Cosmopolitan empathy in volunteer tourism: a psychosocial perspective

ABSTRACT

Volunteer tourism provides a means of proximate engagement with usually distant others, emphasising reciprocity, cultural learning and humanitarianism in poor communities. As such, the practice has come to be investigated for its potential to engender global citizenship, a broader scope of emotional identification, and new kinds of progressive transnational social spaces. This paper focuses on the intersection between volunteer tourism and cosmopolitan empathy, outlining an account of cosmopolitan empathy that draws on a Lacanian psychosocial reading of tourist subjectivity. This theorisation conceptualises cosmopolitan empathy as an emergent property of interrelated social and psychic fields, which results in the affect serving both ideological and psychological functions. I argue that bridging geographical distance through travel presents volunteer tourists with encounters that can potentially destabilise the discourses and fantasies of the needy, grateful Other underpinning their experiences of cosmopolitan empathy, thus disrupting the conventional spatial ontology of affect that frequently dominates theoretical discussions of cosmopolitanism.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteer tourism
• cosmopolitan empathy
• global citizenship
• psychosocial
• affect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Émilie Crossley is a recent graduate of Cardiff University whose work explores tourist subjectivity from the perspective of psychosocial studies and critical psychology. Her doctoral research presents an in-depth, qualitative study of British volunteer tourists in Kenya, focusing on postcolonial constructions of the toured Other, understandings of care in a tourism context, and the development of ‘ethical’ identities over time. She is currently based at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand.

Notes

1. The term ‘investment’ was first used in this sense by Hollway (1984) to denote the reasons behind a subject’s adoption of particular subject positions, replacing ‘choice’ because this implies a ‘rational, decision-making subject’ (Hollway & Jefferson, 2005, p. 149).

2. Extimité or ‘extimacy’ is a Lacanian neologism used to suggest that the truth and centre of the subject lies outside itself (Lacan, 2002). The term attaches the prefix ex (as in exterieur, ‘exterior’) to the French intimité (‘intimacy’), thus problematising the boundaries between the inside and outside of the subject.

3. One Love, deriving from the title of Bob Marley’s hit song, ‘One Love/People Get Ready’, has been used in advertisements by the Jamaica Tourist Board since 1994 in an attempt to combat the country’s negative reputation for being unsafe and unfriendly.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).