Making Monsters: Dark Tourism and Constructions of Crime, Criminality, and Victimization

The tourism sector contributes trillions of dollars to the global economy and engages over 1.2 billion people every year (UNWTO, 2017). An increasing number of tourist activities throughout the world involve crime-themed leisure (Huey, 2011). These activities have the potential to shape tourists’ conceptions and understandings about criminal justice phenomena. Studies of crime-themed leisure have thus far centered on the study of prison museums in the international context. While examining prison museums as a site communicating socio-cultural representations is important, there are a wide variety of activities tourists engage in, including tours of sites, spaces, and contexts beyond the museum. 

This presentation broadens our understanding by examining the representation of crime and criminality in the context of a number of crime-themed leisure activities in the United States. Utilizing ethnographic methods, Dr. Whitehead explores the world of crime-based leisure paying particular attention to the way crime and criminality are imagined and how they manifest mythologies of crime and justice (Kappeler & Potter, 2004). She also explores the affective and performative dynamics at play in crime related tourism – that is, the feelings and sensations artifacts emote and how they work to perform gendered, class, and racialized constructions of crime.