Volunteer Tourism and Nonelite Young Subjects: Local, Global, and Situated

Abstract

There is a pernicious tendency to portray particular young subjects as “global” and others as “local.” Although it often emerges implicitly from otherwise valuable academic work, this maps problematic a global-local dualism onto classed subjects. For instance, working-class youth are often cast as “trapped” and subject to localized urban settings, and young people traveling and volunteering abroad are often presumed to be exercising unfettered social and physical mobility across space. This chapter illustrates a more nuanced approach through discussing research on short “volunteer tourism” trips undertaken by young people from lower-income socioeconomic backgrounds. The ways that these ordinary, nonelite young subjects engage with volunteer tourism and its popular humanitarian imaginaries reveals how understandings of both “global” and “local” space are always situated amid interconnections between near and distant places. This contributes a grounded analysis of how the seemingly coherent meanings of volunteer tourism are always made through processes that cross multiple scales. Young people from nonelite backgrounds engage with “the global” around the trips in ways that are creative, agentive, and always deeply situated in their navigations of local constraints and opportunities and gendered, classed, and racialized hierarchies. Close attention to the way the global is situated and how transnational connections animate the visceral body also fosters possibilities to see problematic stabilizations of scale and meaning as contested and contestable.