unchallenged stereotypes.
Perhaps most significantly the Romantic Movement reminds us of the power that creative thought and imaginative introspection has to reshape ways in which we see the world. If our students learn what Michael Ferber identifies as a key element in the Romantic imagination, we will surely enrich their lives:
The imagination was not a blank slate, not just the passive power to register, remember and compare perceptions or “images,” but an active power to shape the perceptions themselves in fundamental ways. And everyone had it. (2010: xx)
In Blanning’s view “the romantic revolution is not over yet” (2010: 186). The potential for profound alteration remains within all of us as we contemplate, explore, and analyze the troubled spaces of our world.
Dr. Michael Woolf is the deputy president for strategic development at CAPA Global Education Network. Mike has had much of his career in an international context. Prior to working in mainstream international education, he taught American literature in the universities of Hull, Middlesex, Padova, and Venice and worked as a researcher-writer for BBC radio. He has held leadership roles in international education for many years with FIE, CIEE, and Syracuse University. He has written widely on international education and cultural studies. He serves on a number of boards and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Forum on Education Abroad from 2006 to 2012.
Notes
1. Cited in Blanning 2010, 9.
2. From a cynical viewpoint it may be argued that the exclamation mark, a recurrent indication of multiple epiphanies in Romantic poetry, is a form of hyperbole that resonates with the kinds of inflated rhetoric familiar in study abroad. Beyond that somewhat superficial critique, there is also a more positive implication for our learning objectives.
References
Berlin, Isiah. 1999. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Blanning, Tim. 2010. The Romantic Revolution. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Ferber, Michael. 2010. Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Galitz, Kathryn Calley. Romanticism. Department of European Paintings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm, accessed 29 April 2015.
Johnson, Martha. 2012. “City as Relationship.” In The City as Text: Urban Environments as the Classroom in Education Abroad, Occasional Paper 1, ed. A. Gristwood and M. Woolf, 32–35. London and Boston: CAPA International Education.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1817. “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni.” In History or a Six Weeks Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland. London: Hookham, 177.
Wordsworth, William. 1888. “The Prelude, Book Fourteenth.” In The Complete Poetical Works. London: Macmillan.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the students who participated in our studies and contributed to this volume, the study-abroad and volunteering-abroad professionals who welcomed us as we carried out these studies, colleagues who commented on our presentation based on these chapters at the Forum on Education Abroad conference in 2013, and our family and friends who helped us formulate the ideas and supported us while we engaged in this work. We would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers; we have tried to integrate into this volume our reactions to their helpful and stimulating comments. The text’s deficiencies are wholly our responsibility.
PART I
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
Affect and Romance in Study and Volunteer Abroad
Introducing our Project
Neriko Musha Doerr and Hannah Davis Taïeb
Romance is at the heart of our travel fever. We romanticize landscapes, people, languages, and the very fact of moving across borders, of encountering and learning something new, of transforming ourselves as well as others. Study abroad and volunteering abroad are fueled by these passions, by this romance. And along with this romantic passion comes other emotions: fear of the unknown mixed with thrilling attraction to its temptations; longing for liberation; yearning to make a difference; guilt about one’s privilege; moral righteousness; and hope for growth, transformation, and enlightenment.
What kind of affect helps students form deep, long-lasting relationships with people during their travels? What kind of affect thwarts or dehumanizes encounters? What kind of affect drives study abroad students to understand their sociocultural surroundings and participate in wider social activities? What kind of affect leads them to withdraw into transient observer or consumer positions? How do study and volunteering abroad programs generate, shape, or transform such affect? What drives the romanticization of border-crossing and the construction of the border itself? And how does affect tie in to larger social and economic structures around us, to neoliberal and globalist and other world transformations, to the subjectivities of our time? These are the questions that inspired us to put together this volume.
As a collaboration between researchers and study abroad practitioners with diverse expertise—cultural anthropology, geography, education, foreign language education, and psychoanalysis—this edited volume seeks to explore the romantic passions and related affect of border crossing in the context of study abroad and volunteering abroad by students from American colleges and universities.
The framework that we bring to this multidisciplinary volume is that of affect. As we will discuss below, we use the notion of affect to focus not only on bodily response that cannot be signified (Buda 2015; d’Hauteserre 2015), but on how affect is mobilized and managed and how it shapes subjectivities—and how these processes are embedded in broader economic and political processes, in relations of power.
Why examine study abroad and volunteering abroad in this way? First of all, because of the intensity of the affective load that surrounds study and volunteer abroad. Before travelling the destination is often surrounded in the mind by a romantic aura, driving and heightening the desire for change, for discovery. Once the student or volunteer arrives at the destination, other, equally strong emotions may come into play: love, or shame, or guilt, anger or fear, exhilaration, deep disappointment. The strength and importance of these emotions is evident, and is reflected in their use in marketing study abroad and volunteering abroad programs, as well as in the many practices of predeparture and on-site professionals intended to handle these emotions to enhance outcomes defined as optimal, and in the writings of students and volunteers about their experience. Furthermore, in the literature written by and for study abroad and volunteering abroad professionals, there is growing interest in looking at emotions and affect and bringing this aspect of student experience squarely into discussions in the field. Our approach to affect, primarily anthropological but also emerging from other fields, can contribute to these discussions, and is thus of interest for international education and community service professionals.
This book is also geared for anthropologists, geographers, and cultural studies scholars who study affect in globalist/globalizing processes, encounters with cultural Others, travel and tourism, education, and humanitarian work. Our turning of the lens onto study and volunteer abroad contributes a new field of affect analysis that focuses on the construction and sustenance of difference in globalist processes, border crossings involving less apparent relations of power, a field of experiential learning in which what constitutes “learning” is not clear, volunteer and service work, and on intersections of affect and wider political economy.
We consider the field of study and volunteering abroad to be a rich, understudied domain for understanding the emergence of the subjectivities of twenty-first-century selves. Study and volunteer abroad are growing dramatically, but little serious attention has been paid to the analysis of these phenomena, to what