International volunteering occupies a popular place in contemporary UK public imaginations. It is supported by a range of stakeholders, including the state, the corporate sector and non‐government organisations (NGOs), which increasingly share a narrative emphasising international volunteering’s capacity to develop volunteers whose impacts on global equity or their professional identities emerge on their return as much as during their stay overseas. This paper explores discourses and practices of citizenship, professionalisation and partnership as they produce and are produced through contemporary international volunteering. We do this through interrogating the overlapping genealogies of international volunteering and development. Our analysis explores the ways in which international volunteering seems to both exemplify neoliberal ideas of individual autonomy, improvement and responsibility and at the same time allies itself to notions of collective global citizenship, solidarity, development and activism. To illustrate our argument we examine two sets of volunteering partnerships, those that support the Department for International Development’s £10 million, 3‐year programme focused on sending young, British disadvantaged people as international volunteers, and the corporate citizenship volunteer programmes supported by VSO and the international consulting firm, Accenture. Interrogating contemporary state, corporate and civil society promotion of international volunteering allows us to examine how notions of professionalisation and global and neoliberal citizenship are produced through development imaginaries, and are negotiated and constructed among and by new volunteering populations and sectors at a moment when, particularly due to the credit crunch, economic and career futures are fragile and uncertain.

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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. K E Y W O R D Sbiographies, flattened topographies, international development, relational space, temporalities, volunteering | INTRODUCTIONIn 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). Here we question the dominance of international volunteers in development volunteering scholarship and explore geography as more than place and destination. We interrogate the geographical imaginary that frames volunteering research and examine the extent to which current geographies of volunteering are able to contain the tensions and contradictions associated with contemporary international development, and their transcendence of established North-South spatial imaginaries. We argue that the "global work" (Jones, 2008) of wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/tran | 95