Mark Griffiths

I’ve got goose bumps just talking about it!: Affective life on neoliberalized volunteering programmes

In recent years, research has focussed on the ‘neoliberalization’ of volunteering programmes in the developing South. Commonly cited processes include an uncritical pedagogy of development and a heavy emphasis on ‘difference making’ and curriculum vitae building. These neoliberalizing processes, research finds, have come to shape the affective and emotional experience of volunteers on placement. This article presents an alternative reading of the embodied experience of volunteering. Affect here is understood as autonomous and explored as a potential ‘outside’ to formations of power and neoliberalization. The discussion begins with a critical reading of the British government’s International Citizen Service programme, drawing out its neoliberalized construction of volunteers as ‘global citizens’. The article then moves on to present affective data from fieldwork carried out on International Citizen Service projects in India. The argument is made that neoliberalism need not be the only frame of analysis; volunteers experience rich inter-subjectivities that cannot (and should not) be easily attributed to processes of neoliberalization. The resulting account writes into being the affective life on placement as potentially autonomous of expressions of power and neoliberalization.

Embodied experiences in international volunteering: power-body relations and performative ontologies

Abstract In this paper we debate the interpretation of embodied experience on international volunteering placements. Drawing on six in-depth interviews with volunteers recently returned from Northern Thailand, we document the affects and emotions that play a key role in the formation of volunteer–host relations. We then present two interpretations of the data, conceptualising power-body relations in two different ways: from power’s affective and emotional literacy, to the body’s autonomous capacities. With these two interpretations at hand we then consider the performative nature of academic labour and make the case, following the work of feminist geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham, for a research praxis that does not set limits on subjectivity but rather excavates – and writes into being – the possible. We therefore argue for a conceptualisation and interpretation of embodied experience in volunteering as a site of potential transformation and transcendence of the inequalities that otherwise set the conditions of the volunteer–host encounter.

‘It’s all bollocks!’ and other critical standpoints on the UK Government’s vision of global citizenship

ABSTRACT The UK Government’s International Citizen Service (ICS) sends volunteers abroad to ‘fight global poverty’ as ‘global citizens’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the construction of development on the ICS programme forecloses important political and historical contexts, resulting in a model of global citizenship we might term ‘soft’. This article presents data from interviews with ICS volunteers with a specific methodological concern of recognizing the agency of young people and allowing their responses to lead discussion. The outcome is a range of themes across the data that critique the Government’s model of citizenship and, I argue, shows the volunteers to be ‘critical’ global citizens. I then ask whether we can consider this a mode of resistance. I conclude with a final data set that – the case is made – presents an imperative to allow these volunteers to have their perspectives on historical and contemporary North–South relations recognized as a critical mode of global citizenship.

An Opinion Piece. A response to the Special Issue on volunteer tourism: the performative absence of volunteers

This short Opinion Piece reflects on the construction of volunteers in the Journal of Sustainable Tourisms recent Special Issue on Volunteer Tourism, Volume 22, Issue 6, 2014. The Issue indicates directions for future research and presents some productive cases of applied modes of knowledge production. This Opinion Piece notes that, despite the good work in the Special Issue, more research on the impacts of volunteer tourism on host communities is still overdue. But most importantly, however, running through the papers in the Issue, there is a problematic construction of volunteers as passive subjects of capitalism. As “consumers” or “clients”, it is argued that the Special Issue papers perceive volunteers through the very same logic of commodification that much of the research intends to push against. Drawing attention to the performativity of language and research outputs, the case is made for more careful attention to the ways researchers in volunteer tourism address subjects so that critical attention might be better aligned with our practices of representation. We should seek to preserve the potential of volunteers to bring about change, and resist the temptation to reproduce the very deleterious discursive realities we seek to bring to account: volunteers, before all else, volunteer.

Peace through tourism: promoting human security through international citizenship

Despite long-standing claims for tourism to be considered ‘the world’s peace industry’ (D’Amore, 1988, p. 35), we are not there yet. There is, however, a renewed interest in exploring tourism’s potential role in fomenting and sustaining peace (e.g. Moufakkir & Kelly, 2010), though much room remains for genuine critical engagement. To this end, Peace through tourism provides a refreshing – and potentially agenda-setting – contribution. Its 17 chapters, written by a mix of activists, practitioners and academics, explore a specifically critical notion of ‘positive’ peace. Drawing on the work of Rees (2003), the volume’s editors conceptualise peace as more than a mere ‘absence of war’. Instead, peace has to do with a keen sense of justice, and justice, in turn, cannot come without the conflict of speaking truth to power. Conflict, therefore, drawing further on Rees, ‘is not the problem; violence is’ (p. 2). The editors situate this conceptualisation within an agenda for research into peace through tourism, tasking scholars and practitioners with ‘shin[ing] the spotlight on conflict’ and ‘unmasking the indirect and structural violence within tourism policy and practice’ (pp. 2–3). This is an admirable critical agenda that the book’s broad mix of theories and philosophies (Part I), case studies (Part II) and advocacy (Part III) works towards. There is a good amount of success, too, and this book will hopefully inform further enquiry from both within and without the academy. The four chapters dedicated to Palestine illustrate well the volume’s broader critical engagement with matters of peace, and will stand out to most readers. Rami Kassis gives an account of the Alternative Tourism Group (ATG), whose tours ‘touch on extremely sensitive issues such as the Occupation, “Judaising” the landscape, and house demolitions [... ] in ways that stimulate thought and awareness rather than imposing positions’ (p. 233). A reader’s initial reaction to this might be sceptical to this ‘exemplary work of the ATG’ (Kassis is the organisation’s executive director), but, at least for me, this makes the volume performative – less an advert and more an insistence on what tourism could be: as Kassis puts it, ‘another tourism is possible’ (p. 234). Focused quite sharply on such a vision, and remaining with Palestine, Chaim Noy’s contribution evocatively recounts an embodied reaction to politicised art installations in Jerusalem: