‘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.     

Urbanization and mortality decline

We investigate the relationship between mortality decline and urbanization, which has hitherto been proposed by demographers but has yet to be tested rigorously in a global context. Using cross‐national panel data, we find evidence of a robust negative correlation between crude death rates and urbanization. The use of instrumental variables suggest that this relationship is causal, while historical data from the early 20th century suggest that this relationship holds in earlier periods as well. Finally, we find robust evidence that mortality decline is correlated with urbanization through the creation of new cities rather than promoting urban growth in already‐extant cities.     

Partition and the Ruptures in Dalit Identity Politics in Bengal

A number of historical studies have revealed that there were powerful Dalit movements among groups such as the Rajbansis and Namasudras in northern and eastern districts in colonial Bengal. The weakening and in some cases almost disappearance of these movements after 1947 is difficult to explain. One plausible explanation could lie in the emotional and physical displacement caused by Partition of the province. Both groups lived in the border region and lost their geographical anchorage following Partition. This essay explores the movement of the Namasudras before and immediately after Partition. Partition represented a major historical contextual shift that resulted in a transfiguration of Namasudra identity politics in the two Bengals, revealing the conjunctural nature of such collective social identities. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Namasudra experience of displacement and struggle for rehabilitation brought to the foreground their “Hindu refugee” identity, overshadowing, at least for a time, their Dalit cultural politics.