Yesterday I had the opportunity to present my work at the Department of Tourism Seminar Series at the University of Otago, New Zealand. In this seminar I chose to focus on the idea of ‘intimacy’ in volunteer tourism, exploring the way that volunteer tourists seek interactions with local people in the visited communities that involve closeness, touching, and expressions of care such as holding the children. I also looked at the way that some volunteer tourists wanted to feel a connection and closeness to the beneficiaries of their volunteer work. Using a Lacanian inflected psychosocial analysis, I tried to argue that these examples of intimacy seeking reflected the desire for volunteer tourists to gain the recognition and adoration of their hosts and that they were structured in part by a Western fantasy of the African Other. I concluded by posing the question of whether the search for intimacy had the potential to enhance the benefits to visitors and host communities or whether it did little to encourage cross-cultural learning and led to a demand for more individualistic project work.
Over the course of my PhD I have been trying to develop a new way of reading tourists that takes greater consideration of the emotions, contradictory positionings, and conflictual dynamics that partly constitute their subjectivities. I have argued that addressing these dimensions is particularly important when investigating forms of tourism that may present the tourist with troubling or challenging situations, such as the moral dilemmas of volunteer tourism, coming face to face with extreme deprivation in poverty/slum tourism, or the morbid sites of thanatourism. In these situations, tourists may be forced to reflect on the nature of their own privileges or wealth, they may have memories stirred, or be confronted with truths that they would rather ignore.
The approach that I have used to address these aspects of tourist subjectivity is ‘psychosocia’l in that it resists the dichotomising of the psychic and social, instead attempting to theorise these dimensions of human existence as intertwining and mutually constitutive. Psychosocial theorists have fruitfully employed ideas from psychoanalysis as a way of showing the mechanisms that operate at the permeable boundary between the psychic ‘inside’ and the collective ‘outside’ of the subject, which brings me to the point of this post.
Until now I have been using a Kleinian inflected version of psychosocial studies which foregrounds the concept of psychic defences that operate to preserve the Self. While this theorisation adequately explained some of the defenses that were evident from the narratives of the volunteer tourists in my research, I found it lacking when it came to elucidating the volunteers’ desire and enjoyment. For example, when the volunteer tourists in my study talked about the poverty they had witnessed in Kenya there was often evidence of emotional reactions, distress, and defensive constructions of the local people that may have lessened their sense guilt, but poverty also appeared as intertwined with discourses of desire directed towards markers of authenticity in the landscape.
In an attempt to find a theoretical framework that more comprehensively explains my findings, I have turned to Lacanian theory and its applications within psychosocial studies in order to draw upon Lacan’s elaborate theorisation of desire. There will therefore be a marked shift in theoretical approach from my two existing publications (see Publications tab, left) and forthcoming papers. I will explain more about my use of Lacanian theory as my theoretical work in this area develops.
I have just had a paper accepted for the forthcoming TOCOCU conference Regimes of Value in Tourism in Sion, Switzerland, this July. The conference currently has a diverse set of presentations planned, all exploring different facets of the concept of ‘value’ in tourism and travel practices. You can read the abstract for my paper below.
The Value of Poverty as Authenticity in Volunteer Tourism
Volunteer tourism has been posited as a practice in which tourists resist the allure of authenticity in favour of the pursuit of interpersonal relations with local hosts. However, the longitudinal psychosocial research that this paper reports, focusing on young British people travelling in Kenya, suggests that authenticity is still of central importance to many volunteer tourists and that its experience is regulated by the dynamic oppositional tension between desire for the authentic on the one hand and sets of ethical values prescribed by volunteer tourism on the other. The paper uses a Lacanian lens to examine how volunteer tourists’ narratives, derived from in-depth interviews, construct a highly ambivalent stance towards manifestations of poverty in the visited communities and built environment. I argue that poverty becomes enmeshed in these conflictual dynamics, being ascribed value as an authentic object of desire and enjoyment whilst simultaneously having this enjoyment curtailed by ethical values that deplore the very existence of poverty. The result is an oscillation in the narratives between the perceived need to develop Africa and concerns that such development will lead to the Westernisation and destruction of the desired objects of authenticity. These tensions and contradictions highlight the operation of multiple values and processes of valorisation in volunteer tourism which have the potential to shape volunteer projects in accordance with the wishes of its paying clients.
