Program: Dark tourism + selfie sticks = moral outrage

Sana Qadar: Just tell me what you had for breakfast while I fix these levels again.

Dr Craig Wight: I haven't had very much. I've had a slice of toast so far.

Sana Qadar: About a year ago, Craig Wight, who researches tourism management, stumbled upon a travel company that was organising the most unexpected, probably unethical, definitely unsafe kind of tour.

Dr Craig Wight: I came across a company online called Visit Ukraine, who were organising battlefield tours of the country for kind of thrill seekers. So they were literally offering tours of Ukraine to go to sites where you could witness warfare and the aftermath of attacks, you know, kind of blown up tanks and so forth and vehicles...

Sana Qadar: Oh my God. Go to a live warzone? Wow that's incredible.

Sana Qadar: Apparently, this kind of thing isn't unheard of though.

Dr Craig Wight: Yeah. And that's something that, again, we've been doing for a long time. So you had the Battle of Waterloo. That was the word. There were tourists there and really good carriages in 1815 watching the battle unfold. Yeah. So it's a kind of ancient behaviour that we're looking at through the lens of the modern day.

Sana Qadar: This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. You might have heard of the term dark tourism or dark tourist. There was a Netflix documentary that gave it a whole new prominence recently. And like Craig says, this kind of thing has a long history.

Dr Craig Wight: I think the first documented example of dark tourism is probably in the 1800s when you had tourists travelling by train to witness hangings and things in England.

Sana Qadar: And while travelling to see the battlefields of Ukraine today is definitely on the more extreme end of dark tourism, you have probably been a dark tourist yourself because the less extreme end includes things like going to cemeteries.

Dr Craig Wight: Like Père Lachaise graveyard in Paris.

Sana Qadar: Or going to former prisons or visiting places like Auschwitz.

Dr Craig Wight: Essentially, it's the attraction of sites of murder, death, mass killing, jolly things like that, assassinations, genocide.

Sana Qadar: And while this is a centuries old type of tourism, the dark tourists of today have something that totally changes the game. We have social media. We have selfies. So today, why we engage in dark tourism, why it can be a positive thing and why anyone would want to take a selfie at Auschwitz.

Dr Craig Wight: So you can visit somewhere iconic like Auschwitz Museum in Poland or Chernobyl or Père Lachaise graveyard in Paris. But you can also engage in the act of dark tourism as well. You can, for example, we saw tourists arriving at the site of the stricken Costa Concordia cruise ship off Gilea in Italy, taking photographs there and showing up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the US whilst there were still corpses floating in the water. So it's kind of both a sort of built heritage, but it's also a behavior, I think, crucially.

Sana Qadar: Craig Wightis an associate professor at Edinburgh Napier University, where he specializes in tourism management.

Dr Craig Wight: And I look specifically at genocide heritage internationally with a specific focus on Europe.

Sana Qadar: And obviously the ethics around visiting a cemetery or Chernobyl versus the scene of an ongoing disaster are wildly different. But that just gives you a sense of how broad the definition of dark tourism is. Some versions of it could otherwise be referred to as heritage tourism or disaster tourism. But if the place you're going to is associated with death, then it's more or less considered dark tourism. So why do we do it? Well, the research literature suggests there are about as many motivations for becoming a dark tourist as there are dark tourism sites themselves. Some papers talk about the idea of these tourists being fascinated with death or wanting to seek out morbid things.

Dr Craig Wight: There's something about human nature and our desire to be drawn towards things that are bloody and macabre.

Sana Qadar: But that really only seems to account for some of the attraction. Often, when people are asked why they visit these sites, they say it's for things like learning and understanding past events, paying respect or remembrance. Plain old human curiosity also comes up as a big driving factor. And sometimes people talk about it as being a must-see or exclusive experience, in a way the kind of thing that every trendy tourist is chasing.

Dr Craig Wight: These are probably seen as slightly edgy things to do. So you get this terminology of deviant leisure.

Sana Qadar: And then, finally, there are some hilariously mundane reasons that Craig's research has also uncovered.

Dr Craig Wight: When I got into this topic, I assumed that the motivation would be inextricably linked to the darkness of the attraction or the event. But the first study I did was at the Imperial War Museum of the North in Manchester. And I did next-to-pass interviews with people and asked them why they were going there. And actually, most of them were going because they just saw the building and it looked kind of windswept and unique. It's a Daniel Leibskind, the architect that built it, and it looks interesting. Some of them were going in because they smelled food cooking in the canteen. So my first finding about dark tourism was that I don't think it's questionable whether there is dark tourism. The motives are so mixed and varied to suggest that there's some dark tourism going on, but otherwise maybe it's just tourism and curiosity.

