Conclusion: Emotion as the Medium and Outcome of ‘Making a Difference’ 183

‘Making a Difference’

In this chapter we have seen the emotional intensity of volunteer tourism trips functioning as a form of power-knowledge through which young subjects are engaged both in and by ‘development’ (Ballie Smith and Laurie, 2011). Drawing on feminist theorisations of how emotions are both constituted by and constitutive of social relations (Ahmed, 2004; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010), I have argued that a certain ‘template’ of common atmospheres, emotional ‘cues’ and affective forces is present in volunteer tourism. I have demonstrated how these expected emotions and affects are implicated in an ongoing process of re-inscribing relations of charitable pity and ‘helping’ which echo colonial histories. However, a focus on emotion and affect has also revealed two other significant points. Firstly, these dynamics always intersect with volunteers’ particular gendered, classed and religious identifications. Privileged western positions are co-constituted alongside particular volunteer identifications through embodied practice. This contributes to fracturing the view of the archetypal, monolithically ‘western’ volunteer of

literature. Secondly, class has particular relevance, as the dynamic of adopting responsible, grateful, and motivated subjectivities does not only serve neo-colonial ends but is adjusted to disciplining classed young subjects towards neoliberal dynamics of individual betterment.

Emotion and affect are both the medium and outcome of the ‘change’ volunteer tourism trips make - both in their action upon the world, and in their action upon the young subjects who participate in them. The analysis of this chapter has been informed by ideas of ‘emotional governmentality’ (Gagen, 2013): emotion as a medium through which young subjects are acted upon and also govern themselves.

Arguably, in contemporary society we see ‘the performance of emotion as being an index of credibility’ (Thrift, 2004: 66). This sentiment was echoed by a youth worker who explained his belief in the power of the trips as such:

Action is vital for them. […] We’re in a generation of people who must

feel… […] ‘I don’t feel you’ – that is the kind of language they talk, you know... no matter what you are saying, like, they want to feel you...

(Ade, Youth Worker)

This is illustrated in a talk to the Kenya group given by Erin, a woman who helped establish the original link to the Kenya project. She passionately reflected on her own experiences of feeling ‘broken hearted’ on her first trip to the global south and said ‘let it [your heart] break’ – but then ‘don’t just cry about it – do something’, encouraging them that ‘little steps can lead to huge things’, citing Liam’s garage as an example and saying ‘Liam is one of my heroes’. This talk, which felt stirring despite its clichés, neatly encapsulates the idea that an emotional reaction of pity should be channelled into being charitable in ways where motivated, determined

‘steps’ lead towards individual fulfilment - being a ‘hero’.

Emotional governmentality does not simply encourage or discourage certain emotions but also helps produce authentically felt emotions and the emotionally self-disciplining subject. In volunteer tourism trips we see young people responding to affective cues with intense feeling. Subject formation occurs through affective dynamics. This chapter has added an attention to emotion which illuminates the processes behind the ‘expected’ story of volunteer tourism criticised in literature.

‘Neo-colonial’ visions of the global south are given persistent force through the

‘authority [that] lies in the authenticity of somebody’s felt experience’ (Pratt 1992:

74). The body and felt experiences are central to animating dynamics of charitable pity and western responsibility, although narrative, such as in times of reflection, is constantly present to solidify emergent identifications and politics. The way that compassion and gratitude are ‘expected’ emotions is additionally problematic in these particular trips as they also powerfully inculcate aspirational subjectivities.

‘Good’ emotions such as gratitude, feeling inspired, and motivation, can reinforce problematic pressure for young people to take individual responsibility for their social positions. Affects which resonate at the intimate levels of inner conviction can connect to ideologies which neutralise the affective potential to challenge inequality in both the ‘global’ and UK contexts:

… good feelings that drive out and even censure “alternative forms of public discourses that combine anger, sadness, apathy, ambivalence and confusion”

(Cvetkovich 2007 p464) that could be the basis of political solidarity and action…. [and] end[s] up privatising and individualising negative feelings and isolating them from the historical and structural contexts that shape them.

(Fortier, 2010: 28)

However, this chapter has also highlighted that these dynamics always intersect with volunteers’ particular identifications and their social positions. The ‘responsible and motivated’ helping subjectivities fostered in the Kenya trip were surfaced

intersectionally with classed expressions of masculinity. Both western paternalism and religious subjectivities were fostered through caring responsibilities and hybrid religious and secular imaginaries of ‘the happy poor’ in the Zimbabwe trip.

Furthermore, the pleasures of ‘irresponsible’ western privilege in times of leisure played out through classed and gendered identifications, which also shaped young people’s distinct engagements with consumption and risk during volunteer tourism trips. Though the ‘conclusion’ of these dynamics, in terms of volunteer tourism’s imaginaries and politics of global (in)justice, echoes that which is highlighted in literature with middle-class volunteers, the drives and results in relation to volunteer subjectivities are quite distinct.

