Читать книгу International Volunteer Tourism - Stephen Wearing - Страница 6

This book revisits and further develops the topics and themes covered in Volunteer Tourism: Experiences That Make a Difference, written over 10 years ago. In Volunteer Tourism, Wearing attempted to develop greater conceptual clarification around the notion of ‘alternative tourism’ with a specific focus on tourists who volunteer as a part, or for the whole of their travels. The book focused primarily on research carried out in the Santa Elena Rainforest, Costa Rica (Wearing, 1993; Wearing & Larson, 1996; Wearing, 1998, 2009) between the years 1991 and 1994. At this time, the paradigm of volunteer tourism was as an extension of ideas on community-based ecotourism (Wearing & McLean, 1997).

Since that time, the majority of Wearing’s fieldwork has focused on areas closer to home in Australia, particularly Papua New Guinea and other South Pacific nations. Some of the following stems from the author’s experiences, research and recent publications carried out in these destinations from 2001 to 2012. This book incorporates some of the work written in previous publications with current thinking and research in volunteer tourism.

Although international volunteering has existed for a number of years, the industry report ‘Volunteer Travel Insights 2009’ (Nestora et al., 2009) notes that ‘it was not until after the September 11th incident and the Indonesian Tsunami that travellers started to think about this type of travel and the market came to realise that they could volunteer on their vacation’. ‘The rise of volunteer vacations seems to be the product of a serendipitous alignment: 10 to 15 years ago, at the same time that trips abroad became easier and less expensive and better-traveled Americans began to seek out more unusual travel experiences, volunteering also became the stuff of national conversation’ (McGray, 2004: 1).

In addition to the authors’ own work, we have had the opportunities to work closely on this book with a number of global scholars who are undertaking research in this area. Some of these are early career researchers who have contributed chapters. However, it is the growing body of work Wearing has developed along with that of Professor Nancy Gard McGehee from Virginia Tech, USA that provides this volume with new critical insights. Most notable is the addition of critical discussions that consider the overlaps and ambiguities surrounding volunteer tourism. Our work together draws on the links with other related areas of inquiry, including gap year volunteering, educational travel and cultural exchange, providing new insights into this phenomenon.

Since publishing Volunteer Tourism: Experiences That Make a Difference, Wearing has received constructive feedback that the first book relied heavily on a single case study and tended to emphasize the experience of volunteer tourism from the tourists’ perspective. In this book, we seek to rectify those limitations by exploring a much wider range of examples of volunteer tourism from all over the world. In addition, the title of this book reflects our attempt to focus more explicitly upon the context for the experience, and place front and centre host community issues and perspectives as a major concern of this book.