Sana Qadar: That was one particular example. And that's pretty funny, yes, for a wide variety of reasons. But I think if someone ends up at Auschwitz, they've made a pretty concerted decision to go there. They haven't stumbled upon Auschwitz and thought, let's see what food's cooking here. You know?

Dr Craig Wight: Right. So you'd be surprised. Some people are just going to Auschwitz because the tourism literature tells them to. So when they arrive in a city, there's quite often a must-see list of top five places to go. And Auschwitz is there if you visit Krakow. So it's going to end up on your agenda. However, of course, there's visitors that go there for genealogical reasons or to get educated about the events that took place there, because it's seen as very important to learn the lessons of what took place at Auschwitz. And it's very baked into public culture. It's all over Hollywood with movies like Schindler's List, The Pianist, things like that. And when you get productions like that, you see a spike in interest as well. And so people want to go along to find out for themselves. So you do get pilgrimages there. You get people visiting to remember relatives and that sort of thing. Also, and this is something that Auschwitz as a museum have recognized over the years, that kind of visitor is also very varied and stratified into different subtypes. So you get people that might come along because it's a site of Jewish tragedy, but it was also a site of Roma and Sinti tragedy. And Catholics were persecuted and killed there. So were homosexuals, disabled people, political dissidents. So there's a range of different kind of interests. And in academia, we call this dissonant heritage, the idea that heritage doesn't belong to one user, but a whole range of users. And that's quite complex when you're talking about dark tourism, because you have to curate experiences that are inclusive and that kind of speak to all of the interests of the different interest groups that are coming along to the attraction.

Sana Qadar: Hmm. And do you think it matters that some people might end up somewhere like Auschwitz just because they saw it on a top five things to do in Krakow list versus someone who's going there to bear witness to what happened there? Is there an ethical component to the motivations that we should think about?

Dr Craig Wight: I'm not convinced that there is. I think people vote with their feet. And unless you're going along there to kind of, you know, be disrespectful, then I think that Auschwitz Museum would welcome all visitors.

Sana Qadar: This issue of disrespect and disrespectful behavior that Craig just mentioned, let's focus on that for a moment, because when you add social media to dark tourism, people start acting in all sorts of questionable ways, especially if they're trying to get the perfect selfie. Yeah, from concentration camps to Chernobyl, plenty of people have no qualms about snapping selfies at these sites and posting them on social media. And in 2017, German-Israeli comedian Shahak Shapira was fed up with the number of people snapping selfies at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. So he launched a project called Yolocaust to kind of shame these people.

Dr Craig Wight: Yolocaust is a portmanteau of YOLO, you only live once, and Holocaust. So it's Yolocaust. And he went out to kind of what he did was he switched out the backdrops of these Holocaust memorials for actual photos from the Holocaust. So suffering, human suffering, dead bodies and so forth. And at the front of these, you had the selfie taker. So it was his kind of way of a kind of highly visual way of shaming selfie taking at Holocaust sites.

Sana Qadar: And so Craig wanted to do a study following up on this and find out what members of the general public thought.

Dr Craig Wight: Why are these concerning? What is it about selfies that kind of seem to upset people?

Sana Qadar: Like are all selfies at Holocaust sites offensive or does it depend on context? To figure that out, he went to the home of the selfie, Instagram, and scoured the platform for photos taken at places like Auschwitz or the Berlin Memorial. And he analyzed the comments that were left under those photos. He found that context matters a lot.

Dr Craig Wight: People were receiving negative comments from others, depending on things like age, gender, cultural identity, the kind of pose that they were striking, even things like their facial expression and particularly as well the captions that accompanied the photos. If there was something a bit more meaningful there, then they were less likely to receive censure. I think younger, more maybe conventionally attractive people and especially women received much more negative comments from others on Instagram. And in contrast, older and less perhaps conventionally sexy selfie takers and males seem to be ignored or kind of overlooked. They got away with it. And so, yeah, a lot of it came down to the kind of style of posing, particularly females holding their bodies and sort of model like poses or having fun with the backdrops, which are essentially Holocaust memorials. To some commentators, this wasn't acceptable and they were prepared to say something to shame these people.

Sana Qadar: OK, so is it the case like if it's just a straight up selfie, that might not be so bad. But like if you're posing like you're in a fashion shoot kind of thing or you know, like what what makes a selfie not disrespectful on these sites?

