Making a difference together: discourses of transformation in family voluntourism

Abstract

This article explores the intersection of development discourse, volunteer tourism, and practices of family travel. While research on the emerging trend of voluntourism has tended to focus on young, single, college-aged volunteers, little attention has been paid to families with young children who volunteer abroad. Taking as its starting point the prevalent message that voluntourism can “make a difference”, the article examines the implications of emphasizing the family and the child, rather than structural inequalities, as the objects of transformation. Based on face-to-face and online interactions with worldschooling families, the article uses mobile virtual ethnography to create an in-depth and immersive study of mobile and online social groups. Findings suggest that families undertake voluntourism as a strategy for fostering family bonding and cultivating their children's sense of global citizenship. In both cases, family voluntourism pursues transformation in the private sphere of the family rather than in the public sphere of political activism. In this sense, discourses of transformation make family voluntourism complicit with neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility and entrepreneurialism that may reinforce rather than dismantle entrenched Global North/Global South power hierarchies, but they also lend themselves to critical debates that may recuperate the transformative potential of volunteer tourism.