Giving Back,Doing Good,Feeling Global: The Affective Flows of Family Voluntourism

Emotion and Affect in Volunteer Tourism

Given that voluntourism sits at the somewhat unlikely intersection between leisure and volunteer work, research on volunteer tourism connects to several distinct bodies of scholarship. It builds on deep traditions in sociological and anthropological studies of leisure (Veblen [1899] 1934; Rojek 1995) and altruism, labor and solidarity (Durkheim [1893] 1997, [1895] 1964), but also draws on more recent scholarship in the areas of emotion and affect (Berlant 2000, 2004) and neoliberalism (Foucault 2008). Indeed, much of the literature has focused on volunteer tourism’s emotional contours as they relate to the neoliberal conditions of global capitalism.

By most accounts, volunteer tourism is an emotional journey, with voluntourism packages often sold on the seductive promise that participants will feel good by doing good (McGloin and Georgeou 2015). It is no surprise, then, that many studies find that volunteers explicitly seek out encounters that will produce feelings of intimacy (Conran 2011), compassion (Mostafanezhad 2013), vulnerability (Parreñas 2012), and even heartbreak (Crossley 2012), intense emotions that may offer an antidote to the bland emptiness of modern life in the affluent Global North (Parreñas 2012; Koch 2015).

Scholars and practitioners frequently refer to voluntourism as “making a difference” (Wearing 2001), referring not only to the difference volunteers make in host communities, but to the deep, personal transformation voluntourism can bring about in the volunteer herself (Wearing 2001, 4). Emotion is pivotal in this transformation, as Anne Zahra and Alison McIntosh illustrate through the concept of catharsis. Following Aristotle, they define catharsis as an “emotional release following the witness of tragic event(s) that lead to a moral influence on the person that is later transferred into virtuous action” (2007, 115). In interviews with voluntourists from Australia and New Zealand, Zahra and McIntosh found that volunteer experiences, such as being confronted by stark cultural differences or exposed to extreme poverty in host communities, were essentially cathartic in nature, often provoking outbursts of grief and tears, spiritual experiences, or personal epiphanies that, in turn, shaped volunteers’ altruistic behaviors. Based on these findings, Zahra and McIntosh suggest that cathartic experiences can “facilitate positive change” and help voluntourists discover their “role in the universe and society” (2007, 115).

In a similar vein, Émilie Crossley’s interviews with voluntourists revealed that “emotions and affects play a crucial role in enabling moral transformations of the self” (2012, 85). One of her respondents, a young British woman named Sarah who was planning to volunteer in a village in Kenya, predicted she would cry when she witnessed people in impoverished conditions, but anticipated the experience would be rewarding, “allowing her to realize her material wealth . . . and attain a more appreciative state of mind” (89). For Sarah and the other voluntourists in Crossley’s study, “encountering destitution is narrated as an unpleasant yet necessary experience that one must go through in order to trigger emotions such as sadness and guilt, which in turn facilitate the positive change in the self” (94).

Although the extent and duration of such emotional transformations are debatable, scholars argue that the cathartic release experienced during volunteering is deeply meaningful to participants. And because emotional experiences such as sadness or guilt catalyze emerging activist subjectivities, catharsis may have long-lasting and far-reaching impact beyond the trip itself (Wearing 2001; Zahra and McIntosh 2007). Not unlike dark tourism, where exposure to historical instances of genocide or slavery produce emotions that may translate into political advocacy (cf. Clark 2009, 2011), or ecotourism where affective encounters with nature spur pro-environmental behaviors (Staus and Falk 2013), the emotions produced through volunteer tourism are also thought to engender moral or political subjectivities. As James Jasper has argued in the broader context of social activism, emotions are “part of our responses to events, but they also—in the form of deep affective attachments—shape the goals of our actions” (1998, 398). In other words, emotional responses to poverty or cultural differences constitute an affective field that makes new attitudes, behaviors, and subjectivities possible.

The question some critics ask is whether these affective attachments ultimately advance global justice agendas, or whether the emphasis on emotion forecloses political action. This concern animates Mary Conran’s (2011) analysis of voluntourism sites in northern Thailand, where she found that volunteers wanted to experience intense emotions. They especially valued the moments of intimacy they shared with local people and with the young children in their care. Conran’s analysis of intimacy, along with her later work on “geographies of compassion” (Mostafanezhad 2013), highlights two problems stemming from the affective flows of volunteer tourism. First, the flow of emotions like intimacy and compassion from North to South maps onto, and naturalizes, an unequal emotional geography in which empowered voluntourists from the Global North offer care and generosity, while passive recipients in the Global South reciprocate with gratitude, authenticity, and intimacy.

Second, Conran argues, “the focus on intimacy overshadows the structural inequality on which the encounter is based and reframes the question of structural inequality as a question of individual morality” (2011, 1455). The result is that emotions like “intimacy, goodwill and compassion are used to justify and depoliticize the volunteer experience” (Conran 2011, 1465). In other words, by shifting the focus away from the historical or political roots of global inequalities and onto the emotional or moral transformation of the voluntourist, the discourse of sentimentality depoliticizes development work and precludes radical structural solutions to these inequalities.

