Refiguring Self And Identity Through Volunteer Tourism

Abstract

What are the impacts of the travel experience on the tourists self and identity? Does volunteer travel provide the opportunity to seek identity in other ways? Interactionist and postcolonialist theories explored within the context of leisure and tourism studies may enable us to move beyond what has remained largely within the tradition of western thought: a predominance of travel to escape, establish identity and a sense of personal individuality in the face of anomic forces of a technological world. It seems timely to develop a self reflexive analysis of those practices assumed to be separate, such as an analysis of the self across cultures in the developed and developing world. We seek to achieve this using volunteer tourism as the focus, examining a dominant cultures' male view of destination communities and nature as 'other' in leisure activities. A greater recognition and incorporation of these in travel experiences allows us to not only enlarge our sense of individual self, but also benefit the communities in which we live and visit.

Evolving Environmental Tourism Experiences in Zambia

“…Volunteer activities may include education, conservation, archaeology and community development elements (Broad, 2003). Volunteering has potential to encourage personal development through interaction with the destination's environment and culture (Wearing & neil, 2000). individuals willingly give up their time and can pay money to contribute towards volunteer efforts (Wearing, 2001).…”

Motivation-based transformative learning and potential volunteer tourists: facilitating more sustainable outcomes

“…While transformative learning can be an uncomfortable process for participants, one that requires an initial challenging of beliefs which can result in strong negative emotions (Coghlan & Gooch, 2011), evidence suggests that some volunteer tourists are seeking the change in perspective that transformative learning provides. As Wearing and Neil (2000) indicate, many volunteer tourists participate in volunteer tourism seeking to change their identities. Additionally, McGehee (2012) summarizes volunteer tourists are often motivated by the potential outcomes of self-development and cultural understanding.…”

Cosmopolitan empathy in volunteer tourism: a psychosocial perspective

“…In the context of volunteer tourism, this has located the individual volunteer tourist as the agent of change and has led to a proliferation of discourses of personal growth, transformative learning and moral self-development, for which we also find substantial empirical evidence from volunteer tourists' narratives (Coghlan & Gooch, 2011;Crossley, 2012b;McGehee & Santos, 2005;Zahra, 2011;Zahra & McIntosh, 2007). Wearing and Neil (2000) suggest that it is in part volunteer tourists' interactions with others from different cultural backgrounds that can bring about a renegotiation of identity and impact on the tourist's self so profoundly. Coghlan and Gooch (2011) make a similar argument for politicised learning in volunteer tourism, suggesting that the practice can be interpreted as a form of 'transformative learning' in which the tourist's social position and naturalised ideologies are critically re-evaluated through shared experiences with others (both other volunteer tourists and local people in the tourism destination).…”