Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that emotions play an important role in international development volunteering (IDV), but researchers are divided about how they matter. For some, Northern volunteering in the Global South is an expression of political agency and solidarity with distant strangers, while for others, it is a product of neoliberal techniques of government that mobilise emotions, labour and social practices of care without challenging the status quo. This paper seeks to disentangle these contradictory claims by examining how participants in an IDV programme experience and articulate emotions, and the context in which they mobilise these emotions to fortify or critique dominant power relations. Drawing on recent theorising about the role of affect and emotion in society, and on interviews collected in Cambodia and Peru, I aim to show how emotions are shaped through relations with humans as well as with history, place and foreign policies. Attending to spatial and temporal context is important to understanding how and why volunteerism’s affective relations can become sites for critiquing unequal relations and imagining development differently.

摘要

人们普遍承认，情绪在国际发展志愿服务 (IDV) 中发挥着重要作用，但研究人员对它们的重要性存在分歧。对一些人来说，在全球南方的北方志愿服务是政治机构和与遥远的陌生人团结的一种表达，而对另一些人来说，它是新自由主义政府技术的产物，在不挑战现状的情况下动员情感、劳动和社会关怀实践。本文试图通过研究 IDV 项目的参与者如何体验和表达情绪，以及他们调动这些情绪以强化或批评主导权力关系的背景，来理清这些相互矛盾的主张。借鉴最近关于情感和情感在社会中的作用的理论，以及在柬埔寨和秘鲁收集的采访，我的目标是展示情感是如何通过与人类的关系以及与历史、地方和外交政策的关系而形成的。关注空间和时间背景对于理解志愿服务的情感关系如何以及为何能够成为批评不平等关系和以不同方式想象发展的场所非常重要。