All that glitters: extraction as communication in international voluntourism practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Extraction” may be understood as both a metaphor and in a Marxian materialist sense, the set of material and discursive conditions through which international workers and travelers experience and understand the nation of Peru. This article examines the popularity of voluntourism programs through the lens of extraction. The politics of extraction is understood in terms of neo-colonial power relations that unite practices of humanitarian engagement and community development with contributions to the personal growth of voluntourists. These travelers anticipate personally enriching themselves through their intercultural experiences. They anticipate gaining emotional and experiential wealth that is associated with (often vague) notions of helping others. By drawing on semi-structured interviews and three months of ethnographic fieldwork at key sites in Peru, as well as by tracing a historical trajectory of extraction, I argue that within contemporary neoliberal modes of humanitarian engagement, an extractive ontology prioritizes the enrichment of foreign individuals and agencies over the wellbeing of communities in need.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".