Dr Craig Wight: Yeah, I think that we also found that location was really important. So where you have signage and tours happening and where it's very obvious that you're in a Holocaust memorial, we saw much less selfie taking going on in the first place. Whereas in contrast, the Berlin Memorial in the city centre of Berlin, it's not really immediately obvious that that's a Holocaust memorial. And you might have to find the sign to give you an indication of where you are. So for some folk, this is just a kind of quirky looking piece of streetscape that's fun to play around. So you jump from pillar to pillar and take a selfie and it may just not be obvious to them where they are. And that's part of the problem perhaps.

Sana Qadar: But for those who do know where they are, maybe it's an age thing, but I still struggle to understand why anyone would be compelled to take a selfie in the first place, especially at a place like Auschwitz. Craig says it might just reflect how our lives are already so intertwined with social media.

Dr Craig Wight: I mean, we live in an aesthetic society. So it's one that's defined by a preference for sophisticated consumer goods and experiences. And all these are things that we like to be photographed with and next to. So our lives have become inextricably hardwired into social media. And for tourism, this means that the postcard has given way long ago to things like Instagram and Facebook and TikTok as we kind of increasingly organise and curate more seemingly authentic versions of ourselves on the socials. And so I don't think dark tourism is an exception. When we did our study of selfie taking at dark tourism sites, we kind of argued that this is something that younger generations will do anyway, regardless of the backdrop. It's their kind of social currency, if you like. And so whether they're at a birthday party or a night out or a dark tourism site, this is all part of the lives that they will curate on social media for the consumption of others.

Sana Qadar: I think that's fair enough, actually. I think that's a really interesting point. But it also feels fair enough to say that, like, maybe don't treat a site of mass death as a place to have like a fashion shoot or, you know, like interact in a fun way with that environment. Like, what do you make of the fact that those are the kinds of images that get shamed?

Dr Craig Wight: Yeah, I guess that what's important here perhaps is the providers of these heritage sites or memorials or experiences and what they do in order to guard against this. So maybe when you're buying a ticket, maybe in some sort of signage that says, please be respectful or please don't take selfies at all or you'll be kind of removed, you know. But I think that because there is nuance to the selfie and not all selfies were seen as being offensive, then I think they're quite valid forms of kind of documenting the fact that you made the effort to go along and see the place.

Sana Qadar: What goes on in the mind of someone who is taking a fashion selfie at a place like Auschwitz? Why would someone do that and think that's appropriate? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Dr Craig Wight: I firmly believe that that doesn't happen very often. And I think that the fashion shoot kind of selfies that we saw were mostly at the Berlin Memorial in the city centre. And I do think it's because it's not really all that obvious where you are. However, you do get, I suppose some people on Instagram, regardless of the backdrop, want to centre themselves. I think that's probably a bit of ignorance at play there. But I don't, I also don't think it's terribly common and we didn't come across many examples, although we did come across some.

Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sana Kadar. OK, so we've heard how combining technology and dark tourism can lead people to behave in questionable ways, but there are upsides to this combo as well. Technology can be used to enhance storytelling, preserve memory, kind of digital dark tourism. That's what Nicole Basaraba from Trinity College, Dublin, is focused on.

Dr Nicole Basaraba: So that's what my research area is looking at, is how we can use digital technologies to kind of capture history and present it to people in an interesting way. And using digital media allows us to tell the stories with many different perspectives. So if you think about traditional media like a book or a film, we call it linear storytelling. So it's kind of usually chronological, beginning to end. Normally, the author or director will have one kind of main story they want to tell. But I say with the advantage of digital media, you can tell all the different stories.

Sana Qadar: One project she's worked on is an app called the National Famine Way, which tells the stories of people forced to leave Ireland during the Irish Potato Famine. If you're not familiar, the famine from 1845 to 52 killed around a million people and forced possibly up to two million people to emigrate abroad.

Dr Nicole Basaraba: So we created the mobile app so that you could kind of jump into the story wherever you were. So it would serve local people as well who are in the surrounding counties and towns if they were walking along the canal. So there's a big canal across Dublin and that's kind of where the walking trail is. So if you jumped into a spot, you could use the mobile app to learn about the history of these people.

Sana Qadar: People like 12-year-old Daniel Tighe. He and his four siblings and his widowed mother made it on a boat to Canada. But only he and his nine-year-old sister survived the trip.

Dr Nicole Basaraba: Yeah, there's lots of sad and dark stories associated. So that story and across all of Ireland, there are so many famine stories that can be told. So there's quite a different variety of digital media being used to tell heritage narratives and dark tourism narratives as well.

