Duncan Light

Bournemouth University | BU · Bournemouth University Business School

Climate change is predicted to have severe impacts on coastal communities, including sea level rise, flooding, and coastal erosion, and is expected to reshape many coastlines. One further, and often overlooked, consequence of the climate crisis is the threat posed to cultural heritage sites in the coastal zone. The threat to coastal cultural herita...

Although souvenirs have received considerable academic attention, their role and significance for domestic tourists are less researched. This paper focuses on the souvenir-purchasing practices of domestic tourists, and the post-holiday role of their souvenirs. Interviews were undertaken with 49 tourists in Romania at the point of souvenir purchase,...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine souvenir sellers as unconventional micro-entrepreneurs, focusing on non-economic motives for selling. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative methodology was used. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 20 souvenir sellers in the Romanian city of Timişoara. These were analysed using themat...

Although research into the relationship between tourism and death has predominantly focused on dark tourism, tourism scholars are exploring other forms of association between the two. In this context, this paper focuses on a little-researched practice in tourism studies: the scattering of cremation ashes in spaces used for tourism and leisure. This...

This paper focuses on the neglect of the heritage of the seaside holiday in England. Many seaside towns feature an idiosyncratic architecture dedicated to entertainment and pleasure which, until recently, was rarely considered in terms of heritage. The paper examines why this heritage has long been neglected, arguing that seaside architecture – ass...

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the visitor experience at a “lightest” dark tourism attraction, focusing on issues of thanatopsis and mortality mediation. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 24 visitors to a “Dungeon”-style attraction in the UK (a site of “lightest” dark tourism). The inte...

Memorial museums are frequently established within transitional justice projects intended to reckon with recent political violence. They play an important role in enabling young people to understand and remember a period of human rights abuses of which they have no direct experience. This paper examines the impact of a memorial museum in Romania wh...

The relationship between tourism and transitional justice is little-researched. This paper explores the importance of domestic tourism for enabling citizens to encounter and engage with wider transitional justice projects. This issue is explored with reference to a memorial museum in Romania which interprets political violence and state repression....

Purpose The concept of “Gothic tourism” has recently been proposed within the discipline of English Literature. Such tourism is claimed to be a distinct form of special interest tourism grounded in familiarity with the Gothic, distinctive aesthetics, and experiences of frights and scares. It is increasingly common in towns and cities around the wor...

Previous applications of existential philosophy to tourism have focused on the work of Martin Heidegger but have neglected the contribution of Jean-Paul Sartre. This paper examines the relevance of Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’ to tourism. Bad faith is a way of living based on inauthenticity, self-deception, and disregard for the Other. The paper...

COVID-19 has played out in Romania in a similar way to that in many other European countries. The government implemented decisive early measures which were able to keep the infection and mortality rates relatively low. This paper considers three distinctive aspects of the situation in Romania. First, the situation was complicated by the influence o...

Heritage visitor attractions operate in a dynamic environment requiring them to respond to changing circumstances which they cannot control. This paper focuses on adaptation strategies adopted by one type of heritage resource: the seaside pier in the UK. As part of the heritage of mass tourism itself, piers were created in a specific context and, a...

This special edition examines various aspects of urban tourism in the post-communist cities of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It begins by examining the nature of tourism restructuring in the region since the end of communism and the way that this unfolds in cities. It then examines major global changes in the nature of tourism and their impacts...

This paper puts forward a theoretical framework of existential well-being that incorporates the twin human drives towards stability and adventure. Todres and Galvin (2011) were inspired to develop the dwelling/mobility framework by Heidegger's notion of Gegnet (translation: “abiding expanse”). The paper will employ examples of tourist practices tha...

This paper examines the role of education within post-communist transitional justice. It focuses on the ways in which young Romanians negotiate the communist past during an educational visit to a memorial museum. The museum enabled these visitors to better understand the repression of the communist era, had limited impact in changing their attitude...

In recent decades, urban policymakers have increasingly embraced the selling of naming rights as a means of generating revenue to construct and maintain urban infrastructure. This practice of “toponymic commodification” first emerged with the commercialization of professional sports during the second half of the 20th century and has become an integ...