Commodification may also be to blame for attenuating the political capacity of voluntourism. Critics point out that despite its veneer of altruistic service, voluntourism is actually a commodified experience that situates participants and their social justice aspirations in the realm of the marketplace rather than in the civic sphere of political activism (Conran 2011; Sinervo 2011; Lyons et al. 2012). Emotional experiences, such as promises of intimate interactions with local children or the rewarding feeling of making a difference, are part of the commodity being sold. In their critique of voluntourism marketing campaigns, McGloin and Georgeou (2015, 7) illustrate how “voluntourism companies apply the language of ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ to sell the commodity of development and to appeal to a consumer desire to effect social change.” Instead of exercising political agency, voluntourists are encouraged to focus on transforming themselves and pursuing “morally justifiable lifestyles” (Butcher and Smith 2010, 30), both of which entail feeling particular feelings, such as sadness, compassion, or intimacy.

For this reason, many scholars have observed that volunteer tourism is embedded in a broader neoliberal logic that shapes contemporary social life. Though neoliberalism has several connotations, I use it here to refer to the range of economic policies and government practices that bring all aspects of social life in line with market rationality. This includes effectively shifting social welfare concerns into the marketplace, where citizens are empowered through consumer choice and individual responsibility, as well as strategies that “encourage subjects to give their lives entrepreneurial shape” (Vrasti 2013, 21). The rise of the volunteer tourism industry itself can be seen as an outcome of the retraction of state welfare (Conran 2011). As the state withdraws public social resources in favor of privatized solutions, it leaves a void filled by NGOs, private foundations, faith-based organizations, and volunteer tourism agencies. It is worth pointing out that strategies of neoliberal governmentality are by no means restricted to the institutional settings of global development or state government, but rather seep into personal and intimate spheres, such as the self and the family. For example, voluntourism offers opportunities for tourists from the Global North to develop themselves in line with the entrepreneurial imperatives of neoliberalism by acquiring marketable skills, demonstrating self-sufficiency, and cultivating emotional skills that will give them a competitive edge in the neoliberal labor market (Simpson 2005; Lyons et al. 2012).

When we consider the role of emotion in the commodification of volunteer tourism, we see that voluntourism and its related emotions are also experiences through which volunteers commodify themselves. Knowing what to feel, how to express those feelings, and how to translate those feelings into commodifiable skills becomes part of the “emotional labor” (Hochschild 1983) voluntourists do in order to develop themselves as desirable, employable global citizens. In study after study, voluntourists cite mixed motives for volunteering abroad. The desire to help others is certainly one motivation, but just as important is the desire to gain hands-on experience and develop professional skills (Simpson 2005; Jones 2011; Smith and Laurie 2011; Lyons et al. 2012; Vrasti 2013; Allon and Koleth 2014). Through voluntourism, participants “create a ‘personality package’ which builds ‘identity’ and is instrumental to being competitive in the workplace” (Lyons et al. 2012, 370; Simpson 2005). Volunteer tourism is an effective way to signal on a CV that the candidate has cultivated a range of “soft skills” (such as open-mindedness, intercultural communications skills, flexibility, and a global outlook) required by employers in the neoliberal marketplace (Jones 2011; Allon and Koleth 2014).

In previous studies of backpacking and youth travel, Luke Desforges (2000) and Ian Munt (1994) observed that middle-class youth used international travel “to stoke up cultural capital,” which was then used to stoke up economic capital (Jones 2011, 539). Today’s voluntourists might be said to use their international volunteer experiences to stoke up “emotional capital” for the same purposes. In other words, through voluntouring, they are able to build up the kind of “emotional capacities and entrepreneurial competencies” (Vrasti 2013, 15) that position them competitively in the global labor market (Simpson 2005). Wanda Vrasti (2013, 130) describes the neoliberal conditions under which volunteer tourists come to relate to themselves as marketable commodities:

Simply having lived and worked in places the West considers destitute and dangerous earns volunteers a flexible seal of quality. By developing multicultural sensibilities or mastering cultural tensions, volunteers distinguish themselves as mature, magnanimous and mobile subjects unencumbered by sovereign borders and cultural boundaries. . . . Being “at home in the world” is no longer the mark of the cosmopolitan aristocracy . . . but a requirement for all workers who wish to enter the ranks of the middle class. Because it places young adults in trying circumstances and foreign settings, volunteer tourism . . . can help individuals amass scarce social capital, demonstrate their cognitive and communicative skills, and become the transgressive, risk-taking subjectivities multinational capital thrives on.

Many scholars have noted that making our way in the uncertain and precarious landscape of “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000) will require a new set of social and emotional skills (Wittel 2001; Bialski 2012). As Vrasti’s comments suggest, volunteer tourists are not merely negotiating their own emotional responses to the different cultural conditions in which they find themselves, they are also, simultaneously, navigating the affective flows of neoliberal capitalism in which their chances for success hinge on their emotional competencies (such as their ability to feel at home in the world). In this sense, volunteer tourism is a measure of the “emotional climate of globalization” (Elliott and Lemert 2006), which I refer to as “feeling global.”

