https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8877-6388
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ABSTRACT
This study sheds light on competitive lieux de memoire in the south-east of Slovenia that are directly related to significant social changes of the twentieth century. The aim is to evaluate the perceptions of influential domestic stakeholders, including experts and media, representing (different) perspectives of the transformation of sites of memory into national and transnational spaces of memory in the dark tourism context. We carried out 10 interviews and a qualitative inductive content analysis, and a subsequent qualitative deductive content analysis of 16 news media articles. Creating an Euler diagram, we compared real social and media-created reality and found inconsistencies: only three main categories are common. We found that development issues are highlighted within social reality, while the media mainly report on what was observed on the ground, at sites or events. Despite the polarised Slovenian post-socialist atmosphere, competitive memories gradually become multidirectional with the potential for the commodification of lieux de memoire within international dark tourism.
Funding details
This work was supported by the Univerza na Primorskem , Slovenia, under grant number 2990-6-2/2021.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Notwithstanding terminological heterogeneity, this paper uniformly uses dark tourism as the most commonly used term to represent the death – tourism nexus, see Light (Citation2017), Šuligoj and De Luca (Citation2019).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lucija Boršić
Lucija Boršić is an independent young researcher and postgraduate at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research interests focus on the relationship between tourism and culture.
Metod Šuligoj
Metod Šuligoj is an associate professor at the University of Primorska, Faculty of tourism studies – Turistica, Slovenia. He blends and bridges theory from a variety of disciplines, e.g. management, sociology, geography, history, to explain social phenomena in tourism.