Learning to Enact Canadian Exceptionalism: The Failure of Voluntourism as Social Justice Education

ABSTRACT

Voluntourism, or volunteer abroad, is a form of travel involving unpaid work intended to benefit a local community. Critiques of voluntourism as reproducing and, indeed, perpetuating global inequities are yielding a re-framing of voluntourism around principles of partnership and equality. Drawing from ethnographic data, this article analyzes one school’s efforts to establish and leverage a voluntourism program as social justice education. I trace a reversible discourse of inspiration (“I inspire Others” and “I am inspired by Others”) to demonstrate how elite school students, white and of color, transmute extractive relationships with their Black South African peers into feeling good about doing good, thus becoming an exceptional Canadian subject: the global (girl) citizen. The findings have implications for understanding voluntourism as a salient site for grooming young elites to participate in the production of the white settler state. This article demonstrates how voluntourism fails as social justice education, and provokes a larger debate about abolishing school-based voluntourism.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Karishma Desai, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Gada Mahrouse, and Brenda N. Sanya, whose input helped shape this article at various stages of the writing process. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and the journal editors for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. During my research, I also observed this problematic re-centering of whiteness within other elite school voluntourism programs.

2. Throughout this article I predominantly use the term “girls” because this is how the young women referred to themselves. Additionally, this research is in conversation with girlhood studies.

3. This strategic management of the encounter is one example of how the Black South African educators leveraged the encounter to set the stage to request significant, additional resources from Manorwood’s teachers. This suggests that there was a great deal at stake for the township teachers in facilitating an encounter that would nurture the volunteers’ fantasies of themselves as benevolent humanitarians.

4. Elsewhere (Angod, 2015) I explore how elite school voluntourism trips are a tough sell for boys. In the context of this project, the laptop component had little to do with technology; rather, the technology was one mechanism among several that facilitated a caring, nurturing encounter (for example, the physical contact of guiding children’s hands on a mouse).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leila Angod

Leila Angod is an assistant professor at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research is at the nexus of critical race, transnational, and decolonial feminisms, critical youth and girlhood studies, and the sociology of education. Her work explores how schools invite young people to embody racial and colonial orders, and how youth-centered research can create sustaining communities and other worlds. https://carleton.ca/iis/people/leila-angod/

Dedication:

For Dr. Arnold Itwaru.