I have recently had an article published in Tourism Geographies entitled ‘Poor but Happy: Volunteer Tourists’ Encounters with Poverty’ which attempts to use a psychosocial methodology to interpret the responses of volunteer tourists to potentially troubling sights of poverty during their travels. The article forms part of a special issue on slum tourism edited by Fabian Frenzel and Ko Koens following the highly successful Destination Slum! conference that was held at the University of the West of England (UWE) in December 2010. More information about the special issue and about slum tourism can be found on slumtourism.net
Another essay is due to be published in Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect and Transformation in April 2012, which is available for pre-order now. This collection, edited by David Picard and Mike Robinson, is the first to address the emotional and affective dimensions of travel and tourism. My contribution, ‘Affect and moral transformations in young volunteer tourists’, again looks at encounters with poverty but this time with a focus on claims of self-change that are present in the narratives of volunteer tourists.
Any comments on either of these publications can be sent to: crossleye@cardiff.ac.uk
It’s a very exciting time in my PhD at the moment as I have recently been preparing to move to New Zealand for three months as part of an ESRC funded Overseas Institutional Visit (OIV) to the University of Otago in Dunedin. During my stay I will be based in the Department of Tourism, allowing me to work alongside internationally renowned critical tourism scholars and giving me a valuable opportunity to present my work to a new audience. This visit will also allow me to write collaboratively for the first time, give several lectures, and gain experience of working in an academic environment outside the UK. I will be increasing my blogging frequency over the coming months, so watch this space!
During the past two weeks I have been a Researcher in Residence at the Gower College Swansea, working with groups of AS and A2 Sociology and World Development students to enhance their understanding of the research process and to promote research as a career option. It has been a really positive experience for me, both professionally and personally, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the placement.
Workshops
The students participated in two workshops which were designed to give them a taste of being a social scientist and hands-on experience of doing research. Workshop 1 involved analysing anonymised data taken from my own research interviews with volunteer tourists. I used the interviews as a way of connecting my research to the subjects the students were studying, linking volunteer tourism with development for the World Development lessons and exploring it as an example of ethical consumerism in Sociology. Several of the students asked whether the data were ‘real’ and I think the fact that they were made the task far more rewarding. Working with the transcripts also allowed the groups to explore some of the ethical considerations necessary in social science. Why had I changed the participants’ names to pseudonyms? Why couldn’t I let the students keep a copy of the data?
Workshop 2 then gave the students a chance to produce their own data by conducting semi-structured interviews and group discussions with one another, trying to find out what their peers’ plans were for after they left college. I had borrowed some pretty expensive digital voice recorders from the department to heighten the realism of the interview activity and also to introduce the students to such equipment. This was all part of my strategy of making these rather abstract elements of the research process, which they may well have read about already in textbooks, tangible, doable, and engaging. It was also fun! The students got to listen to their voices afterwards, making quite a few giggle and ponder how different they sounded on the recording. This led to a discussion about how we could potentially transcribe the sound files. Would we want to include all of the laughter, coughs, pauses, ‘likes’ and ‘ums’? What would this add to the data, if anything?
Sparking curiosity
As the placement progressed, I began to see my role as a Researcher in Residence less in terms of disseminating and communicating my research and more about trying to spark a curiosity in the students about my work. Some found it hard to believe that anyone could spend three years on one research project. ‘Three years? To answer one question?’, said one student. It was hard to explain the amount of work involved in a PhD without putting the students off, but I tried to get across that the work was immensely rewarding despite being difficult at times. Others were surprised by the diversity of research areas and asked me whether you could really do a PhD on ‘anything’. This got several students thinking about possible research topics that had captured their imaginations, from studying criminals to the sexualisation of girls through the media. Making the students aware that one could apply for funding to do a Masters and PhD also made the prospect of doing research as a career seem more viable.