These debates leave us with several important questions about what it means to feel global. Are emotions a conduit to more radical, activist subjectivities and solidarities, or does the focus on sentimentality depoliticize volunteer tourism? Do the affective flows of voluntourism reproduce power hierarchies along emotional lines, or do they offer potential ways of dismantling global inequalities? And what happens to human relations and our sense of self when emotions are commodified as experiences to be consumed and skills to be sold in the neoliberal marketplace? The literature on voluntourism has tended to address these questions through the eyes of individual volunteer tourists who are on the cusp of entering the global labor force. The analysis I offer here contributes a somewhat different perspective, namely, that of parents volunteering abroad with young children.

Methods

The analysis in this article is based on a twelve-month “mobile virtual ethnography” (Germann Molz 2012) of worldschooling families. As noted earlier, worldschooling, also known as roadschooling, is an alternative educational approach in which parents take their children out of formal school settings and teach them while traveling the world. Because worldschooling families are, by definition, constantly on the move, studying them poses significant methodological challenges that mobile virtual ethnography addresses.

Similar to methods such as virtual ethnography (Hine 2000) or netnography (Kozinets 2010), mobile virtual ethnography entails interacting with respondents and communities by following blogs and websites, communicating through email or video conferencing, and connecting with individuals and groups via social media platforms. The fact that many worldschooling families publish blogs and maintain a social media presence online makes it possible to stay in touch with this mobile community. However, unlike netnography, mobile virtual ethnography also includes meeting up face-to-face and traveling together in person with respondents. In this sense, mobile virtual ethnography mirrors the ways in which most of us conduct our daily social lives, interacting with friends, colleagues, and family members through a combination of mediated and face-to-face communication. Given the fluidity and hybridity of the ethnographic field, which is just as likely to consist of mobile and ephemeral connections in virtual spaces as it is to be a physical place (Howard 2002; Germann Molz 2012; Germann Molz and Paris 2015), mobile virtual ethnography allows researchers to become immersed in mobile lifestyles and social relations by “following” and “traveling with” research participants across multiple physical and virtual sites online, face-to-face, on the road (Büscher and Urry 2009; Haldrup and Larsen 2010).

Informed by mobile virtual ethnography’s emphasis on combining virtual and physical connectivity, I followed worldschooling families online by monitoring, downloading, and analyzing the travel blogs (n = 50) that they published as they traveled. This group of fifty blogs represents a purposive sample of a larger database of nearly two hundred worldschooling or roadschooling travel blogs that I generated using online search engines to identify families traveling the world with school-aged children, and virtual snowball sampling to extend the scope of my search (Noy 2008; Baltar and Brunet 2012). In the virtual domain, travel blogs and social media sites are significant spaces for ethnographic interaction and observation. Since personal travel blogs first appeared online in the late 1990s, they have been rich sources of data, offering researchers access to travelers’ narratives as well as insight into their interactions with an extended social network (Dann and Parrinello 2007; Mascheroni 2007; Sigala, Christou, and Gretzel 2012). As Hookway (2008) puts it, blogs do not merely document social life, they are social dramas in the making. In addition to “hanging out online” (Kendall 2002) by regularly checking in as blogs were being updated, I downloaded all of the posts and comments published on each blog and coded them using Atlas.ti. I also interacted with families in a variety of social media forums established to share support, inspiration, and information among traveling families. In some cases, I found these groups by searching for relevant key words on sites like Facebook; in other cases, I was informed of and invited to join these groups by parents I met in person.

My online observations were coupled with physical travel and in-person encounters with other worldschooling families, made possible by the fact that I spent seven months traveling as a worldschooling parent with my husband and our ten-year-old son. By incorporating this analytic autoethnography (Anderson 2006) component in the study, I was able to meet up with families in Argentina, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States who became the subjects of in-depth face-to-face research interviews (n=12).

The data this analysis draws on include interview transcripts, travel blog content, and ethnographic fieldnotes based on my online interactions and encounters and observations while traveling, as well as marketing materials and relevant magazine and newspaper articles on family voluntourism. Triangulating these various sources of data contributed to a deeper understanding of the cultural context that shapes the personal meanings parents attribute to traveling and volunteering with their families. Assisted by Atlas.ti analysis software, I used qualitative and inductive techniques to identify discourses, code themes, and discern patterns in these data. During this process, volunteering appeared as a significant part of many families’ experiences. Because my analysis is concerned with understanding the emotional dimension of family voluntourism, I refined my coding to capture the subtle themes related to emotion and affect that reverberated within this practice.

