Liam’s story goes like this. He grew up on a council estate in south London. In his teenage years he was ‘smoking a lot of drugs… in trouble with the police’. One of the few adults Liam got on with was Gary, a youth worker, who at times came to the police station to bail him out. In 2006 Gary planned a youth trip to Kenya and invited Liam. The local council funded the cost of Liam’s place, since he was on their list of ‘at risk’ youth, but they were struggling to engage him. Liam says ‘I thought, this could be an opportunity for me to get out… I was sick of what I was doing, it wasn’t helping me…’
Liam was ‘blown away’ by the trip. He found it good to have a break from smoking weed and reflect on life. A conversation with some Kenyan young people ‘really hit him’. When he told them about his mechanic apprenticeship, and they said ‘we can’t get jobs, we live on the street, we get our food out of dustbins, we want to be car mechanics’. He told the kids, ‘I’m going to build you a garage so you can have jobs’. When he returned to the UK, he stopped smoking weed, got baptised, and came to Gary with his apprenticeship pay to put towards the garage for several months. Six months later Gary and Liam returned to Kenya and bought land attached to the partner project they worked with in Nakuru.
From then, Gary’s youth charity Springboard made trips from the estate to Kenya a regular part of their work. This was in large part driven by ‘seeing the impact it had on Liam’, and how he ‘got a vision to help other people’ that ‘completely changed his life’. Since then,’…young people that have been heavily involved in gang life and street violence have decided that they want to make a difference, and they are now also going over to Africa…’. Liam now works as a mechanic. He enjoys ‘inspiring’ others with his story, and says: ‘before I went out there… I didn’t know where I was goin in my life, I just, like, didn’t have no goals or no dreams. People helped me in my life, and changed me, so I wanna do that to other people’. When others go to Kenya, he believes ‘guaranteed it’ll have an impact’ because they’ve ‘experienced something that has touched their heart’.
(Sources: Gary interview, Research Diary notes and Springboard videos. All quoted speech verbatim from these sources)
Liam’s story20 exemplifies the narrative of personal transformation which exists around volunteer tourism. ‘Life-changing…’, ‘I think it will change my life…’, ‘it changed my life…’: this is how trips are described. The physical movement of volunteer tourism is imagined to catalyse an internally felt, socially performed, movement from a problematic ‘before’ to an idealised ‘after’. Young people invest in this narrative of change in the literal time prior to undertaking trips. Volunteer tourism has a temporal reach beyond its practice, both in such anticipatory
dynamics (Anderson, 2010) - and in the way that during and after the trips, they fuel future-oriented identity work (Jones, 2011). Ideals of personal transformation
through volunteer tourism are encapsulated in the contemporary cliché to ‘be the change’: the idea of a synchronicity between personal change and social change, and a valorisation of a generalised ‘desire and belief that you can make a difference’
(Gary, Youth Worker) in both one’s individual life and the global setting.
The overarching narrative of personal transformation through ‘making a difference’
was expressed as ‘common sense’ knowledge. Videos made on trips featured close up shots of young people’s faces as they stated they felt the trips had ‘transformed’
them as they felt ‘inspired’ through ‘helping kids’. I witnessed a young man come into the Springboard offices, greet Gary, and say ‘I need to go on one of those life
20 This is the publically circulated version of Liam’s story. Other versions and the questions they raise will appear throughout the thesis.
changing trips, man’. My PhD was introduced by a key informant as: ‘about the impact of taking kids from estates like this to the third world and how it develops them’.
This ‘dominant discourse’ was expressed by both adults and young people and present in widespread representational circulations. Youth workers suggest that volunteer tourism trips prompt maturation, saying ‘they went out as immature little boys, and they’ve come back real young men’ (Nigel, Trustee of Volunteer
Organisation), or that the trips provide the ‘opportunity to progress and develop and invest in yourself, to reflect and mature’ (Adam, Youth Worker, Leatherhead).
The narratives around the trips can be seen as emblematic of the tenacity of understanding young people as in the process of ‘developing’ in normative, teleological ways towards autonomous adulthood (Jeffrey, 2010) and how these visions are often linked to spatial imaginaries (Smith, 2013). Such visions have a broad reach, linking to near-universal coming-of-age rituals, and adventurous pursuits that have been historically been central to attempts to shape young UK citizens21 (Mills, 2013).
This narrative also emerges in relation to other influences. Liam’s idea that short trips to the global south will naturally and certainly ‘touch people’s hearts’ fits with analyses of the renewed vigour of ‘popular humanitarian’ imaginations. Here, sentimental expressions of individual charitable compassion, particularly towards Africa, are an aspirational desire and moral good ‘above’ politics (Butcher and Smith, 2010; Daley, 2013; Mostafanezhad, 2013b). That such action is thought to prompt self-transformation reveals that the discourses around the trips reflect and inculcate ideologies of teleological development and improvement at the individual level (self-development) and the transnational scale (international development). For instance, in a planning meeting for the trip to Kenya, we talked about painting and refurbishing dormitories, and one youth worker excitedly declared how the site used to be ‘just fields’ and how ‘our time there will be like Changing Rooms! [home
21 The historical detail to youth movements cannot be fully recounted here, but the Scouts and Guides, founded in the early 20th century, were informed by complex mixtures of Christian ideas of virtue with an emphasis on nature, and can also be understood against the backdrop of imperialism (Mills, 2013). Outward Bound and the Duke of Edinburgh trips emerged around WW2 from founders with military backgrounds.
redecoration TV show]’. Other plans for the itinerary included reflection times with questions such as ‘things you’re grateful for’ and ‘what you’ve learnt and are going to take home’. Two logics of ‘development’ interpenetrate (Gagen, 2007). The personal development of the western volunteer tourist is seen to occur through engaging in the work of the modernising ‘development’ in depersonalised needy spaces.
However, as Liam’s journey from drug-consuming teen to motivated and charitable mechanic illustrates, the particular trips this research engaged with must also be situated in regard to the fact that young working-class people are especially subject to heavily moralised inscriptions of adult hopes and fears (Kraftl, 2008; Valentine, 1996). This is illustrated in the words of one of Springboard’s business supporters, whose idea that the trips will produce ‘good citizens’ implies that young participants are currently not:
The people that they target are the people that are ready to change their life… This is kind of one of the final pieces, where hopefully… they kind of flick over into being a good citizen, so to speak.
(Hamish, Business Supporter)
Implicitly, the ‘development’ of the young volunteer is driven by gaining
‘perspective’ about comparative privilege. The idealised outcome of Liam’s story, becoming someone who ‘makes a difference’ to distant others and has ‘goals and dreams’, illustrates that the ideal is to become ‘aspirational’ and virtuous – pressures that are amplified by concerns around working-class youth as apathetic and deviant (Allen et al., 2013; Brown, 2011). This research brings starkly into view the strong resonances between imperial dynamics and the way ‘urban’ young people have been framed as in need of rescue and civilisation (Gagen, 2007). I now unpack in greater detail how both youth workers and young people adopt and express these anticipatory narratives.
4.2.2. Shifting Identities Via Mobility: Becoming Grateful and