Volunteer Tourism Popular Humanitarianism in Neoliberal Times New Directions in Tourism Analysis Series

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.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Sentimental Sojourns in Northern Thailand; Chapter 2 “Making a Difference One Village at a Time”: Volunteer Tourism and the Peace Corps Effect; Chapter 3 The Seduction of Development: NGOs and Alternative Tourism in Northern Thailand; Chapter 4 Cosmopolitan Empathy, New Social Movements and the Moral Economy of Volunteer Tourism; Chapter 5 The Cultural Politics of Sentimentality in Volunteer Tourism; Chapter 6 Converging Interests? Cross-Cultural Authenticity in Volunteer Tourism; Chapter 7 Conclusion—Re-mapping the Movement: Popular Humanitarianism and the Geopolitics of Hope in Volunteer Tourism;

Dr Mary Mostafanezhad is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Hawai'i.