However, the reproduction of existing relations of domination through volunteer tourism trips is not inevitable. ‘Emotional governmentality’ in not totalising. Some young people did display the most unexpected (and denigrated) response to a volunteer tourism trip - a ‘lack of feeling’, being apathetically unmoved.⁴⁴

Furthermore, affective and embodied experience is ‘unruly’ and exceeds relations of domination in multiple, messy ways (Griffiths, 2013). Young people’s voluntary

44 Countless small moments of this pepper my research diary in terms of young people displaying boredom or distraction at various ‘emotive’ moments. However, most young people adopted a narration of these moments in the dominant manner of being ‘moving’ after the fact, which testifies to the ongoing power of discourse. On an overarching level, I knew of young people who appeared to not adopt - or narrate - the trips in terms of the narrative of dramatically ‘life changing’ (one in each of my case studies, and Gary told me of various ‘unsuccessful’ stories over the years at

Springboard), but I was unable to access these individuals’ views, as they distanced themselves from the youth charities and the research process.

efforts may contain less objectifying politics based on a recognition of shared

humanity. Their sense of becoming ‘responsible’ and ‘motivated’ may link to a sense of self-worth and agency that is deeply valuable for these particularly positioned subjects. Alternative meanings about the affective experience of the trips are also made by young people outside of the strong urges to gratitude and motivation, again in ways which always intersect with their existing, particular identifications. It is to explore these ‘excessive’ dynamics around emotion on the trips that the next chapter turns.

chapter SIX

6. During (2): Excessive Feelings and Ambivalent Resistance

6.1. Introduction

Emotions and affect exceed scripted lessons. They are ‘mediated by histories and dynamic and emergent’ (Askins, 2009:10, emphasis in original). The last chapter argued that the emotional and embodied experiences of trips ‘animate’ and are animated by ‘neo-colonial’ and ‘neoliberal’ power dynamics, albeit intersecting with particular identifications. This chapter provides a counterpoint. Emotion and affect are never wholly determined by dominant ideologies or simply evidence of

governmentality. Recognising the embodied and emotional intensities of volunteer tourism that demonstrate this is a representational choice with significance. It can reveal transpersonal capacities for solidarity against a sense of the inevitability of neo-colonialism and neoliberalism (Askins, 2009; Griffiths, 2014). However, it is important to not over-romanticise this argument - emotions can be excessive not only in ways we would construe as politically progressive ‘resistance’, but rather, refusals, negotiations and reworkings have ambivalent effects.

Embodiment and emotion are entangled in webs of ‘ambivalent and dynamic’

power which emerge through action (Gallagher, 2008). For instance, during the Kenya trip, British and Kenyan teenagers gathered to play a football match on a wide, dusty field. The set-up clearly reinforced difference: ‘England v Kenya’,

‘volunteers’ versus ‘locals’. However, closer attention to embodied dynamics reveals multivalence. Enthusiastic play, handshakes and hugs work to create a sense of cosmopolitanism through sports. Degrees of interest and sporting prowess define gendered boundaries and masculine hierarchies. Global privilege is made visible through who has shoes and who doesn’t. Racialised differences are constructed in comments about ‘natural’ athleticism. Post game laughs are based on sparks of personality-based connection. The layers of complexity continue: at one point, Henry, a young person of Jamaican heritage from Hackney, as opposed to the majority of the group, white or mixed race from Roehampton, suddenly turned

around and scored for ‘Kenya’. Some people laughed, whilst others muttered that he’d ‘betrayed England’. Henry shrugged nonchalantly with a smile and said Kenya

‘seemed like they needed a bit of help’. Was Henry performing boundary-crossing solidarity or charitable pity? Clearly, powerful histories and identity categories do play a significant role in the football game, but there is also a ‘violence of

interpretation’ in narrating the event as driven by any single pathway of power (Lim, 2008).

This chapter is about the dynamics that undercut, or simply don’t ‘add up with’ the story told in the previous chapter of volunteer tourism fostering relations of western dominance and shaping young people’s subjectivities to better fit ‘neoliberal’

economies. The first section looks at the way young people negotiate the idealised transformations of volunteer tourism. Through ‘having a laugh’, young people refuse lessons of ‘reform’ and assert their already-existing identifications and pleasures. Where they do engage with notions of transformation, they rework the lessons of the trips as about collective change and mutual support through intense investment in team relations. At other times, disruptions to performing charity stem from embodied and social identifications, as racialised, gendered and classed

‘minded-bodies’ prompt unruly affects. The second part of the chapter explores how young people relate to, and in, the destination contexts in ways that exceed

charitable pity. ‘African pride’, transnational religion, classed and gendered affective vocabularies and nascent bonds of friendship partially challenge power relations between the ‘west and the rest’. The chapter adds to understandings of youth agency and ‘resistance’ as contradictory, emerging in multiple ways at various moments across time and as often collective and mischievous (Jeffrey, 2010).