Tourists Without Borders: An Anthropological Study of Voluntourism as a Form of Humanitarian Engagement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the relatively new body of critical literature in anthropology about a particular form of humanitarian action, voluntourism, in the Global South. The dissertation looks at discourses of need, community, and “us and them” as these discourses play out via social interactions involved in voluntourism. This dissertation highlights my own experiences working with a particular NGO in Western Ghana, which I call Odenkyem. My research fulfills a need for academic analysis of the role of voluntourism in humanitarianism. In the last several years, the ethics of voluntourism have been questioned by activists and academics, but this debate seems to have hinged greatly on how these endeavors bolster the white savior complex, or the fact that many of these voluntourist programs do more harm than good. While in this work I do not champion the voluntourism industry, based on my research and my own voluntourist experiences, I am convinced that the industry will continue to flourish via Westerners, particularly those from the US and Canada, looking for exotic experiences while simultaneously helping those they consider vulnerable. While some argue that voluntourism amounts to commodifying the needs of others as simplistic psycho-political packages that can be fixed in a brief volunteer vacation experience, others suggest that voluntourism can generate important learning for all involved, and that it is possible to maximize positive outcomes for both the voluntourist and the voluntoured in these endeavors. I place myself somewhere in between these two perspectives, arguing that while both internal and external critiques of voluntourism are crucial, scholars must avoid using arrogance to critique arrogance by wholly dismissing voluntourism as a potentially meaningful form of humanitarian engagement. I further argue that with proper training and critique, there are ways in which voluntourism might also serve as an effective learning experience for all involved, while maximizing positive outcomes over negative ones.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".