Pain, politics and volunteering in tourism studies

Ryan Frazer and Gordon Waitt

Annals of Tourism Research, 2016, vol. 57, issue C, 176-189

Abstract: This paper is an ethnography of how six Australian volunteers experience a house-build project in the Philippines. Contingencies of empathic pain arising from the living conditions of those they aimed to help were felt through their bodies. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s ideas on pain enabled us to explore the politics of volunteer tourism. We suggest the intensification of volunteers’ empathic pain constitute ambivalent spaces. In some volunteering contingencies, pain led to a blurring of conventional boundaries of ’them’ and ’us’, giving priority to difference over dominance. In others, volunteers reproduced dominant understandings of volunteering that mobilised neoliberal and colonial discourses. We conclude by encouraging other tourism scholars to think politically about pain.

Keywords: Affects; Emotions; Sensations; Qualitative; Volunteer tourism; Philippines (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160738316300032
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:anture:v:57:y:2016:i:c:p:176-189

DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2016.01.001

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Tourism Research is currently edited by John Tribe

More articles in Annals of Tourism Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().