What is Dark Tourism and how did the term originate?
Dark tourism, a label first coined in the mid 1990’s by Professors John Lennon and Malcolm Foley of Glasgow Caledonian University, is the act of travel and visitation to sites of death, disaster and the seemingly macabre. Lennon and Foley’s book ‘Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster’, first published in 2000, whilst not the first publication to address the subject area within academia, it was the first to systematically outline some of the issues and concerns associated with tourism, death and associated suffering. Since then, the subject area has attracted a great deal of interest from the media community and academia alike.
