'Dark tourism' study centre launched by university

LONDON.  April 24. KAZINFORM "Dark tourism" - where visitors travel to sites of death, brutality and terror - is to be the subject of a dedicated centre for academic research at the University of Central Lancashire.

The Institute for Dark Tourism Research is said to be the world's first such academic centre.

Researchers say they want to examine why people "feel compelled to visit sites like Auschwitz or Ground Zero", BBC reported.

Director Philip Stone says such places make people face their "own mortality".

The institute, which is being launched on Tuesday, will look at the relationship between places with terrible associations - and tourists who use their leisure time to visit them.

Disaster trips

Dr Stone says that this includes places such as the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York, Nazi concentration camps and the sites of disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Ukraine.

He says that going to such places becomes a form of "secular pilgrimage", with people feeling they need to visit them.

Dr Stone says his research suggests that visitors want to find some kind of meaning in these places of suffering.

 

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