Methodologies in Dark Tourism Issues: Modelling the Dark Experience

Introduction

Dark tourism is doubtless one of the global themes that have captivated international researchers worldwide. The concept debates the nature of tourism confronting our already-existing beliefs. Tourism should be understood -at least in the literature- as a result of the combination between two factors, movement and leisure. In this vein, the rise of tourism combined a strange “British taste” for pleasure as well as an apollonian sense of beautyness that led travelers to enjoy the visited landscapes (Ousby, 1990). In consonance with this, some authors alert that the turn of the twentieth century has facilitated the emergence of new morbid forms of tourism consumption which include spaces of death or war, suffering, slumming or mourning (Freire Medeiros 2014; Korstanje 2016; Mionel 2019). Dark tourism defies our concept of leisure putting the problem of morbid taste into the tapestry. Having said this, dark tourism offers a more than interesting spectrum for applied research in the years to come but with no few methodological problems (Bowman & Pezzulo 2009; Martini & Buda 2020). At first glimpse, there is a great dispersion of definitions as well as methodologies in dark tourism studies (Hooper & Lennon 2016). Secondly and most importantly, applied research is mainly based on what A. Franklin dubbed as “tourist-centricity” which means an obsession to take tourists as the only valid source of information or knowledge. For that, dark tourism studies are conducted on visitors who express or manifest their so-called motivations for visiting these places (Seraphin & Korstanje 2021). Methodologically speaking, centering the research on the questionnaire application has two fundamental problems. On one hand, interviewees often are unfamiliar with their real motivations and on another, they can lie to protect their interests. This behooves us to consider new emerging methodologies for dark tourism fields (Korstanje 2020).