinner, Jonathan

doi:10.1177/1468797615588427

Cited by 37 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Across Northern Ireland a number of ‘political/conflict tours’ are offered by a diverse range of victim, ex-combatant, community and campaign/advocacy groups. 12 As part of the broader practice of ‘dark tourism’ or ‘conflict heritage’, the tours are designed to be of interest to visitors, students and researchers (see for example: McDowell, 2008; Skinner, 2016). They typically involve exploring a specific geographical area (urban and rural), with the tour guide providing an insight into the local experience of violence.…”

Section: The Haunting Of Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

Haunting and transitional justice: On lives, landscapes and unresolved pasts

Lawther

2020

International Review of Victimology

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This article explores practices of haunting and ghosting after conflict-related loss. This is not to suggest a focus on the occult or the paranormal, but to use these phenomena as a prism through which to understand the intersection between unresolved pasts and the transmission of trauma post-conflict. As Michael Levan notes, trauma lingers ‘unexorcisably in the places of its perpetration, in the bodies of those affected, in the eyes of the witnesses, and in the politics of memory’. The ghost, according to Avery Gordon ‘is the principal form by which something lost or invisible or seemingly not there makes itself known or apparent to us’. In this article I argue for three conceptualisations of haunting when past traumas remain unaddressed: the haunting of lost lives, the haunting of landscape, and the haunting presence of the unresolved past. The article focuses on Northern Ireland, a post-conflict jurisdiction described as being haunted by a ‘conflict calendar in which every day is an anniversary’ and extensive fieldwork with victims and survivors of the conflict. The article concludes by arguing that the presence of ghosts and the experience of haunting represent a ‘call to action’ in the quest to deal with a legacy of violent conflict and human rights abuses.

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Section: The Haunting Of Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

Haunting and transitional justice: On lives, landscapes and unresolved pasts

Lawther

2020

International Review of Victimology

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“…A growing body of scholarship has examined the production of texts and material objects linked to difficult heritage as well as, to a somewhat lesser extent, its communication in face-to-face interactions (Pfoser and Keightley 2019;Quinn and Ryan 2016;Skinner 2016;Lehrer, Milton, and Patterson 2011;Lehrer 2010;Macdonald 2006;Schwenkel 2006). This literature has been very valuable in identifying key dynamics and challenges of heritage interpretation but is limited in significant ways, because it tends to overlook the communication of heritage in conventional tourism offers.…”

Section: Communicating Contested Pastsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This literature has been very valuable in identifying key dynamics and challenges of heritage interpretation but is limited in significant ways, because it tends to overlook the communication of heritage in conventional tourism offers. Most of the literature has focused either on public institutions such as museums and memorial sites dedicated to the presentation and commemoration of difficult pasts (Macdonald 2006;Lehrer, Milton, and Patterson 2011;Quinn and Ryan 2016;Ferguson, Walby, and Piche 2016) or has examined commercial offers in the field of dark or political tourism (Nisbett and Rapson 2020;Markham 2018;Skinner 2016). This literature examines for example particular visual, narrative and performative practices of representing difficult pasts and the particular political renderings of memory they generate.…”

Section: Communicating Contested Pastsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Navigating contested memories in a commercialised setting: conflict avoidance strategies in Kyiv city tour guiding

Schlegel

Pfoser

2020

International Journal of Heritage Studies

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While the tourism industry is oriented towards creating attractive images of destinations, histories of violence and suffering have increasingly been incorporated into tourism offers and are often actively promoted by states and tourism organisations. A growing body of scholarship has focused on how difficult pasts have been represented and have analysed the driving factors behind the rise of such heritage. Commercial tourism offers such as guided city tours have however largely been overlooked as arenas for communicating difficult pasts. This article provides an in-depth examination of memory work of commercial guides, focusing on the example of Russian-language tour guiding in Ukraine's capital Kyiv. Drawing on participant observations of 20 guided city tours and interviews with 18 tour guides, the article identifies a wide range of narrative strategies that guides adopt to navigate pasts that have been subject to memory conflicts. During tours, guides adjust how much they say, what evidence they provide, what aspects of the past they present as relevant as well as their manner of speaking. These conflict avoidance strategies are part of a pragmatic approach to memory that deserves greater attention in the study of difficult pasts.

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“…Other writers consider disaster tourism as a part of 'dark tourism' (see, for example, Stone and Sharpley 2008;Yuill 2003;Skinner 2016;Stone 2011). These are tourism activities that are related to travel to sites of death, disaster, and horrific situations (Stone 2011, p. 319;Stone 2006;Tarlow 2005).…”

Section: Questioning 'Disaster Tourism' Within the Heterotopia Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Tale of Two Disasters: How is Disaster Emerging as a Tourist Destination in Indonesia?

Suyadnya¹,

Fatanti²

2017

AJTR

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Abstract:The paper examines how disasters are represented as tourist destinations by local tour guides in tours around two Indonesian disaster areas at the Mount Merapi Eruption in Jogjakarta, Central Java, and Lapindo Mudflow in Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia. Across the world 'disaster' is defined as an observable event in time and space in which societies incur physical damage and loss and/or disruption of their routine activities. Despite the formal definition of disaster characterized by losses, sadness, sorrow, and trauma, in contrast, it is positioned as a more authentic, realistic, and challenging space, as demonstrated by the development of tourism destinations at Mount Merapi and the Lapindo mudflow. By first exploring the complex geography and history of the two disaster areas, this paper argues that any representation of these places can only ever be subjective, conditional and uncertain. Through in-depth interviews and observation with local tour guides and tourism operators this paper investigates how disaster areas are represented to tourists and how its messages are conveyed as 'satisfaction and pleasure tours'. It becomes clear that local tour guides do have the capacity to change the image of disasters as a tourism destination. The paper also scrutinizes in which ways local tour guides transform the perception of fear to the spirit of struggle in post-disaster contexts. It concludes that the local tour guides are responsible for changing the negative perceptions and images of disaster and, through the tours, realize transformative aims.

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Walking the Falls: Dark tourism and the significance of movement on the political tour of West Belfast

Cited by 37 publications

References 24 publications

Haunting and transitional justice: On lives, landscapes and unresolved pasts

Haunting and transitional justice: On lives, landscapes and unresolved pasts

Navigating contested memories in a commercialised setting: conflict avoidance strategies in Kyiv city tour guiding

A Tale of Two Disasters: How is Disaster Emerging as a Tourist Destination in Indonesia?

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