- Title
- The volunteer's journey through leisure into the self
- Creator
- Wearing, S.; Deville, A.; Lyons, K.
- Relation
- Journeys of Discovery in Volunteer Tourism: International Case Study Perspectives p. 63-71
- Relation
- http://bookshop.cabi.org/default.aspx?site=191&page=2633&pid=2078
- Publisher
- CABI
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2008
- Description
- Volunteer tourism is in essence a form of leisure behaviour. Perceived freedom and choice, intrinsic motivation, satisfaction and enjoyment, and identity and selfhood are central tenets of leisure that are clearly evident in emerging definitions of volunteer tourism. However, it is the relationship between volunteer tourism as leisure and the conceptualization of 'the self' that is the focus of this chapter. Volunteer tourists engage in a range of self-challenging and self-complexifying activities that leisure scholars have long theorized and studied. However, the concern with the project of the self that has occupied the theoretical and conceptual debates among a number of leisure studies researchers over the past few decades, apart from some notable exceptions such as Cohen (1979) and Kottler (1997), is largely missing in tourism studies. Given that volunteer tourism has emerged primarily as an area of scholarly inquiry within tourism studies, there is a risk that analyses of the self in volunteer tourism may also be overlooked. This is particularly of concern when one considers how volunteer tourism is as much a journey of the self as it is a journey to help others. In some instances, it is possible that volunteering can be life-changing and life-fulfilling, but it can also cut one adrift from self-knowing to the sometimes unnerving worlds of self-discovery and self-doubt. The purpose of this chapter is to provide some insights into the way the self has been examined in the context of leisure studies and to a lesser degree in tourism studies. It reviews the trajectory of the self in conceptualizations of leisure and concludes by considering its implications for volunteer tourism. Partly, this is an attempt to avoid the reinvention of wheels that can occur when one fails to take note of developments in cognate fields. In addition, volunteer tourism is a relatively new form of leisure behaviour and presents an array of issues and challenges not previously considered in examinations of the relationship between leisure and the self and so presents opportunities to expand understandings of this relationship. This chapter also provides a conceptual and theoretical starting point for this section of the book. In the chapters that follow, there are a number of cases presented that each build upon and illustrate the importance volunteer tourism plays in the self-development of volunteers as they embark, sometimes unwittingly, on existential and ontological journeys into themselves.
- Subject
- volunteer tourism; leisure behaviour; self; tourism studies; leisure studies; volunteers
- Identifier
- uon:6732
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804793
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781845933807
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