For the purposes of this analysis, I narrowed my focus to the 30 families (out of 50) in my sample who undertook some form of volunteer experience while traveling. Although there is some demographic diversity in the research sample, the families in this group are predominantly white and come from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The parents tend to be well-educated and are intent on transferring cultural capital to their children through traveling. Despite considerable disparities in income (often due to the fact that some of the travelers in my sample have foregone salaried jobs to pursue traveling lifestyles), most of the families express middle-class values related to parenting, education, environmental stewardship, social justice, and global citizenship In regard to race, class, and country of origin, therefore, these families align with the demographic profile of voluntourists more generally (Sin 2010; Conran 2011; Lyons et al. 2012; Mostafanezhad 2013), except on the issues of age and gender. For example, surveys indicate that more than half of all volunteer tourists are between twenty and twenty-nine years old and that approximately 80 percent of volunteers are women (Mostafanezhad 2013, 319). In my research sample, there is a more even distribution of gender and the parents in this sample are, on average, in their thirties and forties, traveling with children ranging in age from infants to teenagers. In the analysis below, I do not use the names of any children, nor did I interview any children under the age of eighteen. In interview extracts and field notes, I identify respondents using pseudonyms; however, I use the real names of travelers when citing blogs or articles that are accessible to the public.

The families in my sample engaged in a variety of humanitarian activities such as playing with children at orphanages and daycare centers, helping out at local libraries and community centers, or working with trafficked and exploited women and children. Volunteering on wildlife and nature conservation projects was also popular among these families, many of whom worked at zoos, animal shelters, and elephant sanctuaries, helped with beach clean-ups or sea turtle hatchling releases, or WWOOFed on organic farms. ² Although similar opportunities to work with communities in need could certainly be found closer to home, and indeed several families had engaged in volunteer opportunities in their home countries, many of the parents in my study saw the international setting as central to the experiences and outcomes they wanted for their children. As I began to focus on the emotional and affective dimensions of these volunteer experiences, I noticed two kinds of narratives that repeatedly emerged in families’ accounts: stories about catharsis and connection and stories about comfort zones. The remainder of the article is devoted to analyzing these two stories and teasing out their implications for feeling global.

Catharsis and Connection

As we waited in the lobby of our Chiang Mai hostel for the minivan to pick us up, my ten-year-old son wondered aloud whether we would be allowed to touch the elephants. “Maybe,” I answered. I didn’t want to get my son’s hopes up. “We will definitely get to feed them,” my husband offered encouragingly. I had learned about the Elephant Nature Park, a sanctuary for rescued elephants in northern Thailand, while interviewing a worldschooling family who spent a week volunteering at the park. I had also seen accounts of volunteering at the Elephant Nature Park in some of the blogs I had been following as part of my ethnographic fieldwork. From this research, I knew that many families with young children spent a week or two at the park doing a variety of tasks: handling food deliveries and preparation, helping maintain the facilities around the park, and shoveling copious amounts of elephant droppings. ³ We were just going for the day, and our activities would be limited to feeding and bathing the elephants.

A young man in a crisp white shirt appeared in the lobby and introduced himself as Mr. Som. The three of us followed Som down the alley and climbed into an air-conditioned minivan already nearly full with other tourists. After an hour or so, our van pulled off the highway and followed a dirt road up to an open lot where five or six other vans were already parked. From there, Som led us to a multilevel, open-air house with a large viewing balcony overlooking part of the 250 riverside acres of lush jungle where the rescued elephants roamed slowly in small groups. Soon it would be time to feed the elephants, but first we were asked to join the other groups to watch a film. We filed into a large room and sat down in rows of chairs. The film introduced us to Sangduen “Lek” Chailert, the park’s founder, and explained how her passion for elephants was ignited when she was a child. As a small girl, Lek became attached to a baby elephant her grandfather, a traditional healer, had received in return for saving a man’s life. When she was sixteen, she visited a logging camp where she saw the elephants being abused and exploited. After graduating from university, Lek committed herself to rescuing abused elephants and eventually opened the sanctuary.

The film then depicted an elephant enduring its training crush, a brutal ritual meant to break the elephant’s spirit. The graphic images of elephants penned in tiny cages being stuck with sharp pokers and whipped by their mahouts were admittedly hard to watch. The footage that followed showed the result of this taming ritual. Mahouts paraded their docile elephants through the city streets while unwitting tourists, their faces blurred out like a crime scene caught on hidden video, paid to pet or feed the elephants. On that note, the film ended with a clear set of steps we could follow to advance the park’s mission: while in Thailand, refuse to support trekking agencies that offer elephant rides or mahouts who use elephants to solicit money on city streets; and when we returned to our home countries, spread awareness about the plight of Asian elephants.

My son sank down into his seat and held his hands over his eyes when the images on the screen were too disturbing. As I put my hand on his shoulder to comfort him, I turned around to see that many people in the room were wiping tears from their eyes. I had been warned about the footage by some of the parents in my research sample. One father from the United States who volunteered at the park with his wife and two sons had written on his family’s travel blog:

Our indoctrination on the first day began with a film of what Elephant Nature Park was all about and how Lek had come to start it. . . . It was horrifying. . . . The young elephants’ screams were heart wrenching. Many were in tears by the end of the film, myself included. Alana had the boys out of the room within the first five minutes. They were there to learn and care for the elephants but there’s only so much an eight and ten year old should see.

