Towards critical global education worker subjectivity: An exploration of narratives of American women engaged in education-related international volunteerism

Lucy Mule

doi:10.18546/ijdegl.8.2.05

Abstract

International volunteerism is increasingly associated with shaping global subjectivities of participants. Significant numbers of Global North volunteers – whether working through established volunteer organizations, corporations, nonprofits, academia, or personal networks and connections – engage in educationrelated activities while in the Global South. I emphasize in this paper that education-related international volunteering presents a rich context in which to explore global subjectivities due to the high likelihood of participants' engagement with mobility, difference, poverty, inequality, and development. In this paper, I explore six women's accounts of their transnational experiences and resulting understandings of their education-related work. Four related thematic categories derived from these accounts convey meanings of education-related work in terms of self-fulfilment, social responsibility, active engagement with host communities, and cross-cultural competence. I explore two overlapping subjectivities – participatory and critical – that emerge from an exploration of these themes, examine how they intersect with common discourses of international volunteering and development, and discuss the implications for the relationship between global citizenship and education-related international volunteering.

Highlights

Individuals from the Global North, including the United States of America, are increasingly embracing international mobility and an ethos of volunteerismMule as a response to what Rizvi (2009: 253) calls the ‘contemporary conditions of globalization’
While acknowledging the contested nature of the term ‘global citizenship’, this paper presents an exploration of two co-existing and overlapping global subjectivities – participatory and critical – that emerged from an analysis of the narratives of six white American women involved with long-term educationrelated international volunteering
This paper involved an exploration of six white American women’s accounts of their transnational education-related work and resulting understandings. It affirmed that international education-related volunteering provides a rich context in which to explore participants’ global subjectivities. It assumed that there is a relationship between education-related volunteer practices and ideas about global subjectivity, and that the relationship can be ascertained from participants’ narratives about their work

Summary

Introduction

Individuals from the Global North, including the United States of America, are increasingly embracing international mobility and an ethos of volunteerism. Scholars in the fields of development and development education who recognize international volunteers as development actors are increasingly urging an elucidation of the ways whereby volunteers’ global subjectivities relate to common discourses of development and international volunteering This paper supports this call and affirms the view that such an exploration of subjectification allows for a nuanced understanding of the volunteering experience in an increasingly changing and complex global context (Baillie Smith et al, 2013; Baillie Smith and Laurie, 2011). Volunteer tourism (Bailey and Russell, 2012), gap year and career gap experiences (Lyons et al, 2012), and other forms of short-term volunteering (Tiessen and Heron, 2012) are examples of international mobility that are seen as privileging individual choice, autonomy, and marketability They reproduce certain conceptions in which, as Baillie Smith (2013) notes: development concerns have become subservient to a focus on the Global Northern volunteer and their personal development (Baillie Smith and Laurie 2011)

Towards critical global education worker subjectivity

Description of the study

Study findings and discussion

Mutual learning

Conclusion