Making a difference together: discourses of transformation in family voluntourism

Abstract

This article explores the intersection of development discourse, volunteer tourism, and practices of family travel. While research on the emerging trend of voluntourism has tended to focus on young, single, college-aged volunteers, little attention has been paid to families with young children who volunteer abroad. Taking as its starting point the prevalent message that voluntourism can “make a difference”, the article examines the implications of emphasizing the family and the child, rather than structural inequalities, as the objects of transformation. Based on face-to-face and online interactions with worldschooling families, the article uses mobile virtual ethnography to create an in-depth and immersive study of mobile and online social groups. Findings suggest that families undertake voluntourism as a strategy for fostering family bonding and cultivating their children's sense of global citizenship. In both cases, family voluntourism pursues transformation in the private sphere of the family rather than in the public sphere of political activism. In this sense, discourses of transformation make family voluntourism complicit with neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility and entrepreneurialism that may reinforce rather than dismantle entrenched Global North/Global South power hierarchies, but they also lend themselves to critical debates that may recuperate the transformative potential of volunteer tourism.

一起创造不同：家庭公益旅游中的话语转换

本文探讨了社会的发展话语，公益旅游以及家庭旅游实践之间的交集。大多数对新兴产业公益旅游的研究针对于年轻的单身大学生志愿者，而少有涉及有孩子的海外志愿者家庭。文章以热门话题公益旅游能够带来``与众不同的体验"为出发点，分析了在公益旅游影响下的家庭关系从不平等到和谐的转变。本文基于与世界各地志愿者家庭的面对面交流和网络在线互动，利用移动虚拟民族志创建了一个让人身临其境的移动、线上社会群体。研究结果表明，这些家庭把公益旅游作为他们建立和睦家庭关系和培养子女全球公民意识的方法。家庭公益旅游在上述这两种情况中都关注于私人家庭关系，而非公共政治活动领域的转变。从这个意义上说，话语的转换使家庭公益旅游与新自由主义理想下的个人责任和创业精神相互融合，这可能加强而非消除全球根深蒂固的等级制度, 但是他们自身就足以引起对有关公益旅游变革潜力的讨论。

Keywords:

• development discourse
• family tourism
• global citizenship
• neoliberalism
• parenting
• transformation
• voluntourism

关键词:

• 发展话语
• 家庭旅游
• 全球公民意识
• 新自由主义
• 家庭教育
• 转变
• 公益旅游

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions, and to the editors of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, especially Bernard Lane, for his careful editing and encouragement. The author also wishes to acknowledge that the ethnographic fieldwork in this study was made possible in part by an O'Leary Award from the College of the Holy Cross.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennie Germann Molz

Jennie Germann Molz is an associate professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is the author of Travel Connections: Tourism, Technology and Togetherness in a Mobile World (Routledge, 2012), co-author of Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and co-editor of Mobilizing Hospitality: The Ethics of Social Relations in a Mobile World (Ashgate, 2007).