And another worldschooler, a Dutch-Canadian mother who volunteered with her husband and two small boys, offered a similar account of their arrival at the Elephant Nature Park on her blog:

The video we were shown of this “crush” ritual was unbearable to watch and I kept trying to shield the children from the gruesome images shown, but they insisted they wanted to see and learn. Honestly, I don’t know anyone that in good faith can go ride an elephant after seeing that video (we are certainly “cured” for life and know better now). Our orientation brought home right away why we were at ENP to volunteer!

We spent the rest of the morning feeding the elephants, who delighted us by nimbly removing pieces of fruit from our outstretched hands. After feeding time, we toured the park, meeting some of the older elephants who had been featured in the film, including one who had been injured by a landmine. We then ventured out to the river to bathe the elephants with buckets of water. In the end, my son did get to touch an elephant—we all did—and it was thrilling.

For Rose’s family, too, the heartbreak of the film gave way to more positive emotions once she and her children were able to interact with the elephants, a mix of joy and distress that she captures in a later comment:

As heartbreaking as it sometimes was to see the abused elephants (they . . . were blind from abusive slingshots to their eyes . . . or still had open wounds on their feet 5 years after stepping on a landmine), there was also lots of hope and joy in the Park. Happy and relaxed elephants bathing, elephants that found new family groupings and received such loving care that had turned them from aggressive to hopeful, playful and full of joy.

In one sense, we can understand the film and parents’ reactions as a kind of emotion work undertaken by park administrators and by parents to bring about a particular emotional response. Emotion work involves managing one’s own feelings in order to align with cultural norms of emotional expression or to bring about a desired emotional state in others (Hochschild 1983). In this case, the emotion work was geared toward evoking a cathartic response as a basis for moral action (Zahra and McIntosh 2007). As Morgan’s term “indoctrination” and Rose’s claim that they were “cured for life” suggest, the film was clearly intended to elicit in the audience an appropriate sense of outrage at the cultural and environmental threats to the elephants’ survival. These parents did a significant amount of emotion work on behalf of their children as part of the volunteer experience. Alana and Rose both tried to “shield” their children from being disturbed by the film’s “heart wrenching” and “gruesome images.” At the same time that parents tried to protect their children from distressing emotions, however, they also wanted to facilitate other emotional responses to the situation, namely for their children to care for the elephants, to feel justified in their decision to volunteer, and to sense the joy of helping.

A week after visiting the Elephant Nature Park, we traveled to Udon Thani, a city in the northeast of Thailand. As we sat at a roadside stall eating supper, a mahout with a baby elephant approached our table and asked us to buy a bag of bananas for the hungry animal. Having learned from Lek’s film that this was a common ploy to extract money from tourists, my son was on the verge of tears as he weighed the injustice of the situation. His response reminded me of another comment I had read on one of the worldschooling blogs. Noah and Ann, a couple from the United States who traveled with their son and daughter, reflected on what their children had learned from volunteering at the Elephant Nature Park:

I see L. taking what she has seen and learned in the world and becoming something of an activist. She has grown in confidence and is much less afraid to share her opinions with others. After spending two weeks volunteering with elephants and dogs at Elephant Nature Park, she will never let us buy a dog from a breeder, attend a circus, or ride a “trekking” elephant.

Returning to Zahra and McIntosh’s (2007) concept of catharsis helps us understand how the film operates as an important node in the affective experience of volunteering at the park. The film, and subsequent embodied encounters with the elephants at the park, expose parents and their children to the elephants’ suffering in ways that evoke an emotional release (e.g., tears in the screening room), which in turn informs a moral attitude and virtuous action (Zahra and McIntosh 2007, 115). For example, Nick Fox argues that “watching a film about injustice may produce anger (an ‘emotional’ capacity), a desire to donate money or time to a campaign, and an identity as a campaigner” (2015, 10). In other words, films can prompt emotions, “such as love, anger or fear,” that can in turn be “powerful motivators of action” (Fox 2015, 10). Lek, who was transformed into an activist when she witnessed the brutality of the crush as a child, is a model for children like my son, or like Noah’s daughter, who extend their moral lessons into an activist stance. The disturbing feelings evoked by the film, combined with the joyful experience of encountering the elephants, generated feelings of care and responsibility not just for the elephants in the park but for elephants and other animals everywhere.

Sara Ahmed writes in her work on affective economies that “emotions . . . are bound up with how we inhabit the world ‘with’ others” (2004b, 28). Through emotional experiences, we are moved to act, interact, and inhabit certain subjectivities in relation to the world, as evidenced by Noah’s daughter’s emerging sense of confidence and activism. In reflecting on her family’s experiences, Noah’s wife, Ann, writes that volunteering provides her family “a unique opportunity to get involved in something bigger than ourselves” (TravellersPoint.com). Her comment echoes a belief expressed by many parents that volunteering while traveling is a way of helping their children feel emotionally connected to the wider world, thereby expanding their children’s scope of care and responsibility. In other words, catharsis can lead to a sense of connection and agency on a global scale.

We see this notion reflected in a comment from Lainie, a mother who has been traveling with her fifteen-year-old son since he was ten. On her blog, she reflects on the benefits of volunteering abroad with her son:

I think the rewards gained from our life-style choices are immeasurable. . . . My son has the opportunity to experience his own humanity through so many things, like volunteering, connecting with people young and old and stepping outside of his comfort zone. . . . [He] experiences within himself a sense that he can really do anything in his life that he desires.

