Cosmopolitan empathy in volunteer tourism: a psychosocial perspective

Abstract

Volunteer tourism provides a means of proximate engagement with usually distant others, emphasising reciprocity, cultural learning and humanitarianism in poor communities. As such, the practice has come to be investigated for its potential to engender global citizenship, a broader scope of emotional identification, and new kinds of progressive transnational social spaces. This paper focuses on the intersection between volunteer tourism and cosmopolitan empathy, outlining an account of cosmopolitan empathy that draws on a Lacanian psychosocial reading of tourist subjectivity. This theorisation conceptualises cosmopolitan empathy as an emergent property of interrelated social and psychic fields, which results in the affect serving both ideological and psychological functions. I argue that bridging geographical distance through travel presents volunteer tourists with encounters that can potentially destabilise the discourses and fantasies of the needy, grateful Other underpinning their experiences of cosmopolitan empathy, thus disrupting the conventional spatial ontology of affect that frequently dominates theoretical discussions of cosmopolitanism.

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