Mind the ‘gap year’: a critical discourse analysis of volunteer tourism promotional material

Abstract

The volunteer tourism program (VTP) is a popular form of travel for young tourists in which adventure travel is paired with short-term ‘volunteer’ placements in host communities around the countries of the global South. VTPs are now a routine mode of travel or pre-university ‘training’ for wealthy young people from across North America and Western Europe and exist outside of any historical or political context. They promise adventure travel, altruistic volunteer experiences, and an authentic experience of the other, whom the volunteer can help to transform. If not for the long history of intervention and domination that normalizes this new incarnation of the ‘civilizing mission’, the knowledge claims and authority asserted by the VTP would hardly appear so acceptable. The VTP exists in a cultural blind spot made possible by North–South relations structured on intervention and transformation of the other. This paper critically examines the promotional discourses of VTP providers and identifies the discursive strategies employed to normalize, encode, and legitimate the practice of volunteer intervention. VTP discourses legitimate volunteer intervention through representations of the host community that imagine poverty and authenticity as presenting a need for volunteers and through constructions of a volunteer identity that allows for travel outside of political and historical contexts. I suggest that the VTP can best be understood as a manifestation of continuing patterns of exploitation and domination of the global South, whereby VTP intervention discursively positions itself as ‘innocent’ of the very historical and political trends that make it possible.