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also consider what unanswered questions this work has brought up and fruitful directions for future research.
Together, these chapters explore the role of affect in studying and volunteering abroad. While the chapters introduce the reader to individual students and the details of their day-to-day lives while studying and volunteering abroad in particular settings, these quotidian and experiential details are put into the context of the diverse theoretical questions we discussed in this chapter.
Collectively, these chapters contribute to the discussions on globalization and analyses of affect in (re)constituting and crossing borders on which the discourses of globalization rely; to the discussions of power relations in the encounters with the cultural Other cases in which such power relations are not apparent; and to the literature on affect in learning a new examination of the fields of study and volunteer abroad that involve mobilizing and managing affect in specific ways. To the fields of study abroad and volunteering/serving abroad, this volume adds analyses of how affect and wider sociocultural and economic structures relate with each other, as affect is not only mobilized and managed while situated in these wider contexts but also shapes subjectivities and the actions of those involved.
Romantic passions drive us to gaze at maps, pack our bags, and step out of our daily lives to travel. Pushed by strong feelings, we hope for freedom, for new emotions to spring up as we travel into new worlds. However, Althusser (1971) tells us that we are never free: we are always subject in a double sense—subject as author of our own actions but also subjected to ideologies or systems of representation (i.e., categories). Passions rise up inside us, we feel, but we feel as part of wider political, economic, and sociocultural structures. Analyzing such dynamics helps us further examine our experience, perceptions, and feelings, not only in terms of what they can teach us about ourselves personally, but also as they and we are part of our time. Passions for travel thus help us journey into other domains intellectually and affectively.
Postscript: Reflecting on the Genesis of This Project
This project was born out of a conversation that took place in July 2011 in Paris. Neriko Musha Doerr was carrying out fieldwork on study abroad, following a student attending Hannah Davis Taïeb’s study abroad program. As we talked about the program and our understandings of study abroad in general, we found our mutual interest in the question of romance—the romance of travel, the romantic attraction of certain destinations and cities, the romance of service. Being ourselves an anthropologist specializing in education (Doerr) and a study abroad director and international educator trained as an anthropologist (Taïeb), we come at the subject from different but related points of view. Though our starting point was the question of romance, as we worked and solicited ideas from colleagues, we expanded our scope to other kinds of passions about travel, learning, and service. We decided to investigate questions of affect in the very specific context of study abroad and volunteering abroad, looking not only at romance, desire, and objectification, but at other passions and emotions such as shame, embarrassment, yearning, and the desire to be of service. We hoped to analyze these themes in an open-ended, context-specific manner, looking at particular places and projects and some of the expressions of affect they elicit. This is a beginning in which our two divergent visions, as detailed below, converged.
Neriko Musha Doerr: I came to do research on study abroad because a friend, Drew Maywar, who was designing a study abroad program for engineering students asked me to work with him as a consultant to understand and support the adjustment of students to their destination, Japan. Prior to that, my research had been on issues of education, language politics, race relations, and technologies of power in the context of the revitalization of indigenous Maori language in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2009), English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) education in the United States (2012), and the education of Japanese-as-a-heritage-language (JHL) in the United States (Doerr and Lee 2012; 2013). The friend felt my expertise would be an asset for the team. Although the program did not materialize due to lack of funding, I was inspired by what is involved in study abroad processes, and I decided to carry out research on study abroad.
For me, the issue of romance was one of the things that made study abroad special. Compared to the areas of education I had studied, in which the students tended to be driven to learn by their ethnic affiliation, the sense of responsibility, and parental and peer pressure (indigenous language revitalization); by the necessity to adjust and increase career opportunities (ESL education); or by the need for communication with extended family, their ethnic affiliation, and future career opportunities (JHL education), study abroad appeared to be driven more by personal romantic views of things the students seek to learn about—the people and culture of a destination. This made me focus on the role of affect, especially romantic sentiment, of the students.
I value collaboration with people I meet in the field. To work together is a way to give back something—documents collected through fieldwork and their analyses from anthropological viewpoints—to the field site. It is also a way to include viewpoints and draw on the expertise of the people in the field site in the research, and to share authorship of knowledge production during research, which has often been claimed solely by the ethnographer (Clifford 1988). Moreover, because many of the people I meet in the field are professionals, working with them often means interdisciplinary collaboration. For example, I have worked with a school administrator, who is also a linguist, of a JHL program where I was doing fieldwork (Doerr and Lee 2012; 2013; 2016; Lee and Doerr 2015). This project is also an interdisciplinary collaboration with a study abroad director I met in the field, who is also an international educator and anthropologist.
I found it fruitful to approach the issue of romance in study abroad from two different viewpoints—that of the cultural anthropologist, and that of the study abroad practitioner/international educator. I feel that anthropology’s current focus on affect and the ethnographic method can offer critical tools for study abroad, and the focus on study abroad can offer anthropology the opportunity to analyze affect in new ways.
Hannah Davis Taïeb: I have been working in study abroad since the year 2000, most of that time as resident director of CIEE’s Contemporary French Studies program in Paris. My studies, however, were not in the field of international education, but in anthropology, and I did anthropological fieldwork in Morocco in 1988–89, focusing on conceptions of self for unmarried women in a middle-sized town. My interests at that time involved the relationship between conceptions of self and political economy (looking for the links between changing conceptions of the self and of self-control and the fact that women were remaining single longer and entering the labor market). I was also preoccupied by the question of boundaries, of transnational cultural forms and the creating and blurring of boundaries by social actors (Davis 1989), and the projection onto others of our fantasies and desires (Davis 1990, 1993, 1998).
As I learned the profession of international educator, the anthropological approaches that had shaped me were always in the back of my mind. It seemed natural to me to set up classes based on participant-observation, and I launched classes comparing the French and US educational systems. Questions of culture, in constant discussion within the field of study abroad, I saw in terms of long-standing anthropological debates, and I could never feel comfortable when definitions of cultural difference came across as essentialist. Critical anthropological approaches and my own sociopolitical slant also led me towards educational forms that were dialogues or partnerships. I set up seminars that brought French and American scholars and professionals together,1 co-taught bilingual classes and workshops with mixed student bodies,2 and set up classes integrating volunteering with a critical shared questioning of notions such as solidarity, service, and diversity.3
When I met Neriko Musha Doerr, I saw that we shared common analyses of how study abroad works, and that an explicit return to the anthropological approach could enrich my own professional life. What “culture work” are we doing, are we part of, as practitioners in our fields? How is the movement of American and other students around the world contributing to changing discourses of culture and diversity? What is being achieved when global discourses combine with international organizations that talk more and more about difference, but in more and more standardized ways?
At the same time, as an international educator