Sana Qadar: Now, more recently, Nicole has been looking at how dark tourism is playing out on YouTube, and this goes in a direction that I was not expecting.

Dr Nicole Basaraba: (Nicole speaks over a related clip from youtube video) A lot of my past research looks at academics and museum creators and historians telling stories. But I discovered that content creators or people who are not trained as historians or narrative scholars are also creating a lot of stories on social media. And I discovered this channel that had millions and millions of viewers doing ghost hunting storytelling.

Sana Qadar: This (the audio) is from a YouTube channel called Sam and Colby, and they have more than 12 million subscribers.

Dr Nicole Basaraba: So it's kind of a network of YouTubers. So mostly they were based in the United States and Canada, and they were visiting quite old heritage listed homes.

Dr Nicole Basaraba: As well as outdoor places like forests, caves and bridges that are known to be haunted. Investigating these locations to figure out what happened there historically, whether or not paranormal activity exists.

Dr Nicole Basaraba: So the research paper I wrote is kind of saying perhaps paranormal investigations is a new niche of virtual dark tourism where these filmmakers are going to these locations, which some of them are quite remote and difficult to get to. So they may or may not be suitable for the everyday visitor to go themselves. And maybe they don't want to. So this YouTube storytelling kind of creates a virtual dark tourism experience where people can follow along with the story from the comfort of their own home.

Sana Qadar: Right. OK, so dark tourism isn't just something you do IRL in real life. It's something you can do online.

Dr Nicole Basaraba: Yeah, I'd say so.

Sana Qadar: And the fact that it's being broadcast, have you come across any bad behavior like in the way we've seen selfies at Auschwitz that sometimes are pretty offensive? Yeah. What are you seeing here?

Dr Nicole Basaraba: Some of the content creators, of course, they're going in as content creators. They're trying to entertain people. They're trying to get views. So their goals are a little bit different than, you know, myself or people who work in history and heritage sector. So perhaps culturally speaking, they might be disrespectful of the location they're investigating, like to see if there's a ghost there. But actually someone has passed away there and someone has, you know, living family members of the person who passed away. And if they're making jokes or being a bit crass, perhaps that could be sensitive to the people who care about the location or who have that kind of familial connection to it.

Sana Qadar: This issue is at the heart of dark tourism. It's dark because somebody died there. And that warrants a degree of respect.

Dr Craig Wight: I think there's an issue of tastefulness when it comes to dark tourism. And you can do -I don't know if I mentioned the JFK tour in kind of downtown Dallas where you can drive around and the speaker in the car will play kind of gunfire sound effects and so on. That's arguably pretty distasteful.

Sana Qadar: At the moment where he was or at the place where he was shot?

Dr Craig Wight: Yes, that's right. Yeah. So it's a kind of reenactment tour.So it's arguably really distasteful. There's also distasteful behaviors. So, I mean, I think it's probably a bit distasteful to go along to the Costa Concordia, this sort of stricken cruise ship, while there's still a salvage operation underway and people are dead and dying in the water. But there's visitors there taking photographs. So there's moral panic around that as a kind of tasteful form of dark tourism behavior.

Sana Qadar: It's interesting. I'm also now like in my head interrogating why I had such a response to the JFK tour you described. But I'm inclined to think something like, you know, I can understand why people have tried to go to see the Titanic. You know, like obviously there was a really horrible implosion that happened with the submersible that tried to go down last time. But I like I I feel like that's interesting and understandable. And I guess is that just a function of how distant in the past the event was?

Dr Craig Wight: Yes, you raise a really interesting point and one that's kind of very clear within the literature, which is that dark tourism for some commentators is not dark tourism unless it's something that took place within living memory, within the recent past. People talk about the dry eye tests. If you're at a visitor attraction that's dark tourism, unless people are visibly moved and often upset, then perhaps it's not dark tourism. And the distinction I sometimes draw in lectures is the contrast between a site like Pompei in Italy and all of these other sites we've mentioned, like Ground Zero and Auschwitz and all these places. The difference the difference with Pompei is that nobody's related in any way to the to the victims of Pompei. And so that's arguably just a piece of social heritage or human heritage, whereas dark tourism would have to be an attraction commemorating an event that we all remember.

Dr Mariko Smith: I think people need to realise that these are places of reverence and yes, indeed, of sorrow, but also just the magnitude of really realising what happened in these places. And I think it gets a bit removed because it's hard to reconcile when you're in sort of today's world.

