‘The white woman's burden’ – the racialized,gendered politics of volunteer tourism

Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer tourism from the perspective of the ‘white savior complex,’ we seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile ‘civilizing mission’ to the subsequent mandate for development to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as ‘saving the environment.’ Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their depoliticized logic of ‘saving’ and ‘helping’ the less fortunate others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them further. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.     

The Calibanisation of the South in the German public ‘Euro crisis’ discourse

This article highlights the renaissance of the essentialist topos of the ‘lazy and irrational’ ‘Südländer’ (Southerner, Southern countries, South) in the German political and media discourses during the ‘Euro crisis’. It argues that it served to legitimate the political and economic measures taken in Southern European countries that pushed them into still more peripheral positions within the European Union (EU) and deepened the cleavage between North and South. Culture, or better culturalism and racism as its political ideological version, thus were used as a trap, as an intellectual battleground for justifying extremely complex economic and political decisions in a simplistic fashion throughout a crucial period of European history. The article furthermore demonstrates how a postcolonial reading may productively decode the processes of Othering taking place within Europe itself, especially between the so-called core and peripheral countries.     

Drawing the line with Google Earth: the place of digital mapping outside of geography

The Te Kawa a Māui Atlas project explores how mapping activities support undergraduate student engagement and learning in Māori studies. This article describes two specific assignments, which used online mapping allowing students to engage with the work of their peers. By analysing student evaluations of these activities, we identify four aspects that benefit student engagement: mapping diversifies the learning experience; mapping promotes acquisition of a different skill set; online mapping allowed more open sharing of work and; mapping promotes place-based learning. Some students were ambivalent about the assignments, so mapping should only be used to support other learning objectives.     

Towards a trickster science/fiction: complexifying boundaries with Neal Stephenson and Michel Serres

ABSTRACT

This article highlights an intersection between the science fiction of Neal Stephenson and the science philosophy of Michel Serres. As two of the most prolific contemporary advocates of the communication between literature and science, Serres and Stephenson employ permutations of the trickster figure as a potent lens on the epistemological transformations that occur when boundaries are crossed and static systems perturbed. Allegorizing the birth of science and rational consciousness as the intervention of a trickster, Stephenson finds in hackers and couriers the same generative force that Serres associates with the Greek god Hermes and the figure of the parasite. With particular attention to Stephenson’s postcyberpunk novel Snow Crash (Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash. London: Penguin Books) and Serres’ Hermes series (1969–1980), the concept of the trickster will be explored as both a personification of the kinship between creation mythologies, information theory, anthropology, and modern physics, and as the template for a productive transdisciplinary mode of cultural inquiry.     

The historical origins of the vegetative state: Received wisdom and the utility of the text

The persistent vegetative state (PVS) is one of the most iconic and misunderstood phrases in clinical neuroscience. Coined as a diagnostic category by Scottish neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett and American neurologist Fred Plum in 1972, the phrase “vegetative” first appeared in Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul (circa mid-fourth century BCE). Aristotle influenced neuroscientists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Xavier Bichat and Walter Timme, and informed their conceptions of the vegetative nervous system. Plum credits Bichat and Timme in his use of the phrase, thus putting the ancient and modern in dialogue. In addition to exploring Aristotle’s definition of the “vegetative” in the original Greek, we put Aristotle in conversation with his contemporaries—Plato and the Hippocratics—to better apprehend theories of mind and consciousness in antiquity. Utilizing the discipline of reception studies in classics scholarship, we demonstrate the importance of etymology and historical origin when considering modern medical nosology.     

Introduction: recent approaches to pottery and society in the Southeast

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the themes of this special edition of Southeastern Archaeology on modern pottery studies and summarizes the articles included in this edition. Southeastern archaeologists increasingly are applying new theoretical constructs and techniques to ceramic studies. These new techniques, in conjunction with traditional typological analysis, allow archaeologists to approach the study of past peoples from a broader perspective.     

Critical development studies in the Anthropocene

In this short commentary, the ramifications of the Anthropocene for a broadly defined critical development studies are considered. The likely anthropogenic roots of increasing cyclonic intensity and associated impacts in the Pacific are drawn upon to propose four research agendas. The first focuses on how places are becoming connected through human‐induced changes to planetary systems. While direct causal relationships are difficult to draw, research efforts can highlight the disproportionate contributions particular development models, actors, and lifestyles are having on more distant socioecological systems. A second more conventional theme focuses on the uneven impacts of the Anthropocene on people and places, as well as on how development is practised and prioritised. A third theme explores how the Anthropocene can be used to retheorise development in creative and more‐than‐human ways, recognising non‐human agencies and the co‐production of development processes. A final agenda involves asking how critical development researchers can strategically use and repurpose the Anthropocene to pursue socially and environmentally progressive ends.     

POSTMODERNISM,SOCIAL SCIENCE,AND HISTORY: RETURNING TO AN UNFINISHED AGENDA

Recognizing that the vogue of postmodernism has passed, Simon Susen seeks to assess whatever enduring impact it may have had on the social sciences, including historiography. Indeed, the postmodern turn, as he sees it, seems to have had particular implications for our understanding of the human relationship with history. After five exegetical chapters, in which he seems mostly sympathetic to postmodernism, Susen turns to often biting criticism in a subsequent chapter. He charges, most basically, that postmodernists miss the self‐critical side of modernity and tend to overreact against aspects of modernism. That overreaction is evident especially in the postmodern preoccupation with textuality and discourse, which transforms sociology into cultural studies and historiography into a form of literature. But as Susen sees it, a comparable overreaction has been at work in the postmodern emphasis on new, “little” politics, concerned with identity and difference, at the expense of more traditional large‐scale politics and attendant forms of radicalism. His assessment reflects the “emancipatory” political agenda he assigns to the social sciences. Partly because that agenda inevitably affects what he finds to embrace and what to criticize, aspects of his discussion prove one‐sided. And he does not follow through on his suggestions that postmodernist insights entail a sort of inflation of history or historicity. Partly as a result, his treatment of “reason,” universal rights, and reality (including historiographical realism) betrays an inadequate grasp of the postmodern challenge—and opportunity. In the last analysis, Susen's understanding of the historical sources of postmodernism is simply too limited, but he usefully makes it clear that we have not put the postmodernist challenge behind us.     

Gramsci and the African Città Futura: Urban Subaltern Politics From the Margins of Nouakchott,Mauritania

This article offers reflection on how Gramscian theories can be useful for critically analyzing the political significance of the actions and resistances of urban subaltern Africans. It interrogates the potential of subaltern political forms to profoundly transform society and to thus prepare for the African “future city”. It merges a theoretical analysis of Gramsci's concepts relating to the città futura—and its relation to concepts of city, subalternity, political initiative and cittadinanza—with a comparative critique of urban theory applied to Africa and especially relating to the politicization of the city in Mauritania. Our reflections are based on Mauritania and the case of Nouakchott, its capital, where we have carried out our research for over a decade. We will interrogate the re‐appropriations or resistances, as well as the autonomous construction of modes of living and of city‐making, made by marginal inhabitants, in order to consider their political potentialities.     

Postcolonial Development, (Non)Sovereignty and Affect: Living On in the Wake of Caribbean Political Independence

This paper sets out a new research agenda for work on postcolonial development, sovereignty and affect. It examines how ideals of postcolonial independence play out through the more heterogeneous affective atmospheres that disrupt neat paradigms of sovereign control and non‐sovereignty in everyday life. The example employed is everyday life in a Caribbean government office, but the paper develops a wider set of new conceptual tools and ethnographic approaches so as to facilitate research in postcolonial studies and affect more generally.