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ID:
121772
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Reporting on the growth of volunteer tourism, a recent Time magazine article explains, 'Getting in touch with your inner Angelina Jolie is easier than it used to be!'. In myriad ways celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna have made international volunteering sexy. These women and their adopted children from the so-called 'Third World' have come to symbolise popular humanitarianism in the West. This paper addresses the cultural politics of female celebrity humanitarianism and the corollary implications of this practice for 20-something female volunteer tourists in northern Thailand. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the cultural politics of gendered generosity in these encounters overshadows the institutional and historical relationships on which the experience is based and that, in a neoliberal sleight of hand, the political is displaced by the individual with celebrity sheen.
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| 2 |
ID:
163051
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| Summary/Abstract |
Critiques of the voluntourism industry focus on power imbalances, colonial legacies and white privilege. Drawing on the literatures of development and voluntourism to find points of comparison, we argue that the voluntourism industry reflects myriad development problems, such as structural challenges, the fungibility of aid, corruption, representation, worker narratives and temporality. We assert that many of the problems inherent in voluntourism could be remedied by the evolution of a contract norm between volunteers and their local partners, where reciprocity and transparency might practically serve as a corrective to voluntourism’s most entrenched problems.
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