Lainie suggests that volunteering has facilitated a range of emotional responses in her son: a sense of connection with people who are not like him, an awareness of his own place in a global community, and, above all, a sense of agency in the world, all emotions that I associate with feeling global. In her comments, Lainie also notes that her son has had an opportunity to step “outside of his comfort zone,” which brings us to the theme of the next story.

Comfort Zones

This section explores the affective flows of comfort and discomfort as emotions that propel Global North children toward certain kinds of moral and global subjectivities. Parents regularly draw on the metaphor of the comfort zone to describe the benefits of volunteering with their children. In many of these cases, comfort zone is a shorthand term for the kind of materialistic, solipsistic, technology-saturated, suburban bubbles that middle-class children from the Global North normally occupy. Nudging kids out of that comfort zone is shorthand for exposing them to cultural differences, material hardships, technology deprivation, and physical labor in order to trigger the kind of personal transformation that volunteer tourism promises. In fact, scholars argue that a “deep, structural shift in the basic premises” of everyday life facilitates the disorienting dilemmas and confusing emotions that are necessary for transformative learning to take place (Coghlan and Gooch 2011, 716). Eschewing comfort and embracing discomfort, at least temporarily, is another way children learn how to feel global.

In a story that appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, travel writer Claire Shipman (2013) draws on the comfort zone metaphor as she chronicles her first foray into family voluntourism on the Indonesian island of Bali. As much as she craved a relaxing hiatus from her hectic work life, Shipman felt compelled to organize a more productive and educational experience for her children. The compromise: a volunteer vacation that combined tropical beachcombing with a stint working with the East Bali Poverty Project. In the article, Shipman documents her ambivalence about volunteering in an impoverished Balinese village, wondering just how helpful her “saucy six-year old” daughter and her nine-year-old son, “who might be recovering from post-computer-loss stress syndrome” could possibly be. After considering volunteering closer to her home in the United States, Shipman realized that her kids needed to get out of their “cocoon of privilege”:

My gut told me an experience away from home, from our comfort zone, for at least a few days, might make a stronger impression, and allow us to really dig into a project and the culture. To be perfectly honest, I also thought it might assuage my own guilt about my own taste for luxurious globe-trotting.

The fact that Shipman frames her family’s volunteer tourism experience in terms of her own guilt corroborates scholarly critiques that associate the rise of voluntourism with an ever increasing “guilt-conscious society” (Callanan and Thomas 2005, 183; Zakaria 2014). Critics argue through volunteer work, tourists merely buy out the guilt associated with their affluence and privilege (Lyons et al. 2012, 372; Sin 2010). On the other hand, some voluntourists desire to feel—rather than assuage—the guilt. For example, Crossley’s respondents narrated guilt as “an unpleasant yet necessary experience” that ultimately “facilitate[d] the positive change in the self” (2012, 94), such as an enhanced sense of responsibility to the world’s poor (Sin 2010).

In Shipman’s story, there is a fine line between her own sense of guilt and her children’s. Shipman wants her children to be at least more aware of the privileged position they occupy in the world, not necessarily to feel guilty about it. As she writes, volunteer tourism helped her do precisely that: “The combination of traditional holiday and volunteer travel fit just right—we appreciated our more cushy trappings, and put them into perspective with plenty of rich discussions.” Shipman does not expect her children to relinquish the cushy trappings of their comfort zones, but she does want to trigger a sense of gratitude and appreciation.

Like Shipman, many of the parents in my study hope that these intersecting emotions of guilt, gratitude, and responsibility will cultivate their children’s sense of global citizenship. As Shipman writes,

Driven by the same impulse that sends so many adults off in search of meaningful travel . . . I am eager to make a journey . . . that might nudge my kids toward being good little people, and perhaps, in years to come, even better big ones. . . . I want to nourish and nurture responsible people, who will grow up aware of the world’s challenges. . . . [I]f they are lucky enough to have the privilege of far-flung travel, I want my children to understand, first-hand, a fuller picture of human existence. And ideally, the fact of their own good fortune will simply seep in.

Here, Shipman articulates an aspiration common to many middle-class parents: that their children will become responsible, mobile, and world-wise global citizens. Exposing them to the poverty that exists beyond their own doorsteps is one way of achieving this.

However, there is a twist in Shipman’s comfort zone story that comes near the end of the article:

[I]n midst of lives of such poverty, lives so different from ours, there is a palpable measure of hope and joy universal to all children when nurtured. At that moment my kids stop feeling like they are seeing an alien life-style, on a mission to help people truly different. They just start to have fun, and to a small extent, to bond with their kindred spirits. And I also think, at that moment, that the Balinese kids believe the world at large is not so far away or so foreign. And that they are part of it.

