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Volontourism: the story about international aid work and tourism
Linnaeus University, Faculty of Health, Social Work and Behavioural Sciences, School of Social Work.
2011 (English)In: Places, people, stories, an interdisciplinary & international conference. Linnaeus University, Kalmar 28-30 September 2011, Linnéuniversitetet , 2011Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Tourism and travelling has become a natural part of modern people’s lives. How and why we travel is constantly changing and travelling continues to be a status marker. New popular tourist sights are post-colonial countries and over the last decades a new form of tourism has emerged within this geography: volunteer-tourism or “volontourism”. This is vacation and aid work in one package. With the argument of making a difference travel agents sell package trips which include possibilities of volunteer work such as work with children, building houses for poor people, conservation or archaeology. By the volunteer trip the tourist transforms to a volunteer worker with access to areas considered as the real and genuine parts of people and country. Places and people not traditionally connected to the tourist industry. Consequently the phenomenon is built up by two parts: tourism and international aid work. My aim is to discuss how international aid work is integrated into the commercial travel market by standard stories of historical international aid work. A standard story in this setting means, for many people, a well known story with a uniform logic that gives collective answers to the question what it is, why it has to be done and who we and they are. It helps people create meaning in their experiences and give explanations to why they take certain actions. Thus, this is something a lot of people recognise and have an idea about. This standard story contains: relations (people in need of help and helpers), a specific aid geography (poor ex-colonial countries) and identity (a collective answer to who we, helpers, and they, people in need of help, are as well as reasons for why aid work). What does the story about international aid work contain and what are the similarities and differences when forwarded into commercial volunteer work?

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Linnéuniversitetet , 2011.
Keywords [en]
Volontourism, volunteers, commercial volunteer travel
National Category
Social Work
Research subject
Social Sciences, Social Work
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-42209OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-42209DiVA, id: diva2:802628
Conference
Places, people, stories, an interdisciplinary & international conference. Linnaeus University, Kalmar 28-30 September 2011
Available from: 2015-04-13 Created: 2015-04-13 Last updated: 2018-02-01Bibliographically approved

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Jonsson, Cecilia

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf