Learning to Enact Canadian Exceptionalism: The Failure of Voluntourism as Social Justice Education

Abstract

ABSTRACT Voluntourism, or volunteer abroad, is a form of travel involving unpaid work intended to benefit a local community. Critiques of voluntourism as reproducing and, indeed, perpetuating global inequities are yielding a re-framing of voluntourism around principles of partnership and equality. Drawing from ethnographic data, this article analyzes one school’s efforts to establish and leverage a voluntourism program as social justice education. I trace a reversible discourse of inspiration (“I inspire Others” and “I am inspired by Others”) to demonstrate how elite school students, white and of color, transmute extractive relationships with their Black South African peers into feeling good about doing good, thus becoming an exceptional Canadian subject: the global (girl) citizen. The findings have implications for understanding voluntourism as a salient site for grooming young elites to participate in the production of the white settler state. This article demonstrates how voluntourism fails as social justice education, and provokes a larger debate about abolishing school-based voluntourism.