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or the “City of Love” (Paris) can be reframed and problematized by study abroad professionals and students, in contexts involving laughter, urban exploration, and study (Rink, Taïeb et al.). Other authors consider how students’ themselves manage their affect—various degrees and contours of fascination about the destination—in ways that may highlight the sometimes contradictory goals of studying abroad (Doerr, Kumagai); or how the affect evoked by volunteering abroad—ranging from a sense of being useful and loved to guilt and doubt—are managed by participants as they evaluate their experience (Jakubiak, Li).
Affect also shapes our subjectivities and our own and others’ actions. The notion of affect has a double aspect—it is a noun and also a transitive verb. This fits well with the idea that affect simultaneously is what one has and acts on others: a particular form of affect, such as the feeling of shame for example, shapes others’ actions, while shaping oneself as a subject (Richard and Rudnyckyu 2009).
In this volume, our authors explore how passion for the language of the destination transforms subjectivities and shapes the borders of the self as well as the surrounding social terrain (Rodriguez). Romantic attachment to destinations makes the study abroad students observant as they hope to become like local people by copying their behavior and attire but also become critical and reflexive when romanticism turns into disappointment (Taïeb et al., Doerr). The desire to serve others generates for volunteers a sense of themselves as good and caring (Jakubiak) but also guilt as they come to view themselves as colonialist imposers of “Western values,” depending on the type of project and context (Li).
While our main theoretical frames are thus analyses of affect as it is mobilized, is managed, and produces subjectivities and actions, our discussions intersect with four fields of research, to which we turn below.
The Global, the National, and Affect
Current study and volunteering abroad are often framed within the notion of the global. Researchers and administrators, as well as guidebooks and brochures, highlight the merit of these experiences as ways of gaining “global/intercultural competence” (Savicki 2008) and becoming “global citizens” (Lewin and Van Kirk 2009, see Chapter 2 of this volume for extensive discussion of these issues). The notion of the global is often uncritically viewed as positive (for exceptions to this see Doerr 2012, 2014; Grünzweig and Rinehart 2002; Johnson 2009; Woolf 2007, 2010; Zemach-Bersin 2009, 2011). The notion’s reliance on pre-existing differences among people (see Doerr 2012, 2013) and how this relates to students’ affect are rarely discussed. In this subsection, we review the notion of the global and discuss its relation to affect, starting with the research on nationalism/nationhood that serves as the unit of “difference” to be noticed, learned, and bridged.
The sense of belonging to a nation—patriotism, Volkgeist, etc.—has been a major topic of investigation in studies of nationalism. How does one come to feel attachment and belonging to fellow nationals in the bounded territory of the nation-state—people that one may never meet in one’s lifetime? This question was at the heart of the now classic work on nationalism, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson (1991), as well as other studies of nationalism (Balibar 1988; Borneman 1992; Briggs 1996; Comaroff 1987; Sommer 1991). Also, anthropologists in recent years have analyzed affective aspects of the state, its “modern bureaucracy” that is infused with affect—desire, apathy, irony, cynicism (Navaro-Yashin 2006). Michael Taussig (1993) and Michael Herzfeld (1997) illustrate aspects of the state and its officials, respectively, that relate individuals affectively to the state.
This understanding of nation as a unit of belonging with a clear boundary that draws individuals together affectively is an important basis of the notion of the global because the notion relies on crossing such boundaries (Doerr 2012). Researchers of globalization focus on disjunctive flows of people, media images, technology, finances, and ideologies across national borders (Appadurai 1990) as well as the channeling (Broad and Orlove 2007), interrupting, and resisting of such flows (Tsing 2005). Examination of changing perceptions (Robertson 1992; Wilk 1995) and practices (Appadurai 1986; Howes 1996) does not escape the assumption that the unit of focus—whether crossing it or overcoming it—is that of nation-state.
Because the notion of culture has been linked to the nation-states (though it came to be used to challenge the ideology by “ethnic groups”)—in its ideologies, one nation, one people, one culture—some discussions of the notion warrant some space here. Culture is a “take” on human variations that needs to be situated in the context of changing anthropological theorizations: “race” (the nineteenth century), “culture” (the twentieth century), and “ethnicity” with a revised notion of “culture” (late twentieth century). While the earlier approach viewed culture as a given without consideration of power politics, an approach emerged in the 1960s that viewed culture as a new way to stake out claims to precedence and power—the way of life as rooted in the particular place—as cultural particularity has become a major ideological weapon in political struggles (Wolf 1994).
Here, culture came to be viewed as a strategy for groups to mobilize, shape, and reshape self-images and elicit participation. Culture became objectified—aspects of a social world get interpreted as typifying that world and represented as detached, object-like “traits” that are believed to be possessed by the bearer of the culture (Handler 1985)—and analyzed as such (see theme issues in Mankind, 1982; Oceania, 1992; and Anthropological Forum, 1993). Once culture is objectified and named, people take a variety of stances towards it, including using it as a strategy to challenge the one-nation, one-people ideology of the nation-state (Kearney 2004), or to claim authority (Oakdale 2004) and authentic existence as an indigenous group (Clifford 1988; Povinelli 1998), or to gain self-determination (Henze and Davis 1999; Warner 1999), or to intermittently express a sense of belonging when convenient (Gans 1999), or to understand themselves and guide their subsequent behavior (Holland et al. 1998).
Research on study and volunteering abroad often uses the objectified notion of culture without critical analyses about such objectification. The notion of culture is also used to measure the interpersonal skills of individuals who “cross cultural borders”—study and volunteering abroad participants—and is a basis for establishing the desired skills to be taught through these activities, evoked in the notion of “intercultural competence.”
In this volume, we do not focus on the notion of culture as an object of study nor as an analytical tool because of its political nature as described above. We are interested instead in maintaining critical distance from the notion of culture and also the notion of intercultural competence, all the while remaining aware of their importance in the field of international education, in order to reflect on how these notions play a role in the evocation of desired affective states for students and volunteers abroad.
Research about the process of globalization is critiqued as itself being part of the ideologies that portray global connections as always positive, progressive, and universally accessible (Friedman 2003; Tsing 2000). What is rarely discussed is its affirmation and perpetuation of the national as the most relevant unit of difference through its analytical privileging of the crossing of the national borders—methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002)—over other kinds of borders. This is also the case for research on study abroad: it relies on a valorization of global connection and the existence of difference based on which the experiential learning of another culture becomes meaningful (Doerr 2012, 2013, 2015a).
We then seek to analyze how students’ romantic images of the destination draw on and perpetuate (Doerr, Kumagai), ignore (Rink), or subvert (Taïeb et al.) the imagining of the nation as having unique and homogeneous culture. How does urban-rural difference frame differently the power relations between volunteers and those they serve, complicating the notion of crossing borders (Li)? Chapters in this volume further examine kinds of sameness and difference, commonality and separation, that students/volunteers feel and how this is interpreted in light of national borders and the notion of the global (Taïeb et al., Doerr). That is, we show that globalist ideologies mobilize affect around the crossing of national borders and that affect nurtured by various nationalist ideologies is managed through