Voluntourism as cartography of self: A Deleuzian analysis of a postgraduate visit to India

Abstract

Volunteer tourism takes place within neoliberal globalisation and reflects inequalities of privilege and mobility. This qualitative research examined the experiences of young female voluntourists who visited Delhi as part of a trip organised by an Australian University Postgraduate Student Association. The aim was to investigate the motives and potentialities embedded in their experience through interviews and journal contributions. Conceptualisations of mapping (cartography) and territorialisation informed the analysis. We found that participants mainly engaged with the experience on a superficial level within the known territory. This reflects 'soft global citizenship' as participants were uncritical about their interactions with the host community. Voluntourist experiences have the potential to destabilise the self in a process of deterritorialisation, and we contend that this is where change occurs. We bring the philosophical theorising of Deleuze and Guattari and their notions of territorialisation and cartography to the field of tourism and argue that their geophilosophical ideas lead to fruitful insights around negotiating volunteer expectations, tribulations and potential transformations.

From International to Local: Promoting Local Volunteer Tourism to Guarantee the Persistence of Wildlife Conservation Projects in the Post-COVID-19 Era

“…Some observations from the feedback form are of interest when considering the values of young people in the 21st century. Feeling in a safe environment has been identified as important for volunteer experiences [73,76]. This concept had the potential to be even more heightened during the pandemic.…”

Can We Picture Equity? Critically Examining Cross-Cultural Short-Term Project Collaborations

“…In fact, service trips are often advertised as a way for students to grow their CV (McGloin & Georgeou, 2015). Despite these ambitious promises, voluntourism experiences often yield superficial and uncritical engagement with the unknown (Adkins & Messerly, 2019;Bone & Bone, 2018) and engender "soft global citizenship" (Andreotti, 2006) that obscures relations between what feels good to do and the structural inequities upon which the "need" for volunteers are predicated (Brondo, 2015;Conran, 2011).…”

A (Deleuzian) posthumanist paradigm for tourism research

“…In their work, Gren and Huijberns (2011) and Olafsdottir, Huijbens, and Benediktsson (2013) refer implicitly to a Deleuzian plane of immanence to underscore the singular relationality of the social and the material that is inherent in touristic spaces, places and practices. A few other researchers have also used Deleuzian notions like territorialization, rhizomes, milieu, lines of flight, divergent actualizations, affects or multiplicity, to explore transformations of individual hosts and guests ( Bone & Bone, 2018 ; Grit, 2014 ; Veijola, 2014 ), small tourism firms ( Saxena, 2015 ) tourism destinations ( Pavlovich, 2014 ) and tourism research ( Matteuci & Gnoth, 2017 ). Nonetheless, with the exception of Vejiola, Grit, and Matteuci and Gnoth's work, important Deleuzian concepts such as shown in Fig.…”