Dr Beatriz Rodriguez Garcia of the Department of Marketing and Dr Marian Iszatt-White of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy recently received awards for the best Developmental papers at the British Academy of Management Conference in Bristol.

The winning paper is entitled “When organisations prescribe emotions: a dark tourism perspective” outlines some of the findings from a study into how dark tourism organisations use storytelling and narratives to interpret the past and engage their visitors in particular ways to evoke and ‘prescribe’ certain emotions on visitors. Dark tourism refers to the visitation of sites of death, war, atrocities and other gruesome events while dark tourism organizations can be referred to those organizations behind the creation, organisation and management of these sites.

Despite a considerable growth of the literature exploring the visitor experiences in dark tourism sites, little attention has been paid to the narratives and stories conveyed to the visitors of such sites and the way certain stories are chosen, developed, delivered and contested through particular ‘emotional’ experiences in dark tourism sites. These are the issues that this study sought out to find answers for. Specifically, this ethnographic research was conducted from two perspectives: that of the organisations responsible for the sites and that of the observer/researcher.

In addition to Beatriz's award, Dr Marian-Iszatt-White of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy scooped the award for the Best Developmental paper in the Identity track.

The winning paper was titled "No more 'sage on the stage'? Networked learning and educator 'identity undoing'. The Distance Learning Initiative from which the case study was drawn involved colleagues from across the Management School with a range of different areas of teaching expertise, research interests and approaches. They captured their experiences of networked learning in a mini case study and grounded it in relevant theory, with perspectives including narrative and antenarrative, routines and practices, emotions and humanity online, dialogic and active learning online, and networked learning and critical spaces. These perspectives will be synthesised into a single paper for journal submission, aimed at opening up debate and seeding further research relating to educator perspectives on networked learning.

Both the awards were given as part of the British Academy of Management’s annual Best Full and Best Developmental Paper Awards, designed to identify and honour the best research submissions to the conference that year. Congratulations to Beatriz and Marian on these great achievements!