Creating reflexive volunteers? Young people's participation in Czech hospital volunteer programmes

Abstract

Drawing on a recent ethnographic study of contemporary hospital volunteering in the Czech Republic, this paper explores the changing ideologies underpinning youth volunteering in the Czech context and shows how they may be linked to broader socio-economic and political transformations that have taken place in Czech society following the collapse of state socialism in 1989. Volunteering discourses in the contemporary period promote processes of individualisation, and the experiences of young volunteers highlight volunteering as an activity enabling the construction of distinctive personal identities and biographies. The article examines the extent to which these developments can be illuminated by the theory of reflexive modernisation. It is argued that this thesis can conceptually elucidate the emphasis on reflexivity in the creation of young people's contemporary volunteer identities. At the same time, however, young volunteers' reflexive practices also create the ground for the reformulation of certain well-established health hierarchies and gender inequalities linked to the socialist era.