Hero, adventurer and advocate volunteers: A visual analysis of volunteer tourists’ identities on Instagram

Abstract

ABSTRACT When the hybrid business of volunteer tourism (volunteer service coupled with leisure touristic activities) meets the self-referential language of Instagram, travel photography intertwines with the identity construction process. Accordingly, this article examines the visual and textual narratives used to build voluntourists’ identities in their posts from their experiences abroad. Authors highlight the recurrence of a political/apolitical spectrum across which users perform the identities of hero, adventurer, and advocate volunteers. We argue that each identity corresponds to a different approach to the interaction with the local “other.”