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Drawing on the anthropological literature, this paper aims to develop a model of taboos (morality) that applies to the marketing, consumer behaviour and consumption contexts.

The paper is mainly conceptual but illustrates the general premises of the model with a case study of “dark” tourism and the contemporary marketing of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The paper shows that even extreme taboos can be commodified and traded-off, and that not even the horrific deaths and large-scale suffering that occurred at Auschwitz are “sacred”. This can occur through reframing and seeing the same taboo through different national lens.

Questions pertaining to consumer morality are relative rather than universalistic, and even the most extreme cases of taboo can still be successfully marketed.

The paper is among the first to attempt to conceptually design a model and then explain the taboo process as it applies to a marketing and consumption context.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the position of the museum shop within dark tourism sites. In doing so, it argues that the shop has the potential to act as a further meaning‐making vehicle by reconfirming the museum mission within its merchandise selection. The analysis of the particular position occupied by the museum shop as a for‐profit institution within a not‐for‐profit institution will reveal the friction that exists between the competing aims of the museum shop to ideologically, as well as economically, support dark tourism.

The author analysed institutional literature and merchandise selection at three case studies, to explore the relationship between dark tourism sites and their respective shops.

The retail operations of dark tourism sites are highly complex and fraught with potential issues relating to taste and decency. Museums situated at actual sites of death are particularly constrained in regards to the type of merchandise they are able to stock. However, it is not just the locational identity of the museums which dictates the type of shop they are able to operate but their particular subject matter and the way this subject is approached in the gallery space.

This paper is limited by a small survey size. Further research could include interviews with museum shop professionals and other museum professionals to see how different areas of the museum see the role and value of museum shops at dark tourism sites.

This is an under‐researched area. There has been a growing amount of research in to the meaning‐making potential of museum shops; however, little attention has been given to dark tourism sites and how dark content impacts upon the nature of the shop.

The central thesis developed during this study is the idea that human dignity must be understood as the right to be recognised as a participant in the institutional practice of human and fundamental rights. This form of association between human dignity and human rights is a response to the various barbarities of the twentieth century, whether by fascist, Nazi, and socialist regimes in Europe, either by South African apartheid or by military dictatorships in Latin America. Human dignity after Auschwitz is the foundation for the construction of a post-metaphysical institutional morality, independent of an idealised concept of rational subjective personality and closer to the historical and material conditions to guarantee the political personality of every human being. In order to defend this thesis, the study is conducted in two steps. First, two conceptions of dignity will be discussed, namely dignity of man and human dignity. Second, it is intended to discuss how the modern conception was incorporated into the practice of human rights after Auschwitz as a way of responding to a crisis in the modern model of the practice of rights.

The purpose of this self-study is to analyze my experiences learning in Poland, the country where Nazis imprisoned and murdered my family. I share findings from multiple museum locations, including implications for history teachers, teacher educators and visitors to Holocaust museums.

I participated in a ten-day professional development seminar designed for American teachers to visit Poland. To allow for self-study after the trip, I maintained a reflexive journal and photographic records of each day I was in Poland. I analyze these data in conjunction with publicly available data from the museums and historical sites I visited in Poland.

The findings suggest that teachers can face many challenges when learning in a land of traumatic absences. Many challenges stem from the absences of buildings and survivors, as those may be integral to place-based learning. Testimonies and first-person accounts may ameliorate these challenges for teachers engaging in place-based learning. Additionally, teachers may use these accounts to bring a pedagogy of remembrance from Poland to their classrooms.

This study is not under review with another journal.

This article examines the use of alternative texts to represent the Holocaust and to teach secondary students about this event. An alternative text is anything other than a traditional textbook. Alternate texts may include poetry, novels, graphic novels, films, or plays. By using alternative texts, teachers can engage students in multiple perspectives to stimulate critical thinking in their classrooms. Alternative texts, furthermore, can shift the paradigm of how teachers and students think about morally and ethically complex subjects. In order to facilitate such a shift, teachers, scholars, and students should view different ways of representing difficult subjects in the classroom. The Holocaust is a difficult subject to teach due to the scale of moral issues and scope of this crime against humanity. Traditional means of teaching the Holocaust, using maps, textbooks, and primary source documents are important but fail to create changes in students perspectives because there is little space for students to become more empathetic and apply history to current world events. Providing students with texts including narratives, poetry, and first-person accounts can add humanity into what some view as one of the most inhumane events in history and thus shift the paradigm for high school students.

We argue that Oskar Schindler is a moral exemplar. Oskar Schindler and other moral exemplars should, according to Mayo, be emulated. Emulating Schindler when he acted as a moral exemplar could have led to others’ being helped during truly terrible times. Yet, had officialdom at that time known what Schindler was doing, he would have lost his life, and the lives of the many others he was able to save – as well as their progeny – would also have been lost. Thus, we underscore that it can be extraordinarily difficult for someone to be recognised as a moral exemplar when a moral exemplar is so desperately needed.

This essay documents the experience of teaching a course on the Holocaust to incarcerated men. It asks whether teaching about violence inside an institution that responds to and is rooted in violence can produce something transformative for students and teachers; it also asks what it means to initiate this project as a German raised under communism near the Berlin Wall. Situated in critical discussions of the utopian/rehabilitative role of prison education, the essay insists on grounding in reflective and personal experience. It thus contributes to discussion of the ethics of humanist education and pedagogies of hope in prison and beyond.

Dark tourism and, more specifically, visitor experiences at Nazi concentration camp memorials are emerging fields of research in tourism studies and destination management. The purpose of this paper is to build on this growing body of knowledge and it aims to focus on the Second World War Nazi concentration camp at Dachau in Germany to explore the psychological impact of the site on its visitors as well as critical self-reflection processes triggered by this experience.

This micro-netnography resulted in 15 online semi-structured interviews carried out with people who visited Dachau between 2003 and 2015. The interviews involved participants from 11 different nationalities and a range of age groups.

This study has shown that emotions that surface during a tourist’s visit to a concentration camp destination can linger well after they have left the site. In fact, feelings of sadness, depression, anger and existential questions can haunt visitors for a considerable amount of time after their visit. Further reflections by visitors also included a more critical appreciation of world affairs. This is of particular significance when considering the behaviour of tourists in an urban setting.

This research builds on previous dark tourism studies related to the on-site emotions experienced by visitors to concentration camp memorial sites and their travel motivation but takes this knowledge further by exploring the hitherto uncharted longer-term post-experience impacts of these sites on their visitors. Recommendations for dark tourism destination practitioners and academics are also provided based in a critical discussion of the research.

Several historical examples are given that indicate that people taken prisoner appear to psychically freeze and/or become compliant to their captors, even when death at the captors' hands is imminent and when small numbers of captors make escape a real possibility. It is argued that: freezing is a normative response to apparently inescapable capture; ‘escapability’ of capture is underestimated as a result of freezing; and rebellion is rare. Psychological theories of this psychic freezing include: 1) social psychological explanations of learned helplessness in prisoners; 2) trauma reactions of dissociation and numbing; and 3) studies from affective neuroscience suggesting freezing is a brain response to a perceived inescapable attack and may be related to hiding.