| Recent shifts in development policy and practice have focused on private-sector interventions, the growth of small-scale NGOs, and volunteer-driven programs. International volunteering is part of an increasingly privatized, individualized model of development in which responsibility for resolving global inequalities is transferred from political institutions to private citizens. Thus, although individual volunteers act on a small scale, their encounters with local community members have high stakes. Despite the ubiquitous presence of international volunteers in developing nations, scholars have yet to critically examine their role in socioeconomic development. The scant existing literature seems to exempt volunteers from critique by situating them apart from their social and historical contexts--implying that volunteering is a "pure" humanitarian endeavor, removed from the political, economic, and social movements that have shaped contemporary development. In this dissertation, I will complicate this view and begin a critical conversation about the role of international volunteering within the broader field of development. Moreover, I will challenge dominant models of studying and understanding development by focusing on small-scale, individual encounters. I propose a corrective model for understanding contemporary relations of development through an ethnographic study of international volunteering that examines the encounters between the Malawian community members and the Western volunteers as a "serious game." I will describe and analyze encounters between Malawian community members and Western volunteers in order to understand the subjectivities that individuals bring to these encounters; the ways in which those subjectivities are enacted and interact in practice; and the implications of these encounters for the community and development. I will argue that the community-volunteer encounter is a crucial site for reproducing and challenging dominant discourses of place, morality, and development. |