Many states in post-communist East-Central Europe have established memorial museums which aim to tell the story of suffering under the communist regime. They also seek to encourage visitors to develop empathy for the victims of communist repression. This paper explores the responses of a group of young people to a memorial museum in Romania (Sighet...

This paper proposes that flags are an important but under‐theorised aspect of geographical inquiry and seeks to outline a new field of “vexillgeography,” which critically embraces the spatiality and performativity of flags. We start by outlining the potential of semiotics (and geosemiotics) to further our understanding of flags, focusing on iconic,...

Mobility is a prominent theme in Dracula and this chapter focuses on one aspect of this mobility: tourism. Dracula was written at a time when tourism was a well-established practice in Britain (and a key characteristic of modernity) and consequently, tourism features extensively in the novel. This chapter examines a number of forms of tourism in Dr...

This paper explores motives for visiting a lightest dark (heritage) tourism attraction. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 24 visitors to the London Dungeon. Few visitors reported an interest in death, suffering or the macabre as important in their decision to visit, a finding which accords with research at a range of other types of da...

This paper reviews academic research into dark tourism and thanatourism over the 1996-2016 period. The aims of this paper are threefold. First, it reviews the evolution of the concepts of dark tourism and thanatourism, highlighting similarities and differences between them. Second it evaluates progress in 6 key themes and debates. These are: issues...

From the ‘Orange’ and ‘Ukrainian’ revolutions in Maidan Square, Kiev, in 2009 and 2014 (Beissinger 2011; Way 2014), through marches supporting tolerance and equality for lesbians, gay men and other sexual dissidents in Polish cities (Binnie and Klesse 2013; Binnie 2014), to residents of St. Petersburg, Russia, exercising their ‘right to the city’ t...

To date, consideration of the carnivalesque at the seaside has focussed on the practices and behaviour of tourists. Less attention has been paid to tourism employees who are not participants in the carnival but may nevertheless be affected by the ‘playful crowd’ that they work with. This study focuses on employees in a seaside amusement park. Emplo...

Light, D., 2017. The undead and dark tourism: Dracula tourism in Romania. In: Hooper, G. and Lennon, J., eds. Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation. Abingdon: Routledge, 121-133.

This paper explores the relationship between the urban cultural landscape of Bucharest and the making of post-socialist Romanian national identity. As the capital of socialist Romania, central Bucharest was extensively remodelled by Nicolae Ceauşescu into the Centru Civic in order to materialize Romania's socialist identity. After the Romanian "Rev...

One criticism of the tourism area lifecycle model is that it treats destinations as homogeneous entities. Instead destinations can be conceptualised as a mosaic of elements, each of which can follow a lifecycle that is different from that of the destination overall. This paper examines this issue with reference to amusement arcades in British seasi...

This paper considers spaces associated with death and the dead body as social spaces with an ambiguous character. The experience of Western societies has tended to follow a path of an increased sequestration of death and the dead body over the last two centuries. Linked to this, the study of spaces associated with death, dying and bodily disposal a...

Recent academic debate into women’s experiences of tourism employment has emphasised the extremely heterogeneous nature of such work and the need for sensitivity to local political, economic, social and cultural contexts. This article focuses on one such context which has received little attention – state socialism – and we explore women’s experien...

Any radical political change produces a dramatic reformulation of national history and public memory among both elites and publics and at a variety of scales. The post-socialist states of East-Central Europe (ECE) represent one of the best contemporary examples. In the two decades since the overthrow of authoritarian socialist regimes, the countrie...

Taking stock of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, this volume explores how these societies have grappled with the serious human rights violations of past regimes. It focuses on the most important factors that have shaped the nature, speed, and sequence of transitional justice progra...

If we consider heritage as the contemporary process through which human societies engage with, and make use of, their pasts (Harvey, 2001; Smith, 2006), then tourism is a well-established part of this process. People have long been intrigued and fascinated by the past and have been drawn to make their own visits to places of historic resonance. His...

