have power to change situations by “giving” to the “less-privileged” hosts viewed as needy, passive, and incapable of helping themselves (Conran 2011; Manzo 2008; Sin 2009); evading transforming structural inequality by its focus on seeking to improve basic needs—food and shelter—of impoverished communities (Butcher and Smith 2010; Kahne and Westheimer 2003); imposing the idea of what constitutes an ideal state of being onto the community being helped (Gray and Campbell 2007; Munt 1994; Sinervo 2011); and serving primarily volunteers’ need to gain “soft skills”—communication, organization, and team working skills—to give an edge in the competitive educational market (Heath, 2007; also see Gray and Campbell 2007; Munt 1994; Stewart 2013).
Those working towards critical and egalitarian projects abroad have sought to respond to these critiques in several ways. There is a growing literature working to develop ethical standards for practice (e.g. Hartman et al. 2014, Strait and Lima 2009), proposing community direction with multiple stakeholders, long-term interdependent partnerships between volunteer organizations and NGOs (see also Nenga 2011), funding transparency, sustainability, deliberate diversity, and “dual purpose” with a refusal to prioritize student goals or to view students as consumers of experience. Framing classes are increasingly seen as necessary tools, problematizing power relations, raising awareness of privilege, and fostering dialogue between volunteers and local partners (Hartman et al 2014); they can also be used to link notions of service to local conceptions such as solidarity (Taïeb et al 2015). Jacoby (2009) emphasizes the importance of linking practice to reflection not only for students, but also for service-learning professionals, who should foreground social justice concerns and resist the rush to set up programs without considering their duration, sustainability, accessibility, and long-term consequences including the possible obscuring of the root causes of problems (Jacoby 2009: 99-103). Innovative program design can include credit-bearing learning opportunities, teaching, traveling, and “soft skills” for local partners as well as volunteers; questions of affect can also be raised with local partners as well as volunteers (Taïeb et al. 2015).
Affect in volunteering abroad is discussed in various ways. “Caring” is discussed as (re)producing unequal structural arrangements of paternalism (Sin 2009) as in the notion of charity, “a superior class achieving merit by doing things gratuitously for an inferior class” (Dewey 1908/1996: 166). The sense of duty as responsible citizens is seen to be cultivated through service work, drawing on John Dewey’s vision that it is a matter of justice rather than altruism (Barber 1994; Saltmarsh, 1996; Taylor, 2002). Empathy with the less unfortunate through crossing socioeconomic borders and interacting with them is increasingly viewed as a goal of volunteer/service work (Chesler et al. 2006; Rhoads and Neururer 1998). Intimate attachment is seen as part of volunteering’s moral economy, “a tangled circulation of money, people, labor, and emotions that creates complex webs of possibility and connection, but which also contains points of friction and disillusionment” (Sinervo 2011: 6), as intimate connections developed between volunteers and volunteered is commodified for the former as “authentic” experience (Conran 2011) and regarded as opportunities for further economic interactions for the latter (Sinervo 2011). Confidence, altruism, and sensitivity that volunteers develop through their volunteering experience is discussed by some as positive (McGehee and Santos 2005) and by others as negative for benefiting mainly the privileged volunteers (Gray and Campbell 2007; Heath 2007; Munt 1994) and, as it came to be purchased through signing up for volunteer projects, depoliticizing the political urge for social justice into consumerism for self-transformation (Hickel 2013). The emotional difficulties students experience through volunteering are discussed as a starting point towards self-transformation, learning, and the fostering of successful reciprocal projects (Nickols et al. 2013; Pagano and Roselle 2009).
Some point out the dangers of focusing on intimate emotions while volunteering abroad as it overshadows and obscures—or normalizes—larger structural inequalities, depoliticizing power relations and reframing structural inequality as a question of individual morality (Conran 2011). Our intention in this volume is to investigate the links between affect—which drives individuals to connect with those in communities they work in and gives meaning to their acts—and wider economic and structural inequities at the societal level. In Jakubiak’s and Li’s chapters here, we see an approach that views the volunteer’s romantic motivations and on-site affective responses in this way. How does affect reflect the various motivations for volunteering abroad, and their contradictions? How do volunteers manage the emotions that arise during their activity, including emotions like guilt, disappointment, and doubt? How are these affective responses linked to the construction of subject positions via volunteering? What kinds of affect arise for local partners who are the intended recipients of volunteer activities, and how is this managed and interpreted? What does this suggest about the interconnections between affect and wider relations of power, and about how to develop new kinds of critical reflection on these activities?
The Structure of This Volume
This volume is divided into three parts. Part I consists of this chapter and Chapter 2 and sets out theoretical backgrounds in which the volume can be situated. Entitled “Study Abroad and Its Reasons” and written by Hannah Davis Taïeb and Neriko Musha Doerr, Chapter 2 introduces the overview and history of study abroad and how affect has been treated in the field. We offer a new way to look at study abroad itself, focusing on its genealogies and legitimating discourses as they shift throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, bringing out some of the inherent tensions in the field. We then consider how affect has been brought to bear on the field, considering the processes of orientation and reflection on “cultural shock,” “getting out of the comfort zone,” and the reinterpretation of the critical incident and the search for “intercultural competence” and “personal leadership.”
Part II has five chapters that discuss various cases of affect as it plays out in diverse study abroad contexts. Karen Rodriguez’s Chapter 3, entitled “Passionate Displacements into Other Tongues and Towns: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Shifting into a Second Language,” explores the psychic dimension of the second-language learning process, focusing on study abroad students’ passion for the Spanish language in Mexico. Based on student reflections, the chapter examines the psychic shifts involved in the transition to the symbolic in one’s second language that parallels an infant learning their first language. Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, Rodriguez explores the contradictory affective processes—passionate separations and connections; conflicting feelings of love, desire, and hatred; and narcissism and masochism—of connecting to the destination by taking up a subject position in the local language. Rodriguez illustrates the transformation of study abroad students’ subjectivity and its implications for social change through their passionate involvement in another language.
Bradley Rink’s Chapter 4, entitled “Sojourn to the Dark Continent: Landscape and Affect in an African Mobility Experience,” analyzes the study abroad students’ affective responses to the marginalized, patronized, and sexualized Africa—romance, desire, hope/hopelessness, and fear—and considers how such affect influences and is influenced by their institutionalized study abroad experiences. Based on an analysis of the discourses embedded in study abroad literature students are exposed before their travel as well as a series of questionnaires with students during their study abroad experience, this chapter analyzes the complex affective responses that the African city evokes, and suggests pedagogical strategies for affective learning that can be used with students.
Hannah Davis Taïeb’s Chapter 5, entitled “Thinking through the Romance” and written with Emily Bihl, Mai-Linh Bui, Hyojung Kim, and Kaitlin Rosenblum, draws on the input of two groups of students in Paris to discuss the enlistment of students in a critical reevaluation of the romantic images that launched them on their study abroad journeys. The discourses students are brought to question include not only the romantic discourse of Paris, but also the somewhat
