Volunteer Tourism Essay

This narcissistic self-work further manifests itself in the online advocacy efforts of individuals in the Global North, either prior to or after volunteer tourist work, as well as in the absence of. Koffman et al. (2015) describe a form of online humanitarian work known as ‘selfie humanitarianism’ where young girls in the Global North express solidarity with their sisters in the Global South through the posting of selfies on social networking sites. Unlike early “victim orientated” humanitarian communicaton (Chouliaraki 2010, 110), these contemporary forms of humanitarian and volunteer tourism efforts further extend the idea of volunteer tourism as self work by situating the privileged individual as the central focus. Instead of the images

This idea stems from the whiteness of the volunteers and development workers, the prominence of which has attracted extensive attention and criticism (Conran 2011, 1464). The popularity of volunteer tourism among privileged white individuals who are “participants in [the] wealthy capitalist society” (Greenberg 2008, 284) that is the West has garnered criticism that volunteer tourism is, ultimately, a “new form of colonialism” (Conran 2011, 1464). The idea and presence of the ‘white saviour’ “evokes the legacy of the colonial past of the West” (Chouliaraki 2010, 111). Furthermore, in combination with the volunteer tourist’s lack of knowledge of the political and social context of the host community, as mentioned previously, the presence of the ‘white saviour’ serves to “promote a lifestyle of cultural and material values that may be inappropriate” (McLennan 2014, 165) to the host community. As a result, the poverty and inequality that the volunteer tourists seek to dismantle is instead reinforced through both their presence and the beliefs that they hold. Therefore, on a cultural and social level, the presence of the privileged white individual in the Global South causes more harm than it does