to the new social order of the new language (Rodriguez), critical understandings of social issues (Taïeb et al.), learning through immersion (Doerr), learning through academic work (Kumagai)—with varying effects.
We also consider in detail particular emotions, including those of romance, and discuss their mobilizing and transformative effects. Rodriguez’s chapter takes a fresh look at the passions associated with language learning for study abroad students, considering how they are “sublimated” (i.e., modified in order to fit into the social order while modifying the social order creatively also) and thus linked in a creative way to the specificities of the host society. Rink’s chapter discusses some of the affective reactions to the idea of “Africa”—nostalgia for a lost, pristine nature; fear; desire; and also desire to correct perceived wrongs. He brings in the idea of affective learning to propose how professionals can bring about an “entanglement” between the student and the specific site (not the reified, imagined continent), and shows how affect can become mutual, an engagement. Taïeb et al.’s chapter suggests that on-site professors can join with students in observing, analyzing, and rethinking the very processes of study abroad with which they are involved—rethinking romantic journeys underway, and working towards dialogic and critical learning. Doerr’s chapter compares different affective investment in the destinations reflecting the relationships between the students’ host and home countries and examines how they shape the students’ learning and other experiences during studying abroad. Kumagai’s chapter contrasts the kinds of learning—through class work and through extracurricular immersion—that emerge from and further reinforce different student affective experience.
We thus hope to bring the question of study abroad into the discussion of learning and affect, and bring a critical and analytic approach to the discourses of international education, thus contributing to both these domains. We also seek to bring the discussion of affect into the field of volunteering abroad as we discuss in the next section.
Helping and Affect
Volunteer/service work has become increasingly popular in the 1990s (Sherraden et al. 2006). A shift away from the Cold War to “life politics” that focuses on individual morality and sense of self, from the politics of production and social class to consumption and individual identity, and from public politics to a form of therapy for individuals, volunteer/service work came to provide a sense of morality to participating individuals (Butcher and Smith 2010). Neoliberal transformations normalized the privatization of social services by the state, encouraging the development of NGO-run volunteer/service opportunities to fill that gap (Conran 2011). Also, the current tightening of the job market due to the economic crash in the late 2000s in the United States made students increasingly anxious to create a distinguishing edge in their CVs, and volunteer work became a popular choice (Hickel 2013).
Current volunteer/service abroad can be divided into three types. The first emphasizes technical skills to help developing societies to modernize that are (1) altruistic to fight poverty and disease, (2) political to promote a positive image of the West, and (3) manned by skilled people (Butcher and Smith 2010), as in the Peace Corps and the WorldTeach program that Li describes in this volume. The second type, sometimes called International Service Learning (ISL), connects the volunteer work or service with learning, and intends mutual benefit to local partners and to student volunteers who seek engagement in the host society (Bringle and Hatcher 2011; Plater 2011). The third type is volunteer tourism developed as an alternative to mass-packaged holidays aiming at both enhancing the well-being of the host community and nurturing the volunteer tourists’ self-development and academic credit, or “ego-enhancement” (Callanan and Thomas 2005: 196; also see Mowforth and Munt 2009), as Jakubiak discusses in this volume.
Volunteering abroad involves various romanticized notions: the world of cultural Others as an arena of problems to be solved, occluding the problems that exist in students’ home country; the notion of “the local community” as a primordial and authentic entity, occluding the fact that local communities are usually heterogeneous with diverse interests; “sharing of knowledge” as the automatic result of volunteering, occluding the fact that volunteers do not always have significant levels of technical knowledge; equal partnership between volunteers and the community they work in, occluding the fact that their relationships are hierarchical at various levels; a romanticized conception of what it takes to “change the world,” occluding the difficulty involved in liberal art students without training achieving significant results as volunteers; and a vision of the universality of humanitarianism, occluding the US-specific view of individuals as equal units entitled to pursue their interests as civic participation, and occluding the ways in which this may involve an evasion of political responsibility (Cororation and Handler 2013).
Despite their humanitarian goals, these volunteer abroad programs are critiqued for perpetuating the hierarchical relationship between the volunteers and their recipients by suggesting “privileged” volunteers have power to change situations by “giving” to the “less-privileged” hosts viewed as needy, passive, and incapable of helping themselves (Conran 2011; Manzo 2008; Sin 2009); evading transforming structural inequality by its focus on seeking to improve basic needs—food and shelter—of impoverished communities (Butcher and Smith 2010; Kahne and Westheimer 2003); imposing the idea of what constitutes an ideal state of being onto the community being helped (Gray and Campbell 2007; Munt 1994; Sinervo 2011); and serving primarily volunteers’ need to gain “soft skills”—communication, organization, and team working skills—to give an edge in the competitive educational market (Heath, 2007; also see Gray and Campbell 2007; Munt 1994; Stewart 2013).
Those working towards critical and egalitarian projects abroad have sought to respond to these critiques in several ways. There is a growing literature working to develop ethical standards for practice (e.g. Hartman et al. 2014, Strait and Lima 2009), proposing community direction with multiple stakeholders, long-term interdependent partnerships between volunteer organizations and NGOs (see also Nenga 2011), funding transparency, sustainability, deliberate diversity, and “dual purpose” with a refusal to prioritize student goals or to view students as consumers of experience. Framing classes are increasingly seen as necessary tools, problematizing power relations, raising awareness of privilege, and fostering dialogue between volunteers and local partners (Hartman et al 2014); they can also be used to link notions of service to local conceptions such as solidarity (Taïeb et al 2015). Jacoby (2009) emphasizes the importance of linking practice to reflection not only for students, but also for service-learning professionals, who should foreground social justice concerns and resist the rush to set up programs without considering their duration, sustainability, accessibility, and long-term consequences including the possible obscuring of the root causes of problems (Jacoby 2009: 99-103). Innovative program design can include credit-bearing learning opportunities, teaching, traveling, and “soft skills” for local partners as well as volunteers; questions of affect can also be raised with local partners as well as volunteers (Taïeb et al. 2015).
Affect in volunteering abroad is discussed in various ways. “Caring” is discussed as (re)producing unequal structural arrangements of paternalism (Sin 2009) as in the notion of charity, “a superior class achieving merit by doing things gratuitously for an inferior class” (Dewey 1908/1996: 166). The sense of duty as responsible citizens is seen to be cultivated through service work, drawing on John Dewey’s vision that it is a matter of justice rather than altruism (Barber 1994; Saltmarsh, 1996; Taylor, 2002). Empathy with the less unfortunate through crossing socioeconomic borders and interacting with them is increasingly viewed as a goal of volunteer/service work (Chesler et al. 2006; Rhoads and Neururer 1998). Intimate attachment is seen as part of volunteering’s moral economy, “a tangled circulation of money, people, labor, and emotions that creates complex webs of possibility and connection, but which also contains points of friction and disillusionment” (Sinervo 2011: 6), as intimate connections developed between volunteers and volunteered is commodified for the former as “authentic” experience (Conran 2011) and regarded as opportunities for further economic interactions for the latter (Sinervo 2011). Confidence, altruism, and sensitivity that volunteers develop through their volunteering experience is discussed by some as positive (McGehee and Santos 2005) and by others as negative for benefiting mainly the privileged volunteers (Gray and Campbell 2007; Heath