Volunteer Tourism In The Global South

This work explores the increasingly popular phenomenon of volunteer tourism in the Global South, paying particular attention to the governmental rationalities and socio-economic conditions that valorise it as a noble and necessary cultural practice. Combining theoretical research with primary data gathered during volunteering programs in Guatemala and Ghana, the author argues that although volunteer tourism may not trigger social change, provide meaningful encounters with difference, or offer professional expertise, as the brochure discourse and the scholarly literature on tourism and hospitality often promises, the formula remains a useful strategy for producing the subjects and social relations neoliberalism requires. Vrasti suggests that the value of volunteer tourism should not to be assessed in terms of the goods and services it delivers to the global poor, but in terms of how well the practice disseminates entrepreneurial styles of feeling and action. Analysing the key effects of volunteer tourism, it is demonstrated that far from being a selfless and history-less rescue act, volunteer tourism is in fact a strategy of power that extends economic rationality, particularly its emphasis on entrepreneurship and competition, to the realm of political subjectivity. Volunteer Tourism in the Global South provides a unique and innovative analysis of the relationship between the political and personal dimensions of volunteer tourism and will be of great interest to scholars and students of international relations, cultural geography, tourism, and development studies.

Just a generation ago the notion that holidays should be invested with ethical and political significance would have sounded odd. Today it is part of the lifestyle political landscape. Volunteer tourism is indicative of the growth of lifestyle strategies intended to exhibit care and responsibility towards others less fortunate, strategies aligned closely with developing one’s ethical identity and sense of global responsibility. It sits alongside telethons, pay-per-click, Fair Trade and ethical consumption generally as a way to “make a difference”. Volunteer tourism involves a personal mission to address the political question of development. It draws upon the private virtues of care and responsibility and disavows political narratives beyond this. Critics argue that this leaves the volunteers as unwitting carriers of damaging neoliberal or postcolonial assumptions, whilst advocates see it as offering creative and practical ways to build a new ethical politics. By contrast, this volume analyses volunteer tourism as indicative of a retreat from public politics into the realm of private experience, and as an expression of diminished political and moral agency. This thought provoking book draws on development, political and sociological theory and is essential reading for students, researchers and academics interested in the phenomenon of volunteer tourism and the politics of lifestyle that it represents.

In a 2014 essay that went viral, Pippa Biddle revealed the inequities and absurdities baked into voluntourism--the pairing of short-term, unskilled volunteer work with tourism. In the years since, Biddle has devoted herself to understanding the origins, intentions, and outcomes of a multibillion-dollar industry built on the premise of doing good, and she tracks that investigation in Ours to Explore. The flaws of voluntourism have included xenophobia, racism, paternalism, and a "West knows best" mentality. From exploitative orphanages that keep children in squalid conditions to attract donors to undertrained medical volunteers practicing their skills on patients in developing regions and to those looking for an inspiring selfie, Biddle reveals the hidden costs of the voluntourism complex. Along the way, readers meet inspiring activists and passionate community members, as well as thoughtful former voluntourists who still work to make a difference--just differently. Ours to Explore offers a plan for how the service-based travel industry can break the cycle of exploitation and suggests strategies for travelers who want to improve the places they visit for the long haul.

'Practicing Sustainable International Volunteer Tourism' provides a uniquely holistic “how to guide” for the practice of sustainable international volunteer tourism which incorporates contextual as well as practical advice for primary stakeholders including communities, practitioners, governments and volunteer tourists. The first full length guide that highlights the interconnected relationship among and between key stakeholders, Practicing Sustainable International Volunteer Tourism integrates theoretical insights with application. As the international volunteer tourism sector continues to grow, it has become an increasingly complex marketplace which has materialized into a diversity of expectations, motivations and experiences. While sometimes convergent, opportunities for divergence among key stakeholders can also become core challenges in creating an ethical as well as sustainable sector. This timely guide was written with the shared belief that for international volunteer tourism to be appropriately practiced, each individual stakeholder needs to understand their co-stakeholders’ interests and the corollary nuances of their participation. As such. this book is divided by stakeholder group and includes sections for each on “how to practice sustainable international volunteer tourism”, ethical and moral issues, choosing your project, a case study, do’s and don’ts and additional resources. International volunteer tourism is now includes commercial operators, international as well as domestic NGOs, government agencies and local communities around the world. Additionally, while the market has traditionally been dominated by international volunteer tourists from the Global North to the Global South, today Global South-to Global South volunteers further diversify international volunteer tourism mobilities. These diverse stakeholders have developed an array of services and programs designed to serve the needs of host communities as well as the international volunteer tourists. As a result of the numerous critiques against the international volunteer tourism industry, various organizations have developed guidelines. Yet, these guidelines lack a comprehensive perspective that addresses the multiple key stakeholder interests as well as challenges. In this book, the authors: * Highlight the critical need for key stakeholder groups to understand the complex interests at stake in order to create a more mutually beneficial and ethical international volunteer tourism sector; * Challenge traditional assumptions of the benefits of volunteer tourism, and suggests how best practice can truly enable positive contributions to local communities economically, politically, socially and environmentally; * Advocate international volunteer tourism practices that link with national and international governmental organizations that are better prepared to affect policy changes in order really have positive effects. This book is a must-have reading for all those studying and working in the tourism industry as well as not for profits, commercial operators, International and National NGOs, government agencies, communities and international volunteer tourists themselves.

