Education, International Volunteering, and Citizenship: Young People’s Subjectivities and Geographies of Development

Smith, Matt Baillie; Laurie, Nina; Brown, Eric G.; Griffiths, Mark; Humble, Darryl

doi:10.1007/978-981-4585-95-8_21-1

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Research attention on the geographies of education has expanded rapidly in quantity and scope (Waters, 2016). Part of this expansion includes generative synergies across multiple diverse areas of research, including: critical geographies of education, radical youth work and participatory research (Dickens, 2017); shifting infrastructures, financial capital and geographies of schooling (Cohen and Rosenman, 2020); cultural and affective geographies (Ang and Ho, 2019); critical race theory (Hunter, 2020); children's and young people's geographies (Baillie Smith et al, 2016); and educational landscapes, neoliberalism and the 'social reproduction of enduring regimes of power' (Holloway and Kirby, 2019: 164), often understanding 'schools as key sites at which issues such as power, identity, citizenship and participation are illuminated' (Pini et al, 2017: 14). Holloway et al, (2010) draw attention to the ways in which unruly neoliberal logics, government policy and market responses from individuals and companies might be productively explored through the geographies of education, offering an example of Thiem's (2009) argument that education is not a 'discrete topical speciality' but instead is a resource for decentred and outward-looking research, 'one in which education systems, institutions, and practices are positioned as useful sites for a variety of theory-building projects' (p.154).…”

Section: Geographies Of Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographical education I: fields, interactions and relationships

Puttick

2022

Progress in Human Geography

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Complex global challenges, rapid shifts in the mediation and distribution of information, rising inequalities and a toxic milieu of low-quality public reasoning make geography education more important than ever. This first progress report explores the nexus of geography education research, geography education practice and scholarship and the geographies of education. Conceptualising the fields through expansive understandings positions this report in an optimistic space, highlighting significant opportunities for geography and its contribution to public reasoning through deepening collaborations and attending to tensions in education’s ‘shadow and shine’: tensions between its complicity in maintaining unjust hierarchies against its potential for emancipatory transformation.

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Section: Geographies Of Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographical education I: fields, interactions and relationships

Puttick

2022

Progress in Human Geography

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“…What these accounts highlight is a tendency to overlook the journeys across difference within smaller or alternative spatial scales that volunteering of different kinds may enable, as well as those that do not fit within the short and prescribed timeframes of development projects. The non-elite cosmopolitanisms of national, local, diaspora or forcibly displaced volunteers are often absent, or viewed through the prism of their experiences of and encounters with international volunteers (Baillie Smith et al 2016, Sin 2010. The obvious implication here is the reproduction of the historical conflation of cosmopolitanism with international mobility; as Schiller et al (2011, 404) argue, while transnational mobilities and connections may provide possibilities for cosmopolitanism, mobility is not necessarily cosmopolitan, and nor does cosmopolitanism require mobility.…”

Section: Volunteering Cosmopolitanism and Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Volunteering and Cosmopolitanism: Beyond Individual Mobilities and Personal Transformations

2019

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In this paper we use assemblage thinking to offer a new interrogation of the relationalities of volunteering and development and to revisit volunteering's relationship to cosmopolitanism. Recent debates about the rise of new actors in development cooperation have seen a growing interest in the geopolitical significance of volunteers and their contribution to development. Research has addressed the ways international volunteering can shape cosmopolitan subjectivities, whilst claims for volunteering's universality are a key feature of global development policy. However, we argue that existing approaches to volunteering, cosmopolitanism and development remain contained by established development imaginaries and their ascription of agency, authority and expertise to actors from the global North. We use the idea of the assemblage, and data from two research projects, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent's (IFRC) Global Review on Volunteering, and a doctoral research project on diaspora volunteering, to explore the constitution of what volunteering is within and between places. Through this, we identify alternative sites for interrogating the capacity of volunteering to challenge established ideas of agency, care and responsibility in development.

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“…of global North-led aid and development, and its colonial contingencies, power asymmetries and neoliberal citizenships (Baillie Smith et al, 2016;Baillie Smith et al, 2013;Griffiths, 2015;Kothari, 2005;Lyons et al, 2012;McEwan & Mawdsley, 2012). Such geographies, thus, both critique and privilege particular types of volunteer and the institutions that facilitate their work, producing a narrow account of the local and transnational relationalities of volunteering and development .…”

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confidence: 99%

South–South volunteering and development

Smith

Laurie

Griffiths

2017

Geographical Journal

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While research to date on volunteering and development has largely focused attention on the global South as a place that “hosts” volunteers and the global North as a place that “sends”, in this article we focus on movements of volunteers between countries in the South. Our objective is thus to consider “South–South” flows of volunteers in order to provide a counter to dominant North–South imaginaries of international volunteering. However, we do not declare or celebrate South–South volunteering as “new”, rather our approach critically engages with the framing of this geography of international volunteering as offering benefits similar to those of wider South–South development cooperation. Drawing on interviews with volunteers and stakeholders in South–South volunteering, we draw out and explore three prominent themes: (1) how volunteers echo some of the wider discursive formulations of South–South development cooperation premised on commonalities within the global South; (2) how these commonalities meet limits at which a heterogeneity of the South is articulated through hierarchical orderings of relations between Southern constituents; and (3) the ways that racialised development imaginaries bring challenges to South–South volunteers. We thus argue that South–South volunteering works, re‐works and contests established imaginaries of development, and their construction and ordering of sameness and difference. We argue further that caution is needed around claims of “newness” of, or unqualified advocacy for, South–South volunteering, which instead needs to be subject to critical attention in the areas we highlight.

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Education, International Volunteering, and Citizenship: Young People’s Subjectivities and Geographies of Development

Cited by 4 publications

References 31 publications

Geographical education I: fields, interactions and relationships

Geographical education I: fields, interactions and relationships

Rethinking Volunteering and Cosmopolitanism: Beyond Individual Mobilities and Personal Transformations

South–South volunteering and development

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