The Literary Voluntourist: Revisiting NGO Reading Practices

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Voluntourism has become a bustling business in the NGOsector over the last 15 years, consolidating the high demandfor gap year-style voluntary work with the need for freelabour by NGOs across the world. Although there has beensome critical analysis of voluntourism to date withinanthropology and development studies, it has rarely beenviewed through literary critical lenses. This research willshow how literature and reading praxis can inform andinfluence the voluntourist experience. It will take Malawi asits case, as a country which exemplifies many typical aspectsof voluntourism and in which resources for rethinking it arepresent yet drastically underused. I will contrastvoluntourists' typical reading diets with postcolonial textsthat show voluntourism's consequences. I will thendeconstruct my own experience as a voluntourist in Malawithrough literary methods, including critical autobiography.Finally, I will consider how attention to what, and how,literature is read could improve pedagogy and professionaltraining in the voluntourist field. My proposals will be testedby a reader-response project in which voluntourists read aMalawian text.