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justice into consumerism for self-transformation (Hickel 2013). The emotional difficulties students experience through volunteering are discussed as a starting point towards self-transformation, learning, and the fostering of successful reciprocal projects (Nickols et al. 2013; Pagano and Roselle 2009).
Some point out the dangers of focusing on intimate emotions while volunteering abroad as it overshadows and obscures—or normalizes—larger structural inequalities, depoliticizing power relations and reframing structural inequality as a question of individual morality (Conran 2011). Our intention in this volume is to investigate the links between affect—which drives individuals to connect with those in communities they work in and gives meaning to their acts—and wider economic and structural inequities at the societal level. In Jakubiak’s and Li’s chapters here, we see an approach that views the volunteer’s romantic motivations and on-site affective responses in this way. How does affect reflect the various motivations for volunteering abroad, and their contradictions? How do volunteers manage the emotions that arise during their activity, including emotions like guilt, disappointment, and doubt? How are these affective responses linked to the construction of subject positions via volunteering? What kinds of affect arise for local partners who are the intended recipients of volunteer activities, and how is this managed and interpreted? What does this suggest about the interconnections between affect and wider relations of power, and about how to develop new kinds of critical reflection on these activities?
The Structure of This Volume
This volume is divided into three parts. Part I consists of this chapter and Chapter 2 and sets out theoretical backgrounds in which the volume can be situated. Entitled “Study Abroad and Its Reasons” and written by Hannah Davis Taïeb and Neriko Musha Doerr, Chapter 2 introduces the overview and history of study abroad and how affect has been treated in the field. We offer a new way to look at study abroad itself, focusing on its genealogies and legitimating discourses as they shift throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, bringing out some of the inherent tensions in the field. We then consider how affect has been brought to bear on the field, considering the processes of orientation and reflection on “cultural shock,” “getting out of the comfort zone,” and the reinterpretation of the critical incident and the search for “intercultural competence” and “personal leadership.”
Part II has five chapters that discuss various cases of affect as it plays out in diverse study abroad contexts. Karen Rodriguez’s Chapter 3, entitled “Passionate Displacements into Other Tongues and Towns: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Shifting into a Second Language,” explores the psychic dimension of the second-language learning process, focusing on study abroad students’ passion for the Spanish language in Mexico. Based on student reflections, the chapter examines the psychic shifts involved in the transition to the symbolic in one’s second language that parallels an infant learning their first language. Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, Rodriguez explores the contradictory affective processes—passionate separations and connections; conflicting feelings of love, desire, and hatred; and narcissism and masochism—of connecting to the destination by taking up a subject position in the local language. Rodriguez illustrates the transformation of study abroad students’ subjectivity and its implications for social change through their passionate involvement in another language.
Bradley Rink’s Chapter 4, entitled “Sojourn to the Dark Continent: Landscape and Affect in an African Mobility Experience,” analyzes the study abroad students’ affective responses to the marginalized, patronized, and sexualized Africa—romance, desire, hope/hopelessness, and fear—and considers how such affect influences and is influenced by their institutionalized study abroad experiences. Based on an analysis of the discourses embedded in study abroad literature students are exposed before their travel as well as a series of questionnaires with students during their study abroad experience, this chapter analyzes the complex affective responses that the African city evokes, and suggests pedagogical strategies for affective learning that can be used with students.
Hannah Davis Taïeb’s Chapter 5, entitled “Thinking through the Romance” and written with Emily Bihl, Mai-Linh Bui, Hyojung Kim, and Kaitlin Rosenblum, draws on the input of two groups of students in Paris to discuss the enlistment of students in a critical reevaluation of the romantic images that launched them on their study abroad journeys. The discourses students are brought to question include not only the romantic discourse of Paris, but also the somewhat contradictory romantic notions of study abroad adventure, personal transformation, and linguistic immersion. The chapter brings in the particular position of students “studying abroad while studying abroad”—that is, non-US students who come to America for college, and during their college years, study once again “abroad.”
Neriko Musha Doerr’s Chapter 6, entitled “Falling In/Out of Love with the Place: Affective Investment, Perceptions of Difference, and Learning in Study Abroad,” compares two American summer study abroad students’ learning experiences in terms of their affective investment (or lack thereof) in the destination, France and Spain, asking how the different degrees of affective investment shaped students’ learning experiences and perceptions of difference among people. Doerr argues that the student with an invested, romantic view of the destination highlighted differences between French people and Americans and, when she came to be disillusioned, reflected on her experience critically, whereas the student with fewer romantic preconceptions noticed not only differences between the host and home societies but also differences within each society and similarities between host and home societies; however, she absorbed whatever she encountered though with little critical reflection.
Yuri Kumagai’s Chapter 7, entitled “Learning Japanese/Japan in a Year Abroad in Kyoto: Discourse of Study Abroad, Emotions, and Construction of Self,” analyzes the interplay between the students’ sense of the “success” of their study abroad experience (itself influenced by the discourse of immersion), and their romanticized and exoticized views of Japan. The two students both expressed a romantic fascination with Japan (geisha, Shinto, tea ceremony, etc.), but during their year in Kyoto the student who focused on academic work and experienced more mundane parts of Japanese life viewed her study abroad as wanting, while the other who plunged into many “traditional” cultural activities viewed hers as successful while retaining an exoticized view of Japan.
Part III of this volume consists of two chapters that discuss volunteer abroad experiences. Cori Jakubiak’s Chapter 8, entitled “One Smile, One Hug: Romanticizing ‘Making a Difference’ to Oneself and Others through English Language Voluntourism,” illustrates the contradictory link between the discourses of love and caring in teaching, and the encounter with the “exotic” other. Using data collected from the ethnography of English-language voluntourism, where people from the Global North teach English in the Global South as humanitarian aid, this chapter discusses the ways in which voluntourists describe their experience affectively as being helpful and having an important impact, as transformative of self and others, and as an authentic experience of the cultural Other. Her analyses of these affective languages in turn illuminate the ideological underpinning of the voluntourist projects and situate them in terms of North-South power relations.
Richard Li’s Chapter 9, entitled “People with Pants: Self-Perceptions of WorldTeach Volunteers in the Marshall Islands,” illustrates how the romantic view of Americans as modernizers held by the volunteers as well as Marshall islanders intersect with anticolonialist views, and how this varies geographically between the urban and rural Marshall Islands. The chapter depicts WorldTeach volunteers in the Marshall Islands negotiating a tension between their romantic self-image as modernizers and a desire to avoid imposing their values and beliefs, which evolves faced with the Marshall Islanders own idealized and romantic notions of Americans.
The conclusion written by Hannah Davis Taïeb and Neriko Musha Doerr pulls together arguments and suggestions from all the chapters and discusses how we can use this knowledge for reflecting on study abroad and volunteer abroad practice and discourse, and for thinking about ways to “intervene”