A recent Aljazeera report on 'Cambodia's Orphan Business' explains 'how "voluntourism" could be fuelling the exploitation of Cambodian children'. Anti-orphanage tourism movements have emerged to resist the growth of Cambodia's contested orphanage tourism industry, which is blamed for widespread corruption and the exploitation of children for profit. Taking a Polanyian political economy approach, this article illustrates how the emergence of and response to the orphanage tourism industry represent, in Karl Polanyi's words, a 'double movement' between the neoliberalization of orphanages and the corollary protective countermovement by antiorphanage tourism campaigns that challenge the industry's morality and legitimacy. It argues that while resistance to the commodification of orphanages under the newly neoliberalized Cambodian economy reflects Polanyi's double movement thesis, the limits of this resistance are also indicative of how countermovements are challenged by the broader political economy in which they operate.

No abstract

Experiences involving vulnerable children are among the most popular volunteer tourism practices. Celebrity humanitarianism and aid campaigns promote images of vulnerable children receiving love and care from international celebrities and humanitarian actors (mainly women), normalising intimacy within popular humanitarianism, or “hug‐an‐orphan” vacations – vacations where tourists crave direct contact with children in global South countries (Schimmelpfennig, 2011, http://goodintents.org/orphanages/hug-an-orphan-vacations-3). Through accounts given by orphanage directors, volunteers, and commentaries on orphanage tourism, this paper describes the layered emotional entanglements within orphanage tourism. Volunteer tourism literature increasingly recognises the importance of affect in such experiences, principally concentrating on how it leads to its growing popularity. Indeed, many volunteer tourists are motivated from a distance to volunteer at orphanages, being drawn to the possibility of engaging with children. However, their emotions within these encounters are far less examined, and the reality of the lifestyle these children live in is often far more upsetting than expected. Regarding the orphans themselves, the argument I make within this paper is that the commodification of children through orphanage tourism experiences has resulted in an expectation that they will interact with tourists in particular forms. Children are expected to be “poor‐but‐happy” and to engage intimately with volunteers and visitors to engender tourist satisfaction and encourage sympathy and donations. The performance of this behaviour is mediated and controlled by their emotional supervisors, orphanage directors. Through volunteer tourism, children are now a tourist commodity, utilising their love and emotions and creating space for exploitation.

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.

Although children of all ages have the right to participate in urban planning projects, pre‐literate children’s voices are absent from urban debates. In this paper, we explore pre‐schoolers’ experiences in, and expectations for, their city by drawing on a participatory research project that used neighbourhood walks and a tile‐based mapping exercise. Findings suggest that young children, although largely absent from planning, policy or child‐friendly city discourses, nonetheless, deeply engage with and value their city and its human and non‐human inhabitants. In our study pre‐schoolers from Dunedin, New Zealand created an urban environment which cares for their citizens by being safe, socially and physically connected and has destinations, amenities and services available for all ages and abilities. We argue in this paper that pre‐schoolers created not only cities based on their own experiences, but ‘care‐full’ cities that ensure the liveability, flourishing and wellbeing for humans and non‐humans.