Difficult Heritage and Immersive Experiences examines the benefits involved in designing and employing immersive technologies to reconstruct difficult pasts at heritage sites around the world.

Difficult Heritage and Immersive Experiences examines the benefits involved in designing and employing immersive technologies to reconstruct difficult pasts at heritage sites around the world. Presenting interdisciplinary case studies of heritage sites and museums from across a range of different contexts, the volume analyzes the ways in which various types of immersive technologies can help visitors to contextualize and negotiate difficult or sensitive heritage and traumatic pasts. Demonstrating that some of the most creative applications of immersive experiences appear in and at museums and heritage sites, the book showcases how immersive technologies offer the possibility of confronting and disputing presumptions and prejudices, triggering responses, delivering new knowledge, initiating dialogue and challenging preexistingnotions of collective identity. The book provides a conceptual, as well as a hands-on, approach to understanding the use of immersive technologies at sensitive sites around the globe. Difficult Heritage and Immersive Experiences is essential reading for researchers and students who are interested in, or engaged in the study of, cultural heritage, memory, history, politics, dark tourism, design and digital media or immersive technologies. The book will also be of interest to museum and heritage practitioners.

How can emerging technologies display, reveal and negotiate difficult, dissonant, negative or undesirable heritage? Emerging technologies in museums have the potential to reveal unheard or silenced stories, challenge preconceptions, encourage emotional responses, introduce the unexpected, and overall provide alternative experiences. By examining varied theoretical approaches and case studies, authors demonstrate how “awkward”, contested, and rarely discussed subjects and stories are treated – or can be potentially treated - in a museum setting with the use of the latest technology.

This book explores death in contemporary society – or more precisely, in the ‘spectacular age’ – by moving beyond classic studies of death that emphasised the importance of the death taboo and death denial to examine how we now ‘do’ death. Unfolding the notion of ‘spectacular death’ as characteristic of our modern approach to death and dying, it considers the new mediation or mediatisation of death and dying; the commercialisation of death as a ‘marketable commodity’ used to sell products, advance artistic expression or provoke curiosity; the re-ritualisation of death and the growth of new ways of finding meaning through commemorating the dead; the revolution of palliative care; and the specialisation surrounding death, particularly in relation to scholarship. Presenting a range of case studies that shed light on this new understanding of death in contemporary culture, The Age of Spectacular Death will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, psychology and anthropology with interests in death and dying.

This book considers how we encounter and make meaning from extinction in diverse settings and cultures. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary range of scholars to consider how extinction is memorialised in museums and cultural institutions, through monuments, in literature and art, through public acts of ritual and protest, and in everyday practices. In an era in which species are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate, we must find new ways to engage critically, creatively, and courageously with species loss. Extinction and Memorial Culture: Reckoning with Species Loss in the Anthropocene develops the conceptual tools to think in complex ways about extinctions and their aftermath, along with providing new insights into commemorating and mourning more-than-human lives. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, extinction studies, memorial culture, and the Anthropocene.

This book offers critical scenarios of dark tourism futures and examines how our significant dead will be remembered in future visitor economies. It aims to inspire critical thinking by probing the past, disrupting the present and provoking the future. The volume outlines key features of difficult heritage and future cultural trauma and highlights the role of technology, immersive visitor experiences and the thanatological condition of future dark tourism. The book provides a collection of informed observations of how future societies might recall their memorable dead, and how the noteworthy dead might be (re)created and retained through dark tourism. The book forecasts a dark tourism future that is not only perilous but also full of possibilities. It is a helpful resource for students and researchers in tourism, heritage, futurology, sociology, human geography and cultural studies.

Grounded in a critical sociocultural approach, this volume examines issues associated with teaching and learning difficult histories in international contexts. Defined as representations of past violence and oppression, difficult histories are contested and can evoke emotional, often painful, responses in the present. Teaching and learning these histories is contentious yet necessary for increased dialogue within conflict-ridden societies, reconciliation in post-conflict societies, and greater social cohesion in long-standing democratic nations. Focusing on locations and populations across the globe, chapter authors investigate how key themes—including culture, identity, collective memory, emotion, and multi-perspectivity, historical consciousness, distance, and amnesia—inform the teaching and learning of difficult histories.