Sana Qadar: This is Mariko Smith.

Dr Mariko Smith: Walawaani njindiwan. Hello, everyone.

Sana Qadar: Mariko is a Yuin woman with Japanese heritage, and she is the head of First Nations Collections and Research at the Australian Museum. And we haven't talked yet about dark tourism in Australia, but there are many places that fit the definition. But Mariko wonders about the very term dark tourism itself.

Dr Mariko Smith: Well, I think it'd be worth unpacking how the term dark tourism applies in the Australian context, since it is, seems primarily focused on places of death and suffering. It could be quite focused on the macabre, the morbid, be quite lurid in its representation. And this can perpetuate trauma and negative status quo for First Nations people regarding their sites and their histories. And, you know, there's a negative connotation here, too. It seems like, you know, you've got dark versus light. I mean, that sort of imagery as well, where, you know, the positive stories are the mainstream stories where the more darker, I guess, if you want to use that word, the more unpleasant sides of history are designated to this alternate offering, which has been termed as dark tourism. Yet there's a connotation here that is, you know, one sided benefit, exploitation and entertainment at others' expense.

Sana Qadar: And so what would you what would you think would be a better term to describe this kind of tourism or behaviour? Is there a rebranding you'd like to see?

Dr Mariko Smith: Yeah, I think it'd be really good to reframe the concept here because I think we need to keep in mind the bigger picture, the objective here, which is to give the public a better understanding of the full spectrum of details in, for instance, Australia's complex and, yes, quite harrowing aspects in its colonial history. And so I would see it as being reframed as truth telling histories, moving away from like that word tourism too, because of that particular connotations, focusing on how this could be an opportunity to give a platform for agency to First Nations peoples themselves to tell their own stories in ways which are no holds bar accounts of colonial history, but are done in more culturally appropriate and respectful ways on their own terms.

Sana Qadar: That kind of truth telling and the ability to reclaim a narrative, it can be an antidote to some of the more unethical examples of dark tourism as well, and not just in the Australian context.

Dr Mariko Smith: I was reading recently a book about plantation sites, so dark tourism in relation to plantation sites in the Deep South. I think Louisiana in particular. And what was really interesting reading into the concerns about that type of tourism was around where stories were embellished or even made up. And I think there's obviously a concern there about really cashing in on something that is needs to be known about enslaved people in the US and making sure we know that history. But the way that stories could be possibly made up or embellished is particularly a concern because obviously on a factual level, but also in the end, it does downplay the seriousness of the issue as well, where if there is even sort of a doubt that these stories are real, that's where it gets to be quite an issue of representation.

Sana Qadar: So it seems there's no shortage of ethically dubious examples of dark tourism from the Ukraine battlefront tours we mentioned at the start of the show to certain American plantation tours. But Nicole Basaraba and Craig White want you to remember that dark tourism, if we stick with that term for now, can also be a good thing. It can have value.

Dr Craig Wight: I get the students to split into two groups and have a debate about the morality of a site like Auschwitz operating as a visitor attraction. I think it's really a history lesson, a lot of these dark tourism sites. The purpose really is to let people know about the events that took place there and try to ensure to some degree that things like this don't take place again. Although the futility of that is rendered rather obvious at the moment with news from the Middle East.

Dr Nicole Basaraba: If you go to the right location and you're going for the right reasons, you can definitely have a transformative experience where you see the past in a different way.

Dr Mariko Smith: And I think there's time and place for things like selfies. When in doubt, also ask, you know, and be accepting of the answer.

Dr Craig Wight: If it's tasteful, if it serves a good purpose and perhaps if some of the income that comes from dark tourism is being used in responsible ways, then there's nothing wrong with us at all. And in fact, it's quite a virtuous thing.

Sana Qadar: That is Craig Wight, associate professor at Edinburgh Napier University. You also heard from Nicole Basaraba, assistant professor in digital humanities at Trinity College Dublin and from Mariko Smith, head of First Nations Collections and Research at the Australian Museum in Sydney. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr, senior producer James Bullen and sound engineer Beth Stewart. I'm Sana Qadar. And speaking of tourism, I'm off on holiday for the next month. I'm not planning to go to any dark tourism sites at the moment, but we'll see what happens. What I wanted to say, though, is don't worry, we have all new episodes coming for you during that time, though. We've been working in the background with a bunch of contributors and I'm in all of those episodes. So you'll still be hearing from me as well. And I'll be back on deck properly from August. That's it for All in the Mind today. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.