Sport volunteering is becoming an increasingly popular motive for international travel. Many tourism organisations now advertise sport volunteering projects, with colleges and universities also offering students the opportunity to participate in similar projects abroad. This is the first book to bring together diverse and interdisciplinary insights into the development of the contemporary sport volunteering phenomenon. It addresses conceptual uncertainties and challenges emerging from the growing international sport volunteering market, and offers insight into its future directions, impact and sustainability. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, Part I examines volunteering in the context of international sporting events, while Part II evaluates volunteering initiatives related to sport development. Including case studies from Australia, Cameroon, Namibia, Norway, Russia, the UK, the US and Zambia, this substantial volume provides a truly international perspective on the changing roles of sport volunteering. Showcasing the latest research from across the globe, International Sports Volunteering is a valuable resource for any course on sport studies, sport event management, sport development, sport tourism, sport geography, the sociology of sport or leisure studies.

This edited volume extends current voluntourism theorizing by critically examining the intersections among various forms of work-leisure travel and language learning/teaching. The book’s contributors investigate volunteer tourism and its cognates such as working holidaymaking, international internships, and gap year labor, as discursive fields in which powerful ideas about language(s), their speakers, and pedagogical practices are propagated worldwide. The various authors’ chapters shed light on the hegemony of global English, the social consequences of linguistic commodification and neoliberal rationalities, the ways in which speaker identity positions can alter the exchange value of languages, and how language competencies are tied to power in the labor market, among related topics. This volume will be of interest to readers in Applied Linguistics, Critical Sociolinguistics, Educational and Linguistic Anthropology, Tourism and Leisure Studies, Migration and Mobility Studies, and Language Teaching and Learning.

Crossing disciplinary and chronological boundaries, Volunteer Tourism: Popular Humanitarianism in Neoliberal Times is the first full-length treatment of volunteer tourism from a longitudinal ethnographic perspective. Volunteer tourism, one of the fastest growing niche tourism markets in the world, is a type of tourism in which tourists pay to participate in conservation, humanitarian or development oriented projects. Volunteer Tourism is a comprehensive and comparative study of the perspectives of Thai host community members, NGO practitioners and international volunteer tourists. The book thus shines an ethnographic lens onto the complexities and contradictions of the volunteer tourism experience in northern Thailand. Drawing on cross-disciplinary perspectives in geography and anthropology as well as development, tourism and cultural studies, Volunteer Tourism illustrates how a focus on sentimentality in the volunteer tourism encounter obscures the structural inequalities on which the experience is based. Such a focus situates volunteer tourism within the commodification and sentimentalization of development and global justice agendas, which hail the new moral consumer and reframe questions of structural inequality as questions of individual morality. As a result, albeit inadvertently, the practice of volunteer tourism serves the continued expansion of the cultural logics and economic practices of neoliberalism.

This edited volume asks how governmentality and postcolonial approaches can be brought together to help us better understand specific sites and practices of contemporary postcolonial governance. The framework/approach was inspired by the recent use of governmentality approaches that emphasize how governance functions not solely through states but through multiple tactics and means that regulate the conduct of individuals and institutions through both freedom and constraint. A postcolonial approach to governance exposes the role of postcolonial sites and practices in shaping governance and the inequalities embedded within it, insofar as standards of conduct determine which subjects are privileged and excluded.Postcolonial perspectives show how governance can be both productive and repressive, functioning to impose a fixed code of conduct that objectifies (gendered, racialized, sexualized) ‘others’ as part of its project of improvement. In discussing governance, we must also consider how power is negotiated and challenged through forms of resistance and counter-conduct. This volume argues that we need to incorporate postcolonial theories and carefully examine postcolonial practices and sites, to understand how contemporary governance shapes various transnational inequalities and social divisions. The authors in this edited volume illustrate the value of postcolonial governance as a conceptual framework through empirical examples from Asia, Australia, Africa, and Europe. These cases unpack practices of governance operating within complex political landscapes.