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ABSTRACT
This paper examines short-term, volunteer tourism in Romania as a form of education for global citizenship. Drawing upon data collected through participant observation and qualitative interviews with numerous stakeholders, we argue that global citizenship education in this programme not only aligns with neoliberal governmentality, as others have deftly pointed out vis-à-vis volunteer tourism more broadly, but also has troubling implications for volunteering as civic engagement. Due to a short length of stay, a significant language barrier, limited professional or technical expertise, and a lack of knowledge of the service context, what volunteer tourists were able to do in a Romanian intentional community research context, was extremely limited: they primarily played with children. And while this childcare function occasionally offered pragmatic assistance to local community members, volunteers’ evolving understandings of the purposes and role of volunteering in global citizenship contrasted sharply with other understandings of volunteering – particularly those that frame volunteering as a component of democratic citizenship education.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Cori Jakubiak is an assistant professor of education at Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA, where she teaches courses in educational foundations and applied linguistics. Her research focuses on English-language voluntourism, or short-term, volunteer English language teaching in the Global South.
Iulia Iordache-Bryant worked as an English language teaching fellow at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand, after graduating from Grinnell College with a joint degree in psychology and Russian. Her current area of research interest includes international education in Southeast Asia.
Notes
1. Although on-site NGO staff members specifically asked volunteers not to take pictures of Celebrate Life’s residents (in part because many of them were in hiding from domestic violence), many did so anyway. We also saw evidence that volunteers were posting these pictures to online social media sites like Facebook.
2. To this end, the second author made sure that the first author visited Bucharest, the famed Transfăgărăşan highway, and a well-known Soviet-era salt mine prior to her return to the US.