Volunteer tourism as a borderland

• Decades of research on volunteer tourism have both praised it for social and environmental benefits and shamed it for its commercialization or reinvigoration of colonial thought. Voluntourism has been placed interchangeably as a phenomenon in-between working tourism, ecotourism, alternative tourism, and sustainable tourism. Behavior of volunteers have been analyzed both through the prism of “tourist gaze” and as “ulterior-motive” travelers. Lately, voluntourism has been considered a borderland of contradictory spheres: working and touring, in the problematic interface between consumption and devotion. Unsurprisingly, understanding of voluntourism has been marred by the lack of exhaustive, workable definitions. This has affected ways in which voluntourists perceive the relationship between the self, the helped, and the environment, but also as a process of meaning-making. Consequently, tourism industry representatives and local authorities have kept minding and adapting to the voluntourism business, offering more sophisticated ways to undertake volunteering. What used to be considered a clash of two activities, now absorbs a significant part of the tourism economy. Put differently, the core of voluntourism has changed to now being perceived as a borderland. To reconcile the ambiguity surrounding the role of voluntourism in today’s economy, this presentation aims to offer a new socio-geographic perspective that is more apt to make sense of the volunteer tourism as a contested borderland. Departing from theoretical and empirical insights, this will be done by discussing the following: 1) Does voluntourism still entrench the global North-South divide? 2) Is volunteer tourism used to reinforce the “green marketing” of a destination? 3) What is the role of voluntourism within ulterior-motive travel in a post-Covid reality? We argue, it is in these dimensions the new face of voluntourism will be considered in the nearest future: seen more as a chance than a problem.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Social och ekonomisk geografi -- Kulturgeografi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Social and Economic Geography -- Human Geography (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

volunteer tourism

ulterior-motive travel

tourism marketing

volunteer tourism

Human Geography

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)