The Literary Voluntourist: Revisiting NGO Reading Practices

Voluntourism has become a bustling business in the NGO
sector over the last 15 years, consolidating the high demand
for gap year-style voluntary work with the need for free
labour by NGOs across the world. Although there has been
some critical analysis of voluntourism to date within
anthropology and development studies, it has rarely been
viewed through literary critical lenses. This research will
show how literature and reading praxis can inform and
influence the voluntourist experience. It will take Malawi as
its case, as a country which exemplifies many typical aspects
of voluntourism and in which resources for rethinking it are
present yet drastically underused. I will contrast
voluntourists' typical reading diets with postcolonial texts
that show voluntourism's consequences. I will then
deconstruct my own experience as a voluntourist in Malawi
through literary methods, including critical autobiography.
Finally, I will consider how attention to what, and how,
literature is read could improve pedagogy and professional
training in the voluntourist field. My proposals will be tested
by a reader-response project in which voluntourists read a
Malawian text.