This new book ably edited by Lavinia Stan and Diane Vancea brings together timely contributions from younger and more established scholars from two continents that shed fresh light on the evolution of the fledgling Romanian democracy after 1989. It reminds us that Romania’s image and transition to democracy must be linked to the absence of market r...

In recent years the study of urban toponymy (place names) has been revitalized by the emergence of a ‘critical toponymies’ approach. This focuses on the cultural politics of place naming and the decisions involved in attributing names to the urban landscape. However, in contemporary cities place names have an economic role in addition to their poli...

The critical study of toponymy has paid considerable attention to the renaming of urban places following revolutionary political change. Such renaming is intended to institutionalize a new political agenda through shaping the meanings in everyday practices and landscapes. Renaming, however, might not always be successful, and this article examines...

Academic geographers have a long history of studying both tourism and place names, but have rarely made linkages between the two. Within critical toponymic studies there is increasing debate about the commodification of place names, but to date the role of tourism in this process has been almost completely overlooked. In some circumstances, toponym...

The end of state-socialism has produced complex processes of urban change in East and Central Europe including the reshaping of urban identities and urban cultural landscapes in post-socialist cities. The geographical literature focusing on changes in the cultural landscapes of post-socialist cities has emphasized discontinuity from the state-socia...

This paper contributes to recent analysis of tourism within socialist states by examining tourism policy in the Romanian People’s Republic, 1947�1965. It considers the development of tourism policy that was intended to support the broader political project of building socialism. Romania initially adopted the Soviet model of purposeful and collectiv...

This paper explores the relationship between the urban cultural landscape of Bucharest and the making of post-socialist Romanian national identity. As the capital of socialist Romania, central Bucharest was extensively remodelled by Nicolae Ceauşescu into the Centru Civic in order to materialize Romania's socialist identity. After the Romanian “Rev...

This paper follows the mobilities between 1958 and 1990 of the dead body of Dr Petru Groza (1884–1958), a significant political figure in post-World War II socialist Romania, to explore the implications for human geography of engaging with the dead. Although there has been a considerable interest in ‘geographies of the body’ and ‘deathscapes’, huma...

For many in the West, Romania is synonymous with Count Dracula. Since the publication of Bram Stoker's famous novel in 1897 Transylvania (and by extension, Romania) has become inseparable in the Western imagination with Dracula, vampires and the supernatural. Moreover, since the late 1960s Western tourists have travelled to Transylvania on their ow...

This paper is concerned with the post-socialist lives of Communist statues. While acknowledging that post-socialist transformation frequently involves searching for new identities based on the disavowal of the communist past and the de-communisation of cultural landscapes, the paper stresses the importance of exploring complex continuities from the...

Amusement arcades have long been a key component of the British seaside resort. For almost a century, they enjoyed popularity and success and became established as a quintessential feature of the British seaside holiday. However, the advent of home-based video games along with recent gambling legislation has led to a decline of the seaside amusemen...

This article analyses the inter-relationship between political identity, public memory and urban space in South-east Europe through a case study of Parcul Carol I (Carol I Park) in Bucharest, Romania from 1906 to the present. The article analyses how the urban cultural landscape has been reshaped to support the political ambitions of three successi...

Rebranding Menie Links cannot hide the damage which will result from the sanitised environment of a new holiday village and golf complex. Different identities for the area will now be established amongst different communities.

The end of state-socialism has produced complex processes of urban change in East and Central Europe including the reshaping of urban identities and urban cultural landscapes in post-socialist cities. The geographical literature focusing on changes in the cultural landscapes of post-socialist cities has emphasized discontinuity from the state-socia...

In recent years there has been increasing attention on tourism as a form of performance. Moreover, some recent work has focused on the role of tourist performances in the making (and remaking) of tourist places. This article explores these issues with reference to Transylvania, Romania, through ethnographic fieldwork with a group of Western tourist...

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Journal of Cultural Geography, published by and copyright Routledge. This paper is concerned with re-imaginings of 'Europe' following the accession to the European Union (EU) of former 'Eastern European' countries. In...

