Youth’s perceptions of international development and its related themes are being shaped through the messages relayed in the marketing of volunteer sending organizations. This research explores how one voluntourism sending organization, ME to WE, packages and portrays themes of international development and contributes to Heron’s “helping imperative” (2007), which is a desire to go abroad and make change by asserting one’s own values of development. It uses qualitative content analysis from ME to WE’s online youth trip pages and explores how the organization uses a discourse that focuses on the notion of “doing” development, selling adventure, the allure of the proximity to poverty, and leadership and social justice training. The research situates the findings in the scholarly debates on international volunteering and voluntourism and draws heavily on postcolonial analysis. It examines how ME to WE uses a rhetoric that promotes sustainable development, partnerships, building leaders, and global citizenship, however upon deeper analysis this promotion is superficial in that the themes in the discourse point to a lack of critical reflexivity in meaningful, thick conceptions of global citizenship education, an overwhelming support for egoistic motivations over altruism in youth going abroad, a consumer-first, consumption-based mentality, and a reinforcing of unequal power structures between the Global North and Global South, reverting back towards charity as opposed to solidarity.

This thesis examines images of volunteer tourism—or voluntourism—on internet sites and describes how the photographs that appear on them contribute to maintaining global systems of power. Voluntourism is defined as either the payment of a program fee to an organization to travel to a developing country to perform various volunteer tasks or as the pause of gainful employment in one’s own country to work for an extended period of time in a developing country at a local wage. Currently there is debate as to the real benefits of volunteer tourism: is it truly the sustainable form of responsible, alternative tourism it is intended to be, or does it merely replicate the conditions of mass tourism and exploit those it is intended to benefit? This study explores visual representations of voluntourism in non-Western cultures in developing countries, and the consumption of those representations by participants in Canadian-based volunteer tourism organizations. The primary focus is photographs of interpersonal relationships between “voluntourists” and “voluntoured” in an examination of how culture and skin colour are manipulated in an attempt to maintain Westerners’ positions of power in pictures and, by extension, in global power relations. I suggest that a complex interaction of the pictorial codes of tourism, colonialism and the popular media converge in voluntourism’s photographs, resulting in images that simultaneously offer potential volunteers the opportunity to “do good” in the world as well as to consume cultural difference as a commodity. The main body of work is a visual discourse analysis of the photographs of five Canadian volunteer organizations’ websites. I identify the thematic categories used to promote voluntourism and discuss them in relation to patterns of mass tourism, charity advertisements, colonial travel narratives and their associated visual representation. This paper includes interviews with Canadian past volunteers to assess the importance of images to their experience of voluntourism. I close with a discussion of multiculturalism in Canada which brings together the experience of working within another culture in voluntourism and the conditions of Canadian multicultural society. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-27 20:23:25.935

Learning/volunteer abroad (LVA) programs offer important opportunities for students to develop cross-cultural skills and global competence. Universities recognize the value of international experiential learning programs in terms of skills development and career preparation as one component in their internationalization policies and priorities. Scholarly studies on international education and LVA programs have examined university internationalization priorities in promoting international experiential learning. Other scholarly contributions to the field of LVA have documented the nature of students’ experiences, learning outcomes, critical analysis of impacts, and motivations, among other important research areas. Within the LVA scholarship, there are frequent references to the importance of pre-departure training and preparation of students. Many of the references to the value of pre-departure training move beyond practical information (such as staying safe and staying healthy while abroad) to more critical discussions of cross-cultural learning opportunities, ethical considerations, and impacts. Despite these references to the importance of pre-departure training, there are few studies documenting the nature and content of pre-departure training for students participating in international experiences through an academic institution. As a result, there is no clear sense of the range of pre-departure training programs, what information students are receiving as part of their pre-departure training or the impact of training on the outcomes of the students’ learning. This thesis aimed to fill this gap by examining the preparation and training provided to students prior to their international experiences. Through the utilization of a case study approach based on the University of Ottawa’s LVA programs’ pre-departure training, this research specifically analysed the content that is currently employed during pre-departure training and how it ranged across LVA programs. The findings demonstrate that, while all LVA programs provided pre-departure training and covered similar content themes, there was also a range in the content provided across the LVA programs’ pre-departure training. Specifically, the greatest diversity in content was found in the depth of discussion provided to students regarding cross-cultural understanding, ethics, experiential learning, and reflection. Analysis of the identified differences across LVA programs suggest there are likely implications for students’ learning generated from their experience abroad. When students are not prepared to critically understand the complexities associated with living, studying, and/or working cross-culturally and how to reflect upon and generate knowledge from their experiences overseas, learn/volunteer programs may have limited or even negative impacts on cross-cultural understanding and global competence.