Managing collective memory through funeral events

This chapter adopts an experience design perspective to explore how collective grief and mourning are configured through funeral events. Funerals can be conceived as a novel form of dark events, sitting slightly outside the established dark tourism conceptual framework due to their typically closed nature and more individualised, private and personal scale. Through a focus on the transformative design aspects, funerals are recognised as events that encompass the real and imaginary and are therefore dimensionally complex events with diverse experiential elements. They provide an opportunity to further extend the field of dark events beyond an explicit tourism and leisure lens and illuminate the power, influence and discursive practices inherent in life stage events that Critical Event Studies (CES) perspectives encourage us to explore further. Whilst focusing on the theoretical elements to frame this development, the discussion also incorporates research undertaken by the author and colleagues, which draws on professional experiences of funeral event organisation.