Volunteer Tourism and the Moral Self

Volunteer Tourism and the Moral Self, offers a new lens to conceptualise volunteer tourism through the ‘moral self’. It moves the conceptualisation of volunteer tourism to the broader discussion around ways of being and becoming a moral self. It is the first volume of ethnographic research of Asian experiences of volunteer tourism which has been a field of study premised on Western participants and weighted with Western assumptions and ethical models.

Drawing on concepts and theories in geography, anthropology, sociology, tourism and education, Volunteer Tourism and the Moral Self explores how a moral self is cultivated, experienced and (hopefully) re-invented through volunteer tourism. It navigates with volunteer tourists from Hong Kong and Taiwan to examine how volunteer tourism has become a social trend. This social trend emerges from the interplay of institutionalised service obligation in schools and the culturally rooted ethical dispositions. It also manifests the search for rebuilding social ties in different forms of moral communities and new ways of being.