Abstract
This article critically examines the geography of volunteering in relation to international development. We identify the investments involved in sustaining the North–South imaginaries that have come to dominate scholarship in this field and explore new ways of unsettling this geography. We draw together empirical material from five different research projects, conducted with distinct thematic and geographical foci over a six‐year timeframe. We do so in order to show how existing geographies of volunteering and development have produced fixed understandings of agency and experiences in diverse contexts, meanwhile side‐lining the temporalities associated with such fixings. We highlight how the continued privileging of northern mobilities, temporalities and biographies has segregated particular settings and types of volunteering and obscured other, often shared and sometimes co‐produced development processes, relationships and spaces. In developing a new approach, we first emphasise the importance of looking at the “hidden geometries” that shape the individual, institutional and organisational articulations that are central to the relationship between volunteering and development. Second, we introduce the idea of a flattened topography to level the emphasis on difference in the geographies associated with this relationship. We aim to make visible new volunteers and development actors as well as reveal different rhythms and routines of volunteering, and different identities, biographies and forms of career and life‐making connected with volunteering and development.
Highlights
In his article ‘The geography of volunteer tourism: place matters’, James Keese (2011) argues that destination is primary in the recruitment of international volunteers by non-government organisations (NGOs)
We develop the idea of a flattened topography of volunteering and development to unsettle their established geographies, highlighting different rhythms, routines and biographies that cut across South and North
Cultural, political and emotional investments in a partial geography of volunteering have produced a dominant set of policy debates, initiatives and intellectual framings
Summary
In his article ‘The geography of volunteer tourism: place matters’, James Keese (2011) argues that destination is primary in the recruitment of international volunteers by non-government organisations (NGOs). We conceptualise it as something that happens where a volunteer is located within a specific temporality, which is shaped by a set of overlapping and shifting social, economic and political relationships within and between places Such forms of global work mark a moment in time, and make up part of people’s longer lives. Volunteer lives cross different terrains, make links across and within South and North and are read and interpreted backwards and forwards as significant moments of meaningmaking over a lifetime By introducing such a temporal and narrative dimension to the analysis of volunteering in development, we seek to critique relational conceptualisations of space which, while being critical of the over-determination of spatial binaries (e.g. North– South, formal–informal), are still prone to them. We bring centre stage the shifting kinds of agency volunteering promises and produces for diverse interest groups associated with both volunteering and development agendas
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