Valuing partnerships
Now that Researchers in Residence has come to an end, PhD students wishing to have this valuable experience of being partnered with a school will have to arrange it through their own departments and will not benefit from the administrative support and training that researchers received under the scheme. I would highly recommend the experience to other doctoral students looking to share their research with a new audience, develop teaching and communication skills, and enhance their public engagement record.
Following on from the theme of the previous post, here is a wonderful example of the power of visuals in communicating ideas. The RSA Animate series features lectures from leading intellectuals and academics accompanied by illustrations penned by Andrew Park, from the animation company Cognitive Media.
This particular animation expresses some of Slavoj Žižek’s thoughts on charity and cultural capitalism, which ties in with my own work on volunteer tourism as a contemporary form of ethical consumerism. Enjoy!
I have been looking for a more vibrant and dynamic alternative to PowerPoint for a long time, both for my research presentations and for use in teaching, and think that I may have finally found the answer in Prezi. Despite having certain drawbacks, documented elsewhere on the web, I am convinced that Prezi can be a useful tool for researchers and teachers and want to draw your attention to some of its benefits.
1. What is ‘Prezi’?
Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that allows you to create presentations online and then download them. Rather than working with a series of slides in a linear format, Prezi enables you to map out your ideas on one large canvas using a mixture of text, images and videos. Some elements can be large on this canvas whilst others can be made minutely small. When the presentation is played, the software allows you to zoom in and out between these elements along a pre-determined pathway.
2. Is it expensive?
Normally, you would be able to use Prezi for free but would have to pay a subscription fee in order to keep content private. Otherwise, Prezis are automatically published on the website after they have been created. However, students and teachers are eligible for the ‘Edu Enjoy’ licence which allows you to keep presentations private and also replace the Prezi logo with that of your school or university, and all for free!
3. Is it difficult to use?
In a word, no. Playing presentations is as easy as clicking the mouse to transition between the different elements, just as you would move from one slide to the next. Editing feels very intuitive and elements can be manipulated in two ways by altering their rotation and size. The editing canvas has a grid, allowing you to align images easily, and frames (visible or invisible) can be used to group together elements.
I think that this software has great potential for engaging learners and audiences through presentations that are visually different and dynamic. The non-linear format allows users much more freedom in how ideas are presented and the unconventional movement between different elements keeps viewers’ attention. Try it and see for yourself.
So, I’m preparing to become one of the last ever ‘Researchers in Residence‘ at the Gower College Swansea this November. After 17 years the scheme, funded by Research Councils UK with support from the Wellcome Trust, will be closing in January 2012.
The aim of the scheme has been to foster links between schools and universities and to inspire young people to go to university by bringing cutting edge research into the classroom and giving pupils a chance to meet and quiz real life researchers. Benefits to the researcher include developing public engagement skills, learning how to disseminate research findings to new audiences, and raising the profile of their research. Already I’ve been having to think hard about how I can make my work on volunteer tourism, subjectivity, and affect not only accessible to AS and A2 students, but also engaging and relevant to their own studies.
I plan to give talks on ‘Tourism and Development’, ‘Ethical Consumers’ and ‘Qualitative Research Methods’ to World Development and Sociology students. More news soon!
Can it have already been a year since I was in Kenya doing my fieldwork? On this anniversary I have been reflecting on an interesting month abroad, my dual identity as a volunteer tourist and researcher, the effect it had on my research relationships, and some of the difficulties that I encountered in ‘the field’.
What I remember most acutely about my fieldwork is a feeling of isolation, not because I was alone or because I didn’t get on with the other people in the group, but because I was alone in my task of carrying out the research. It was hard at times to explain to the others that I needed to go and write in my field diary or take the occasional day off to catch up on writing, and generally to strike the right balance between being a volunteer tourist and a researcher. I wondered whether they just thought I was being antisocial or trying to get out of the volunteer project work through laziness. I also found it difficult being cut-off from my supervisors, colleagues, and friends, to whom I would normally have turned for support and advice, for such a long time. This was because some of the places we visited were so remote that there were no internet facilities, mobile phone signal, or even reliable electricity! Looking back, however, this situation probably allowed me to become more immersed in my environment than had I been able to contact home every five minutes.
