This blog-post is from 2018 as a request for helpful readings and sources on Volunteer Tourism. The request came via a Twitter message from Claire Hoeschele, an undergraduate anthropology student:
This summer, I will be doing a research project on Volunteer Tourism and orphanage tourism in Costa Rica. Through qualitative evaluation methods, I hope to gain insight about what these experiences mean to all parties involved. I have been conducting background research since January of this year, and am currently reading Karen Stocker’s ethnography Tourism and Cultural Change in Costa Rica: Pitfalls and Possibilities. However, I’m looking for more reading suggestions from anthropology since I have been reading a lot from sustainable tourism. Lastly, if anyone is familiar with qualitative evaluation methods and literature on teaching ESL, then that would be much appreciated as well. Thanks for your time.
Volunteer Tourism Resources
If folks could drop a comment in the Disqus thread below, that would be great. I’ve also compiled suggestions here:
- One thing I found was “Volunteer tourism: what’s wrong with it and how it can be changed” by anthropology professor Andrea Freidus in The Conversation (2017).
- On Trinketization a recommendation for a book by Wanda Vrasti, Volunteer Tourism in the Global South: Giving Back in Neoliberal Times. Hutnyk notes that this was the topic of his first book, The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation.
- Via Twitter, a recommendation for The Romance of Crossing Borders: Studying and Volunteering Abroad edited by Neriko Musha Doerr & Hannah Davis Taïeb.
- From Living Anthropologically, it might be helpful to understand the depth of Global Encounters.