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ABSTRACT
When the hybrid business of volunteer tourism (volunteer service coupled with leisure touristic activities) meets the self-referential language of Instagram, travel photography intertwines with the identity construction process. Accordingly, this article examines the visual and textual narratives used to build voluntourists’ identities in their posts from their experiences abroad. Authors highlight the recurrence of a political/apolitical spectrum across which users perform the identities of hero, adventurer, and advocate volunteers. We argue that each identity corresponds to a different approach to the interaction with the local “other.”
Data availability statement:
Data available on request due to privacy/ethical restrictions. The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Stephen Wearing and Nancy Gard McGehee, “Volunteer Tourism: A Review,” Tourism Management 38 (2013): 120–30; Inge Hermann et al., “Enrich Yourself by Helping Others: A Web Content Analysis of Providers of Gap Year Packages and Activities in the Netherlands,” Tourist Studies 17, no. 1 (2017): 78.
2 Ulrike Gretzel, “#travelselfie: A Netnographic Study of Travel Identity Communicated Via Instagram,” In Performing Cultural Tourism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 115–27; Harng Luh Sin and Shirleen He, “Voluntouring on Facebook and Instagram: Photography and Social Media in Constructing the “Third World’Experience,” Tourist Studies 19, no. 2 (2019): 215–37; Haslebacher et al., “Insights from Images Posted on Social Media: Examining the Motivations of Volunteer Tourists,” Journal of Human Resources in Hospitality & Tourism 18, no. 2 (2019): 259–73; Lisa Ashley Sink, “The Voluntourist Gaze: Framing Volunteer Tourism Experiences as Portrayed in Facebook” (master’s thesis, Virginia Tech, 2011), http://hdl.handle.net/10919/45982.
3 John Urry, “The Consumption of Tourism,” Sociology 24, no. 1 (1990): 23–35; Iris Sheungting Lo et al., “Tourism and Online Photography,” Tourism Management 32, no. 4 (2011): 725–31.
4 Gretzel, “#travelselfie.”
5 Tina Rosenberg, “The Business of Voluntourism: Do Western Do-Gooders Actually Do Harm?” The Guardian, September 13, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/13/the-business-of-voluntourism-do-western-do-gooders-actually-do-harm; Dipo Faloyin, “Stop Picking Up Random African Children and Posting Them on Instagram,” VICE, February 28, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbwp9y/stop-picking-up-random-african-children-and-posting-them-on-instagram; Ken Budd, “5 Myths about Voluntourism,” National Geographic, November 9, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/intelligent-travel/2015/02/04/unpacking-voluntourism-five-myths/; Jacob Kushner, “The Voluntourist's Dilemma,” The New York Times Magazine, March 22, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/magazine/the-voluntourists-dilemma.html; Sally Brown, “Travelling with a Purpose: Understanding the Motives and Benefits of Volunteer Vacationers,” Current Issues in Tourism 8, no. 6 (2005): 487–94; Michelle Callanan and Sarah Thomas, “Volunteer Tourism,” Niche Tourism (2005): 183–200; Wearing and McGehee, “Volunteer Tourism.”
6 Haslebacher et al., “Insights.”
7 Ibid.
8 Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
9 Jim Butcher and Peter Smith, “‘Making a Difference’: Volunteer Tourism and Development,” Tourism Recreation Research 35, no. 1 (2010): 27–36; Wearing and McGehee, “Volunteer Tourism”; Stephen Wearing, Volunteer Tourism: Experiences That Make a Difference (CABI, 2001).
10 Angela M. Benson and Stephen Wearing, “Volunteer Tourism: Commodified Trend or New Phenomenon?,” Controversies in Tourism (2011): 248; Richard Sharpley, “Responsible Volunteer Tourism: Tautology or Oxymoron? A Comment on Burrai and Hannam,” Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events 10, no. 1 (2018): 96–100.
11 Benson and Wearing, “Volunteer Tourism,” 242; Butcher and Smith, “Making a Difference,” 27–36; Sin and He, “Voluntouring,” 217; Wearing and McGehee, “Volunteer Tourism,” 121.
12 Butcher and Smith, “’Making a Difference,’” 27.
13 Butcher and Smith, “’Making a Difference.’”
14 Helene Perold et al., “The Colonial Legacy of International Voluntary Service,” Community Development Journal 48, no. 2 (2013): 181–2.
15 Butcher and Smith, “Making a Difference,” 28; Carlos Palacios, “Volunteer Tourism, Development and Education in a Postcolonial World: Conceiving Global Connections Beyond Aid,” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 18, no. 7 (2010): 863–64.