Living with my ten participants for a month was an interesting experience. I had rather naively thought that this prolonged contact would allow me to develop rapport with all of them and this was part of my justification for the fieldwork. In reality, however, I grew closer to some than to others. I found the burgeoning friendships with some of my participants difficult to manage in the research context for several reasons. First, I was drawn to spending more time with some people and so had less of an opportunity to get to know the other participants. Secondly, the entanglement of personal and research relationships that resulted from seeing participants as friends was often problematic. At times participants would tell me interesting things about their lives as part of a personal conversation, but I would find myself listening as a researcher rather than a friend and trying to link this information being given to me off the record to that which I had gathered through the interviews. Could I legitimately raise material from a conversation in an interview with that person? I did on a couple of occasions and still feel that this was perhaps ethically dubious…
A final point on the challenges of the fieldwork would just be the practical aspects of doing the interviews. For the first wave of interviews in the UK I had been very concerned about confidentiality and speaking to participants in places that were quiet and private. In Kenya these concerns had to go out the window. All of the interviews took place outside, because nowhere was truly ‘inside’ with most buildings having open sides and just a roof, which meant that privacy could not be guaranteed, people often walked past in the middle of an interview, or the wind would suddenly gust and affect the recording. Obviously this was stressful at the time and I worried about the ethics of asking participants personal questions in the knowledge that other people could walk past or be in earshot. However, there was simply no way around it and having this experience made me a lot more laid back when it came to the subsequent two waves of interviews in the UK – after all if we could do an interview on the beach with vendors yelling to try and sell us stuff and the noise of the sea and wind in the background then we could do one anywhere!
In these situations, tourists may be forced to reflect on the nature of their own privileges or wealth, they may have memories stirred, or be confronted with truths that they would rather ignore.
ve recently been preparing to move to New Zealand for three months as part of an ESRC funded 
Workshop 2 then gave the students a chance to produce their own data by conducting semi-structured interviews and group discussions with one another, trying to find out what their peers’ plans were for after they left college. I had borrowed some pretty expensive digital voice recorders from the department to heighten the realism of the interview activity and also to introduce the students to such equipment. This was all part of my strategy of making these rather abstract elements of the research process, which they may well have read about already in textbooks, tangible, doable, and engaging. It was also fun! The students got to listen to their voices afterwards, making quite a few giggle and ponder how different they sounded on the recording. This led to a discussion about how we could potentially transcribe the sound files. Would we want to include all of the laughter, coughs, pauses, ‘likes’ and ‘ums’? What would this add to the data, if anything?
I have been looking for a more vibrant and dynamic alternative to PowerPoint for a long time, both for my research presentations and for use in teaching, and think that I may have finally found the answer in 
rmat, Prezi enables you to map out your ideas on one large canvas using a mixture of text, images and videos. Some elements can be large on this canvas whilst others can be made minutely small. When the presentation is played, the software allows you to zoom in and out between these elements along a pre-determined pathway.
2. Is it expensive?
Playing presentations is as easy as clicking the mouse to transition between the different elements, just as you would move from one slide to the next. Editing feels very intuitive and elements can be manipulated in two ways by altering their rotation and size. The editing canvas has a grid, allowing you to align images easily, and frames (visible or invisible) can be used to group together elements.
one of the last ever ‘
What I remember most acutely about my fieldwork is a feeling of isolation, not because I was alone or because I didn’t get on with the other people in the group, but because I was alone in my task of carrying out the research. It was hard at times to explain to the others that I needed to go and write in my field diary or take the occasional day off to catch up on writing, and generally to strike the right balance between being a volunteer tourist and a researcher. I wondered whether they just thought I was being antisocial or trying to get out of the volunteer project work through laziness. I also found it difficult being cut-off from my supervisors, colleagues, and friends, to whom I would normally have turned for support and advice, for such a long time. This was because some of the places we visited were so remote that there were no internet facilities, mobile phone signal, or even reliable electricity! Looking back, however, this situation probably allowed me to become more immersed in my environment than had I been able to contact home every five minutes.
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