At the same time that Shipman describes voluntourism as pushing her kids out of their comfort zones, she also draws on a kind of myth of “universal childhood” (Zeddies and Millei 2015) that briefly erases the cultural and material differences between her children and the children at the village school. The moment of cultural transcendence that Shipman captures in this passage recurs in many of the stories I encountered in my ethnographic research. It reminded me, in particular, of my interview with Harris, a father from Australia who traveled around the world with his wife and their seven-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son.

I met Harris in the lobby of our Bangkok hotel, where our kids had become engrossed in a video game on my son’s tablet. As the kids played, Harris told me about the week his family spent volunteering at a community day care center in one of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. Comments from worried friends and family members about how unsafe it would be to stay in a favela weighed on Harris’s mind as the taxi from the airport wove its way deeper and deeper into the impoverished neighborhood where the family would be volunteering. Harris admitted that he and his wife were pretty nervous, but that they “put on brave faces” so the children wouldn’t panic. When they arrived at the hostel where the volunteers stayed, “the kids just took it all in stride,” Harris recalled. “There were all these other adults checking in, and they all looked a bit wide-eyed, wondering what they’d just gotten themselves into! But our kids didn’t perceive anything. They just wanted to play with the children.” Harris was inspired by the “innocence or naiveté or whatever it is that children have that keeps them from pre-judging situations and people.” He confided that he was proud of his children, precisely because they were so comfortable outside of their comfort zones. Harris stopped for a second and then added, “How can you know unless you go there? You can’t just tell your kids that other places are safe. They have to go there and have the experience for themselves to offset all the negative media and scary warnings.”

Although parents want to get their children out of their comfort zones in order to evoke certain feelings that will, in turn, lead to transformative learning and an enlarged worldview, at the same time they emphasize how comfortable their children are anywhere in the world, regardless of the deep cultural differences and stark material inequalities they encounter. Voluntourism is not just about getting Global North children out of their comfort zones, but about expanding their comfort zones. In other words, through voluntourism, these children are able to feel at home in the world, thereby consolidating their emerging subjectivities as adaptable, tolerant global citizens. Navigating the affective interplay between comfort and discomfort requires the kind of emotional flexibility that comes with feeling global. Global North children learn how to cope with difference, how to handle guilt and feel gratitude, and how to carry the burden of responsibility that comes with privilege.

Parenting Global Children in Neoliberal Times

The preceding stories about catharsis, connection, and comfort zones illustrate the complex emotions that are produced, suppressed, managed, and circulated in family voluntourism as parents cultivate children’s emerging sense of global citizenship and encourage them to feel global. I want to situate these stories, and my analysis of them, within a broader affective dynamic at play in contemporary approaches to parenting. I am referring to the culture of anxiety that shapes middle-class parenting, especially in the affluent societies of the Global North. Claire Shipman gives us a glimpse of this dynamic in a comment about planning her family’s volunteer trip in Bali. She writes:

Like a lot of parents today, both my helicopter and tiger instincts run strong. I’m eager to give my kids opportunities, to show them the world, but am increasingly concerned they live in a cocoon of privilege.

Shipman is alluding to two of the parenting trends de jour that constantly inundate middle-class parents. In this case, “helicopter parents” are over-protective guardians who micro-manage their children’s educational and emotional experiences, while the “tiger mother” (a reference to the title of Amy Chua’s 2011 book) sets high expectations and pushes her children to succeed in the increasingly competitive worlds of academics, sports, and performing arts. These parenting strategies share a tendency to see children as projects to be developed through “concerted cultivation” (Lareau 2011), but they share something else. Both approaches emerge out of a sense of deep anxiety, risk, and uncertainty that permeates social life in the age of “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000).

How can stories of parents taking their children to volunteer with elephants or with poor children in a rural Balinese village be traced back to an emotional climate of anxiety? The connection may not be immediately obvious, but consider the shifting social landscape in which today’s generation of parents have come of age. Prior to the late twentieth century, social identities and personal biographies were more rigidly ordered by tradition, class structures, and religion than they are in today’s hypermodern world, where, primarily through consumer choice, we are now free to invent ourselves and our lifestyles (Giddens 1991; Lipovetsky 2005). In fact, we are compelled to do so. This sense of freedom and choice extends to parenting styles as well. Unlike previous generations in which parenting techniques, like most aspects of everyday life, were tightly prescribed by “the sureness of folkways” (Mead, cited in Senior 2015, 176), today’s parents are free to experiment with different ways of raising and relating to their children. The tradeoff for this freedom, however, is that we lack a definitive roadmap for parenting, partly because we are no longer bound to tradition, but primarily because we don’t know exactly what kind of future we are raising children for. This places parents in a situation that is both liberating and terrifying—one in which the freedom to choose how to live our lives or raise our children is equally matched by an obligation to make those choices and to take responsibility for the consequences. This is what sociologists are getting at when they refer to the middle-class western experience of family life as “anxious parenting in uncertain times” (Nelson 2010) or as “motherhood in an age of anxiety” (Warner 2006).

