The dilemma of mobility: on the question of youth voluntourism in times of precarity

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we ask whether there has been a revival of ‘youthful aspirations’ in the age of precarity, by examining youth groups’ transnational civic participation in the form of ‘volunteer tourism’ (hereafter, VT). Mobility is central to VT practice, yet is often tainted to various degrees by an associated complex of commercial, extractive, neoliberal, and even racialized interests. Understanding the ‘perils of mobility’, we argue, helps us clear the way for a critical inquiry of VT, rather than closing it down. Without discounting the reality of neoliberal complicity, we want to look a little harder at the possibility of youth enacting change within the contradictions of voluntourism. This project is based on a case study of a Hong Kong-based VT organization called Voltra (established in 2009), especially thirty in-depth interviews with the ‘voltrateers’. We reflect on their first-hand experiences, motivations, challenges, and aspirations to discover a ‘strange synergy’ that is expressed through complex affects that, on one hand, still hold on to the state to be responsible for social change, but on the other hand, develop their own aspirations to freedom generated by a sense of existential authenticity.

KEYWORDS:

• Voluntourists
• precariat
• Voltra (Hong Kong)
• politics of sweating
• existential authenticity

Acknowledgements

This work described in this paper was fully supported by a Faculty Research Grant from Hong Kong Baptist University (Project no. 30-16-289), and a General Research Grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. 12607618).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

John Nguyet Erni is Fung Hon Chu Endowed Chair of Humanics, Chair Professor in Humanities, and Head of the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2017, he was elected President of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. In 2019, Erni received the prestigious President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Research Supervision from HKBU. A former recipient of the Gustafson, Rockefeller, Lincoln, and Annenberg research fellowships, and many other awards and grants, Erni’s wide-ranging work traverses international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth consumption culture in Hong Kong and Asia, cultural politics of race/ethnicity/migration, and critical public health. He is the author or editor of nine academic titles, most recently Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights (Routledge 2019), Visuality, Emotions, and Minority Culture: Feeling Ethnic (Springer 2017), (In)visible Colors: Images of Non-Chinese in Hong Kong Cinema – A Filmography, 1970s – 2010s (with Louis Ho, Cinezin Press 2016) and Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong (with Lisa Leung, HKUP 2014).

Daren Shi-chi Leung is a PhD candidate in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. After completing his MPhil thesis about race, affect and representation on popular culture in Hong Kong Baptist University in 2015, Daren taught courses in popular culture, sociological theories, Hong Kong society, in different universities in Hong Kong. His research interests lie at not only popular culture and racial politics, but also youth participation, sustainability, food politics, and activism. His doctorate thesis is about ‘eating in the future’ through the cases of youth eco-food activisms in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, South China.

Notes

1 Primary data for this project was collected through semi-structured in-depth interview with Voltrateers. The research team collectively conducted 30 interviews from 2016 to 2017 in Hong Kong. Among the informants were two founding members of Voltra, four voltrateers who became Voltra’s staff, and six voltrateers who pursued extended projects after their workcamp experience. All interviewees were identified through snowball sampling. Beside, we also drew information from secondary sources including Voltra’s yearbooks and social media, news coverage, as well as through our first-hand observation at the Glocal-Hero training camp in 2016, and an International Conference of Global Volunteering in 2018 and the NDVA’s 13th General Assembly in 2018, both held in Hong Kong. The in-depth interviews offered us a wealth of insights, assisted by unusually vocal and self-reflective informants. What would have enhanced our observations would be to gain an even deeper experience through an immersive participation in a Voltra workcamp.

2 Aside from coordinating workcamps overseas, Voltra also organizes local workcamps for both Hong Kong residents and foreign visitors for durations of 1–2 weeks.

3 We use real names in these three mobility narratives, with consent from the informants.

4 Here, we supply an additional example. After the 2017 earthquake in Nepal, Janice (25, volunteered in 2015 and 2017) joined a workcamp for temple reconstruction in the capital city Kathmandu. She and other volunteers were assigned to clean up the trash in the city. But they quickly realised that the locals and the tourists alike littered everywhere. Adaptation came when they realized that the action to clean up the city on lofty ecological grounds would not do. Soon, they turned away from the host organization’s focus on ‘care for the environment’ to ‘care for your home.’ Homing, then, became a key message through which Janice and her team initiated new activities (e.g. they drew new posters, lectured, modelled, and even redesigned rubbish bin that can avoid local wild animals). Janice reflected: ‘the locals felt that we did a good job and knew that we wanted to help them improve, so they all told the agency that they hope to have such activities in the future.’ We believe that this adaptation with, and not for, the service targets, exemplifies a lateral aspiration for change.

5 Berlant refers to such feelings of the dead end as the ‘impasse.’ She writes:

I offer impasse both as a formal term for encountering the duration of the present, and a specific term for tracking the circulation of precariousness through diverse locales and bodies. The concept of the present as impasse opens up different ways that the interruption of norms of the reproduction of life can be adapted to, felt out, and lived. The impasse is a space of time lived without a narrative genre … One takes a pass to avoid something or to get somewhere: it’s a formal figure of transit. But the impasse is a cul-de-sac  … In a cul-de-sac one keeps moving, but one moves paradoxically, in the same space. An impasse is a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out into anxiety, that dogpaddling around a space whose contours remain obscure … The activity can produce impacts and events, but one does not know where they are leading. (199; emphasis hers)