Ninth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Tourism and leisure studies face the growing significance of dark attractions, and how contemporary tourists and visitors understand and actively partake in the commemoration of more or less recent genocides. This study brings together empirical and interpretive approaches to tourists’ online discourses (tourists’ user-generated content/UGC or tourist-generated content/TGC), seeking to understand how tourists supply public re-tellings and re-mediations in relation to two major dark museums: The Kigali Genocide Museum and Memorial in Rwanda and The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum of the Cambodian genocide in Phnom Penh. The sample consists of hundreds of texts that tourists and visitors, who visited these museums, have freely and spontaneously uploaded and shared on public online platforms, notably on Google Maps. A comparative discourse and narrative analytic procedures were applied to the data, to examine tourists’ experiences, in two sites that are indexical – the story they tell occurred in the exact location where they are positioned. The research approaches tourists as active agents of mobility of discourse and memory, whose study can shed light on the subfield of dark tourism, but also on much broader critical view of contemporary travel and leisure and their discontents.