Volunteer tourism - 'doing it for the 'gram': Cambodia, Southeast Asia

• Main Author: WOODS, Orlando
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Asian Studies; Tourism
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research/119
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In recent years, volunteer tourism - or 'voluntourism - has become an increasingly popular way for relatively privileged individuals to access and 'give back' to those deemed to be less privileged. While the motivations for such practices are often benign, so too is there a tendency for the distinctions between 'volunteering and 'tourism' to become blurred. With this blurring, the humanitarian logics upon which volunteerism is assumedly based can become commodified in ways that close down the potential to effect change (Sin, 2009). Exacerbating these closures is the mediatory role of digital photography in documenting voluntourist experiences, and representing the humanitarian self (and disadvantaged others) to dispersed networks of followers via social media. These digital mediations can be seen to 'complicate] simple models of subject and object, representation and reality, image and process' (Crang, 1997: 366) as voluntourists are invariably implicated in the new representational politics of 'doing it for the 'gram' (Woods and Shee, 2021a; 2021b). By this, I refer to the obfuscatory role of digital media (an expansive term that captures practices of digital photography and the circulation of images via social media) in both motivating engagement with humanitarian projects and structuring the encounters that voluntourists have with the people and places they are meant to be serving. Indeed, given the assertion that 40 per cent of British millennials choose their travel destination based on the Instagrammability of the locations' (Wearing et al, 2018: 503), the potential for digital media to reify, and possibly exacerbate, the development differential that voluntourism is designed - in theory at least - to help overcome becomes more apparent.These reifications and exacerbations encapsulate the ethical ambiguity that is evoked in the title of this chapter. They not only cause the meaning of voluntourism to become diluted; they also cause it to become a more 'morally ambiguous construct that can be leveraged for its representational value' (Woods and Shee, 2021a: 48). In this vein, the act of doing good' itself becomes a self-directed form of value creation in which the voluntourist has much to gain from embedding themselves and their beneficiaries within the visual narrative of humanitarianism. Over the past decade, the implications of these 'alternative commodity cultures (Bryant and Goodman, 2004) have become a focus of scholarship, with Wearing et al (2018: 502) even suggesting that voluntourism has reached the level of a 'fully commodified experience where both hosts and tourists become exploited forms of labour and capital'. Zooming out, the commodification of the voluntourist experience might well be enabled by digital media, but so too does it reflect the extent to which a neoliberal ethic has led to the ongoing 'privatization and commodification of development and global justice agendas' (Mostafanezhad, 2013a: 321). In this sense, not only does 'doing it for the 'gram' motivate disengagement with the people and places that define the landscapes of voluntourism, but so too does it implicate them in an aesthetically driven narrative of marginality that can be read as one of neoliberalism's more insidious effects. Before illustrating these ideas empirically, I first provide a brief theoretical overview of how debates concerning representations of the 'suffering subject' and 'hero humanitarian' have evolved in recent years.