can produce emotions like alienation, embarrassment, or belonging (Doerr and Lee 2012, 2013; Frekko 2009; Krashen 1998; Yamasaki 2011). Others examine the role of affect in out-of-class learning, such as how culturally specific categories of affect are passed on in linguistic socialization of young children (Schieffelin and Ochs 1987) and how interactions with the “native speakers” of the language outside the classroom, the cultural capital of the target language, and the language-learners’ investment in the social position they wish to occupy—such as mother-figure or immigrant—play a crucial role in the language-learners’ desire to learn and speak the language (Heller 2003; McEwan-Fujita 2010; Pierce 1995; Whiteside 2009).
Another line of research focuses on the management of affect in education, particularly in advanced capitalism. Lynn Fendler (1998) argues that the rhetoric in current US education suggests the need for reflective teachers with understandings of critical and culturally relevant pedagogy and character education. These emphases point to new types of things that are teachable. Besides intellect and disciplined behavior, motivation and attitudes—desire for education—have become something that teachers aim to teach. Love, pleasure, feelings, wishes, fears, and anxieties—in other words, “soul”—all became teachable and things that educated subjects should have. The educated subject that critical pedagogies aim to create is a subject with a desire for social justice and moral commitment to democracy (Fendler 1998).
Similarly, the idea that study abroad can create global citizens with “intercultural competence” involves believing that it is possible through education to bring into being particular attitudes, such as openness and willingness to interact with cultural Others. This process involves work on the self, and reinterpretation of one’s own affect and that of others through new kinds of educative processes. As will be detailed in Chapter 2 of this volume (Taïeb and Doerr), affect and learning have been discussed for many years in the literature on study abroad in terms of the practical issues involved in making “intercultural learning” smooth and helping students adjust to the destination. The focus of discussion moved from handling “culture shock” and its discomforts to include how these can be turned into learning experiences, how to improve students’ openness to and understanding of others, and how to increase students’ confidence and ability to navigate new environments. More recently, the field has developed new ways of thinking about emotions, with the emergence of the idea of fostering “emotional resilience” in students, and an increasing fine-tuning and development of the process of transforming affect from discomfort and fear into “intercultural competence” and “cultural self-awareness.” Study abroad research takes these approaches for granted and thus has not approached them as objects of examination and analyses.
Chapters in this volume contribute to a broadening of how affect and learning can be viewed in these fields. As mentioned above, first we do so by problematizing and analyzing the ideology of globalism prevalent in higher education generally and in study abroad in particular. The ideology is linked to the desire to be “interculturally competent” (though the two are not identical). The search for “intercultural competence” also intersects with other, differently inflected notions of learning, such as moving away from the “mother tongue” to the new social order of the new language (Rodriguez), critical understandings of social issues (Taïeb et al.), learning through immersion (Doerr), learning through academic work (Kumagai)—with varying effects.
We also consider in detail particular emotions, including those of romance, and discuss their mobilizing and transformative effects. Rodriguez’s chapter takes a fresh look at the passions associated with language learning for study abroad students, considering how they are “sublimated” (i.e., modified in order to fit into the social order while modifying the social order creatively also) and thus linked in a creative way to the specificities of the host society. Rink’s chapter discusses some of the affective reactions to the idea of “Africa”—nostalgia for a lost, pristine nature; fear; desire; and also desire to correct perceived wrongs. He brings in the idea of affective learning to propose how professionals can bring about an “entanglement” between the student and the specific site (not the reified, imagined continent), and shows how affect can become mutual, an engagement. Taïeb et al.’s chapter suggests that on-site professors can join with students in observing, analyzing, and rethinking the very processes of study abroad with which they are involved—rethinking romantic journeys underway, and working towards dialogic and critical learning. Doerr’s chapter compares different affective investment in the destinations reflecting the relationships between the students’ host and home countries and examines how they shape the students’ learning and other experiences during studying abroad. Kumagai’s chapter contrasts the kinds of learning—through class work and through extracurricular immersion—that emerge from and further reinforce different student affective experience.
We thus hope to bring the question of study abroad into the discussion of learning and affect, and bring a critical and analytic approach to the discourses of international education, thus contributing to both these domains. We also seek to bring the discussion of affect into the field of volunteering abroad as we discuss in the next section.
Helping and Affect
Volunteer/service work has become increasingly popular in the 1990s (Sherraden et al. 2006). A shift away from the Cold War to “life politics” that focuses on individual morality and sense of self, from the politics of production and social class to consumption and individual identity, and from public politics to a form of therapy for individuals, volunteer/service work came to provide a sense of morality to participating individuals (Butcher and Smith 2010). Neoliberal transformations normalized the privatization of social services by the state, encouraging the development of NGO-run volunteer/service opportunities to fill that gap (Conran 2011). Also, the current tightening of the job market due to the economic crash in the late 2000s in the United States made students increasingly anxious to create a distinguishing edge in their CVs, and volunteer work became a popular choice (Hickel 2013).
Current volunteer/service abroad can be divided into three types. The first emphasizes technical skills to help developing societies to modernize that are (1) altruistic to fight poverty and disease, (2) political to promote a positive image of the West, and (3) manned by skilled people (Butcher and Smith 2010), as in the Peace Corps and the WorldTeach program that Li describes in this volume. The second type, sometimes called International Service Learning (ISL), connects the volunteer work or service with learning, and intends mutual benefit to local partners and to student volunteers who seek engagement in the host society (Bringle and Hatcher 2011; Plater 2011). The third type is volunteer tourism developed as an alternative to mass-packaged holidays aiming at both enhancing the well-being of the host community and nurturing the volunteer tourists’ self-development and academic credit, or “ego-enhancement” (Callanan and Thomas 2005: 196; also see Mowforth and Munt 2009), as Jakubiak discusses in this volume.
Volunteering abroad involves various romanticized notions: the world of cultural Others as an arena of problems to be solved, occluding the problems that exist in students’ home country; the notion of “the local community” as a primordial and authentic entity, occluding the fact that local communities are usually heterogeneous with diverse interests; “sharing of knowledge” as the automatic result of volunteering, occluding the fact that volunteers do not always have significant levels of technical knowledge; equal partnership between volunteers and the community they work in, occluding the fact that their relationships are hierarchical at various levels; a romanticized conception of what it takes to “change the world,” occluding the difficulty involved in liberal art students without training achieving significant results as volunteers; and a vision of the universality of humanitarianism, occluding the US-specific view of individuals as equal units entitled to pursue their interests as civic participation, and occluding the ways in which this may involve an evasion of political responsibility (Cororation and Handler 2013).
Despite their humanitarian goals, these volunteer abroad programs are critiqued for