Imaginative geographies have become a central concept in Anglo-American cultural geography in recent years. We all form knowledge, ideas and beliefs in our minds about what other places are 'like'. In some cases these ideas may so strong that a distinct place 'myth' develops. In this paper I focus on the Western place myth of Transylvania. In the W...

The state plays an important role in tourism development, in planning and policymaking, and also as the arbiter of cultural meanings. States choose to encourage forms of tourism that are consistent with their cultural and political identities. But they may have to contend with forms of demand that are beyond their control. ‘‘Dracula tourism’’ in Ro...

This book addresses European tourism within the framework of an enlarged European Union of 25 members. It looks at the substantial reorientation of the organizational framework of European tourism and its profound implications for future structural and geographical patterns of development. Providing a series of thematic evaluations of relationships...

The renaming of streets is a significant, if often overlooked, aspect of post-socialist change in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Such renamings are one manifestation of the ‘reconfiguring’ of both space and history which is a central component of post-socialist transformations. Street name changes are part of the process of...

Past studies of the Socialist/Communist city have paid only limited attention to the ways in which Communist regimes mobilised a wide variety of symbols in the urban landscape in order to legitimate and institutionalise the ideology of revolutionary socialism. This paper considers the role of street names in this process with particular reference t...

This paper serves as an introduction to this theme issue on the topic of post-socialist identity politics surrounding nation building, national identity and nationalism. It presents an overview of the key processes of post-socialist identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) in order to contextualise th...

Tourism is an important component of the process of identity-building, representing one way in which a country can seek to project a particular self-image to the wider international community. As such, tourism has considerable ideological significance for the formerly socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe that are seeking to project and af...

Like other countries in central and eastern Europe (CEE), Romania is seeking to project a new self-image, or identity, to the wider international community. There are two elements to the process. First, Romania is striving to ‘deconstruct’ a national identity created during four decades of Communist rule; that of a Communist, nationalist, totalitar...

This paper considers how the legacy of communism and revolution has become the focus of interest among Western tourists in post-communist Bucharest. It argues that 'communist heritage' tourism - the consumption of key sights and sites associated with the Ceausescu regime and its overthrow - has emerged as a particular form of cultural or heritage t...

This paper considers ‘communist heritage’ tourism (that is, the consumption of sites and sights associated with the former communist regimes) in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. As one form of special interest tourism, this phenomenon is an illustration of the ever-diversifying tourist gaze. However, such tourism also raises wider issues co...

This paper examines tourism development in post-communist Romania. It first examines tourism trends between 1989 and 1997. International arrivals are faltering, due to political/economic instability since 1989, the legacy of a decaying tourism infrastructure, and poor standards of service. Post-communist economic restructuring has significantly dep...

Within heritage studies the relationship between national heritage and national identity is frequently taken as axiomatic. The construction of a national heritage is an important part of nation‐building, and historic buildings and monuments can be powerful symbols of a nation's aspirations and identity. Yet this relationship has received relatively...

Since the 'revolution' of 1989, Romania has been in a state of transition from a command to a market economy. Romanian tourism is similarly in transition, and there are many geographical components of this transition. Before 1989 Romania was dependent upon visitors from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic, but recently these m...

This paper reports a case study of the characteristics of visitors to special ‘events’ (in this case historical re-enactments) at a heritage site (Caerphilly Castle) in South Wales. By comparing the characteristics of visitors on event and non-event days it was apparent that the events had particular appeal to local people and were successful at en...

The challenges facing planners in historic urban environments are considerable for the UK. At the root of these challenges is the fact that historic towns and cities are popular places for tourists. Such places face a number of conflicting demands. On one hand is the need to maximise the economic benefits of tourism for the town and its inhabitants...

Although heritage interpretation is a central component of the modern heritage industry there has been relatively little concern with how visitors to heritage sites make use of interpretive media. This paper reports a study of visitors' use of three interpretive media — exhibitions, outdoor panels, and stereo-audio tours — commonly employed at one...