Affective politics of Australian development volunteering

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that emotions play an important role in international development volunteering (IDV), but researchers are divided about how they matter. For some, Northern volunteering in the Global South is an expression of political agency and solidarity with distant strangers, while for others, it is a product of neoliberal techniques of government that mobilise emotions, labour and social practices of care without challenging the status quo. This paper seeks to disentangle these contradictory claims by examining how participants in an IDV programme experience and articulate emotions, and the context in which they mobilise these emotions to fortify or critique dominant power relations. Drawing on recent theorising about the role of affect and emotion in society, and on interviews collected in Cambodia and Peru, I aim to show how emotions are shaped through relations with humans as well as with history, place and foreign policies. Attending to spatial and temporal context is important to understanding how and why volunteerism’s affective relations can become sites for critiquing unequal relations and imagining development differently.

Keywords:

• Affect
• emotion
• development volunteering
• Australia
• Cambodia
• Peru

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those involved in this research, especially the volunteers and host organisations in Cambodia and Peru, Tracey Skelton who conducted interviews in Cambodia, and Sally Brokensha for her generous hospitality in Peru. Thanks also go to the two anonymous reviewers and the guest editor for their feedback and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The Australian government has supported IDV programmes since the 1960s. In 2011 it amalgamated several under the umbrella of Australian Volunteers for International Development (AVID), commonly referred to as Australian Volunteers.

2 Interviews in Peru were conducted by the author in English and Spanish, recorded on audiotape and transcribed. A bilingual Peruvian research assistant provided translation when required. In Cambodia interviews were conducted by a research team member in English with the help of a Cambodian research assistant, who translated on the spot when required and transcribed the audiotapes. Host organisation staff often intermingled English with their native language. English-language phrasing was left in the original whenever possible, and when not, paraphrasing was used.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susanne Schech

Susanne Schech is a human geographer who teaches development geography at Flinders University in South Australia. She co-authored Culture and Development: A Critical Introduction (Wiley, 2000), edited Development Perspectives from the Antipodes (2014), and has published on a range of development issues including participation, gender justice, poverty reduction, volunteering and humanitarianism. Another focus of her research interest is migration and mobility, particularly forced migration and refugee settlement in Australia. Her current research projects examine the history of humanitarianism through the lens of the League of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and temporary labour migration from East Timor to Australia.