What I am describing are the emotional consequences of a neoliberal logic that pervades modern society (Elliott and Lemert 2006). In other words, as individuals apply a market logic to their own lives, they see themselves as savvy consumers, weighing choices in terms of costs and benefits, managing risks, assuming responsibility for their own welfare, and making themselves competitive players in the global labor force. The responsibility for securing children’s futures falls primarily on the shoulders of parents who face a future made uncertain by globalization, unprecedented technological advancements, and the competitive nature of free market capitalism. Parents are unsure how to prepare their children for a global future in which, according to pundits’ predictions, tomorrow’s job seekers will be competing not just with their local peers, but with top students from Delhi and Beijing, and where future workers will hold multiple jobs, including ones that haven’t even been invented yet (Nelson 2010; Senior 2015). Which skills will children need? What qualities might give them a competitive edge? Add in parents’ increasing concerns about raising entitled, self-absorbed, materialistic, technology-addicted, callous children, and the culture of anxiety becomes palpable.

This is where family voluntourism comes in. Against the anxiety-producing milieu of competition and uncertainty, voluntourism promises to equip young people not only with CV-worthy skills and experiences that will set them apart, but also with a repertoire of emotional competences that will prepare them for whatever the future might bring. Voluntourism is seen as developing particular emotional skills, such as “maturity, bravery, self-sacrifice, . . . communication, cooperation, [and] leadership skills,” which will be required for future work in the new economy (Vrasti 2013, 15; Jones 2011; Lyons et al. 2012). As Allon and Koleth (2014, 63) argue,

Volunteer tourism is just one component of the substantial amount of “emotional labour” involved in the production of the emotionally intelligent, competent, personable, confident and well-rounded individual—the most desirable worker around today. [T]he performance of emotional labour and the accumulation of emotional intelligence and competence . . . are indispensable to the ideal neoliberal workplace.

According to this logic, emotional skills rather than content knowledge will best prepare young people to compete in an uncertain future labor market.

Unlike the college-aged individuals profiled in this literature, however, most of the children in the families I have studied are too young to be seriously worried about their CVs (although more than one parent commented that their child’s volunteer experience might show up in a future college admissions essay). Instead, my focus on family voluntourism shows how the anxious culture of neoliberalism plays out at the register of parenthood.

It is unclear—at least to parents—what kinds of academic or professional skills their children might need in the future. What does seem clear is that children will need to be emotionally flexible and to be able to call up and express an affective repertoire of adaptability, empathy, open-mindedness, and tolerance. Indeed, according to recent reports, employers are becoming increasingly interested in job candidates’ emotional intelligence, such as deep cultural knowledge or skills in personal interaction (Colvin 2015; Gray 2015). The implications of this argument thus extend beyond voluntourism, but voluntourism is both a significant symptom of and a strategy for navigating this uncertainty. Through family voluntourism, parents expose their children to poverty and injustice and help them cultivate appropriate emotional responses to these inequalities, emotional skills that will prepare children for the global subjectivities they will be expected to inhabit.

Conclusion

Family voluntourism is not about making a difference in the world, but rather about equipping children with the emotional skills they will need to live in the uncertain and unequal world of neoliberal globalization. Through experiences like voluntourism, children develop emotional qualities that will make them competitive and help them maintain their position of privilege in an uncertain economic future; at the same time, they exercise emotional skills such as compassion and understanding that will help them navigate the responsibilities that accompany their position of privilege in a perpetually unequal world. In this sense, feeling global does not necessarily disrupt the deep structural inequalities that voluntourism seeks to remedy. On the contrary, as Elizabeth Spelman writes, “compassion, like other forms of caring, may also reinforce the very pattern of economic and political subordination responsible for such suffering” (cited in Ahmed 2004b, 35). Wanda Vrasti echoes this paradox in her claim that “even pleasurable and empowering individuation strategies, like those employed in volunteer tourism, can make people complicit with unjust and violent conditions” (2013, 20).

This critique echoes the idea that an emphasis on emotions and individual morality in voluntourism discourse depoliticizes the social justice agenda of humanitarian work (Conran 2011; Mostafanezhad 2013, 2014). However, the paradox I have uncovered here is that it is precisely the exigencies of neoliberal governmentality that compel parents to focus on emotions and to teach their children to feel global in the first place. Emotions do not just depoliticize volunteer tourism; emotions are political. To put it another way, the political and economic milieu of neoliberalism entails a particular feeling, a point Wanda Vrasti captures when she writes, “it is not that we have acquiesced to neoliberalism; rather we have become emotionally attached to it” (2013, 55). The analysis of family voluntourism offered here hints at some of the ways social research might uncover the complexities and nuances of these emotional attachments to a global political system that perpetuates inequalities even through efforts to alleviate them. My hope is that this initial exploration will encourage researchers to delve more deeply into the empirical practices of family voluntourism and the broader affective dynamic of neoliberal globalization that shapes these practices. By tracing the historical trajectories of voluntourism’s affective flows, paying attention to the emotional labor it entails, and highlighting the way feeling global is complicit with unjust political structures, but may also challenge them, social researchers can offer important insights for activists promoting social justice agendas. The emotional strategies volunteers, including parents who volunteer with their children, use to cope with, resist, or nestle into neoliberalism may also be the key to unlocking alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in a “spirit of service.”