As A Field
Dark Tourism became a field of study in 1996 when the term was coined by Professor John Lennon and Malcolm Foley of Glasgow Caledonian University. Scholars have analyzed both recent and ancient settings which attract visitors and are associated with death. Scholars of the field hope to understand tourist motivation for visiting such locations. Dr. Philip Stone, a senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, is another one of the individuals currently studying this field. He has written several journals and given presentations on the subject. He has tried to determine moral and social effects of dark tourism, pointing out how individuals come together in these places associated with grief and death. Stone has also stated how dark tourism represents immorality so that morality may be communicated. In Latin America, Maximiliano E. Korstanje continued the contributions of Stone to expand the current understanding of disasters, mass-death and sanctuaries such as the tragedy of Cromañón where 194 attendants lost their life in a music festival. Dark tourism would be a mechanism of resiliency that helps society in the process of recovery after a disaster or cathastrophe, a form of domesticating death in a secularized world.
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