Evolving Themes in Dark Tourism Research

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to identify the evolving themes in dark tourism research. The increase in death-related incidents in the last few years has increased the consumption of dark tourism, igniting a resurgence of dark tourism literature. This study retrieves 363 articles published in Scopus-indexed journals from 1996 to 2021, using the SPAR-4 SLR technique to identify the themes using Sci2 and Gephi software. Keyword co-occurrence network, Bibliographic coupling network, and Collaboration networks were used to identify the knowledge clusters in dark tourism literature. The study reveals that existing studies have largely focused on the scope of dark tourism, destination identification and management, marketing aspects, motives, experiences, and engagement, and mitigating moral and ethical dilemmas. As the themes have remained consistent since the past studies, the study concludes that the research on DT has become stagnated, and there is a need for a novel approach. For that, it recommends that the scope of dark tourism should be enhanced beyond heritage tourism and promoted as a tool for global peace. Further, several gaps in marketing and visit and emotional engagement aspects are identified that could become the research agendas in future studies.