16 Inge Hermann et al., “Enrich,” 79.
17 Butcher and Smith, “Making a Difference,” 32.
18 Giles Mohan, “Beyond Participation: Strategies for Deeper Empowerment,” in Participation: The New Tyranny?, eds Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari (London: Zed Books, 2006), 153–67.
19 Sue Heath, “Widening the Gap: Pre-University Gap Years and the ‘Economy of Experience,’” British Journal of Sociology of Education 28, no. 1 (2007): 93–5; Wanda Vrasti, Volunteer Tourism in the Global South: Giving Back in Neoliberal Times (London: Routledge, 2013); Butcher and Smith, “Making a Difference,” 28; Helene Snee, “Framing the Other: Cosmopolitanism and the Representation of Difference in Overseas Gap Year Narratives,” The British Journal of Sociology 64, no. 1 (2013): 142–62.
20 Wearing and McGehee, “Volunteer”; Benson and Wearing, “Volunteer Tourism.”
21 Stephen Wearing, “Examining Best Practice in Volunteer Tourism,” in Volunteering as Leisure/Leisure as Volunteering: An International Assessment, eds Robert A. Stebbins and Margaret Graham (Cambridge: CAB International, 2004): 209–24; John L. Crompton, “Motivations for Pleasure Vacation,” Annals of Tourism Research 6, no. 4 (1979): 408–24.
22 Benson and Wearing, “Volunteer Tourism.”
23 Callanan and Thomas, “Volunteer,” 196; Wearing and McGehee, “Volunteer,” 123; Sharpley, “Responsible,” 97.
24 Sally Brown and Alastair Morrison, “Expanding Volunteer Vacation Participation: An Exploratory Study on the Mini-Mission Concept,” Tourism Recreation Research 28, no. 3 (2003): 73–82.
25 Haslebacher et al., “Insights,” 262.
26 Brown, “Travelling,” 487–9; Callanan and Sarah Thomas, “Volunteer Tourism”; Wearing and McGehee, “Volunteer,” 123.
27 Angela Benson and Nicole Seibert, “Volunteer Tourism: Motivations of German Participants in South Africa,” Annals of Leisure Research 12, no. 3–4 (2009): 302–6.
28 Haslebacher et al., “Insights,” 261; Inge Hermann et al., “Enrich,” 77–9; Snee, “Framing the Other.”
29 Haslebacher et al., “Insights.”
30 Lo et al., “Tourism and Online Photography,” Tourism Management 32, no. 4 (2011): 725–31.
31 Bailey Seibel, “Insta-Identity: The Construction of Identity Through Instagram” (Bachelor’s thesis, Portland State University, 2019), https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/honorstheses/747/.
32 Seibel, “Insta-Identity”; Daniel Kreiss, “The Networked Self in the Age of Identity Fundamentalism,” in A Networked Self and Platforms, Stories, Connections, eds Zizi Papacharissi (Milton Park: Routledge, 2018), 12–28.
33 Lo et al., “Tourism.”
34 Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 4.
35 Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
36 Mike Crang, “Picturing Practices: Research Through the Tourist Gaze,” Progress in Human Geography 21, no. 3 (1997): 359–73; Lo et al., “Tourism”; Sontag, “Plato’s Cave,” 9.
37 Caroline Scarles, “The Photographed Other: Interplays of Agency in Tourist Photography in Cusco, Peru,” Annals of Tourism Research 39, no. 2 (2012): 928–50.
38 Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
39 Scarles, “The Photographed,” 928–50; Ellyn Clost, “Voluntourism: The Visual Economy of International Volunteer Programs” (PhD diss., Queen’s University, 2011); Hermann et al., “Enrich.”
40 Hélène Joffe, “The Power of Visual Material: Persuasion, Emotion and Identification,” Diogenes 55, no. 1 (2008): 84–93.
41 Henri Tajfel, “Social Identity and Intergroup Behaviour,” Social Science Information 13, no. 2 (1974): 64–93.
42 Henri Tajfel, “Social Identity.”
43 E. W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978); Snee, “Framing.”
44 Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
45 Konstantinos Paglamidis, “Semiotics of Humanitarian Photography” (master’s thesis, University of Malmö, 2013), http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1482350&dswid=8670.
46 Sin and He, “Voluntouring”; Mary Mostafanezhad, “The Geography of Compassion in Volunteer Tourism,” Tourism Geographies 15, no. 2 (2013): 318–37.
47 Kate Manzo, “Imaging Humanitarianism: NGO Identity and the Iconography of Childhood,” Antipode 40, no. 4 (2008): 632–57; Mostafanezhad, “Geography of Compassion.”
48 Mostafanezhad, “The Politics of Aesthetics in Volunteer Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 43 (2013): 161; Vrasti, “Volunteer Tourism.”
49 Sin and He, “Voluntouring,” 215–37.
50 Britta Timm Knudsen and Anne Marit Waade, eds. Re-Investing Authenticity: Tourism, Place and Emotions (Channel View Publications, 2010).
51 Mary Mostafanezhad, “Politics of Aesthetics.”
52 Mostafanezhad, “Politics of Aesthetics,” 156.
53 Mostafanezhad, “Politics of Aesthetics,” 150–69; Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
54 Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
55 Vasant Kaiwar, “Colonialism, Difference and Exoticism in the Formation of a Postcolonial Metanarrative,” Revue LISA/LISA e-journal. Littératures, Histoire des Idées, Images, Sociétés du Monde Anglophone–Literature, History of Ideas, Images and Societies of the English-Speaking World 5, no. 3 (2007): 1–2; Scarles, “The Photographed”; Giorgia Alù and Sarah Patricia Hill, “The Travelling Eye: Reading the Visual in Travel Narratives,” (2018): 1–15; Andrea Ceroni et al., “Mining Exoticism from Visual Content with Fusion-Based Deep Neural Networks,” In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM on International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (2018): 37–45; Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
56 Scarles, “The Photographed”; Snee, “Framing”; Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
57 Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
58 Steve Garlick, “Revealing the Unseen: Tourism, Art and Photography,” Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2002): 289–305.
59 Sin and He, “Voluntouring,” 231–2.
60 Scarles, “The Photographed”; Sin and He, “Voluntouring,” 220.
61 Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
62 Sin and He, “Voluntouring”; Daniel Miller et al., “How the World Changed Social Media,” 1st ed. Vol. 1, UCL Press (2016), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1g69z35; Joseph Walther, “Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction,” Communication Research 23, no. 1 (1996): 3–43; Seibel, “Insta-Identity.”
63 Seibel, “Insta-Identity”; Taylor Miotti, “How to Be Authentic: A Visual Social Semiotic Approach to Travel Photography on Instagram” (Master’s thesis, Lund University, 2019), https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=8987539&fileOId=8987547; Alan Bryman, Social Research Methods (Oxford University Press, 2016).
64 K. Caton and C. A. Santos, “Closing the Hermeneutic Circle? Photographic Encounters with the Other,” Annals of Tourism Research 35, no. 1 (2008): 7–26.
65 Patricia C. Albers and William R. James, “Travel Photography: A Methodological Approach,” Annals of Tourism Research 15, no. 1 (1988): 134–58; Bryman, Social Research Methods; Sink, “The Voluntourist Gaze.”
66 Sink, “The Voluntourist.”
67 Jane Bone and Kate Bone, “Voluntourism as Cartography of Self: A Deleuzian Analysis of a Postgraduate Visit to India,” Tourist Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 177–93.
68 Perold et al., “The Colonial.”
69 Butcher and Smith, “Making a Difference.”
70 Heath, “Widening,” 92.
71 Sin and He, “Voluntouring,”
72 Snee, “Framing.”
73 Steve Garlick, “Revealing the Unseen.”
74 Sin and He, “Voluntouring,” 224.
75 Mostafanezhad, “Politics of Aesthetics”; Sin and He, “Voluntouring,” 218.
76 Brown, “Travelling,” 488; Wearing and McGehee, “Volunteer,” 122.
77 Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
78 Mostafanezhad, “Politics of Aesthetics.”
79 Snee, “Framing.”
80 Benson and Wearing, “Volunteer Tourism.”
81 Pierre Bourdieu, “Habitus,” In Habitus: A Sense of Place (Routledge, 2017), 59–66.
82 Snee, “Framing.”
83 Cohen, Erik. “Tourism, Leisure and Authenticity,” Tourism Recreation Research 35, no. 1 (2010): 67–73.
84 Snee, “Framing.”
85 Snee, “Framing”; Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
86 Mark G. Aune, “Elephants, Englishmen and India: Early Modern Travel Writing and the Pre-Colonial Moment,” Early Modern Literary Studies 11, no. 1 (2005).
87 Butcher and Smith, “Making a Difference,” 30.
88 Butcher and Smith, “Making a Difference”; Benson and Wearing, “Volunteer Tourism”; Sin and He, “Voluntouring.”
89 Butcher and Smith, “Making a Difference,” 31.
90 Butcher and Smith, “Making a Difference.”
91 Ibid.
92 Sin and He, “Voluntouring”; Scarles, “The Photographed.”
93 Bourdieu, “Habitus.”
94 Butcher and Smith, “Making a Difference”; Wearing and McGehee, “Volunteer.”
95 Brown, “Travelling,” 480.