THE POLITICS OF AESTHETICS IN VOLUNTEER TOURISM

•I examine the “politics of aesthetics” in volunteer tourism in Chiang Mai, Thailand.•Research is based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork among three NGOs.•Volunteer tourists aestheticize poverty by describing it as authentic and cultural.•Volunteer tourists perpetuate an aesthetic structure that depoliticizes poverty.•Volunteer tourism needs to be reframed to make history and politics “sensible”.

In this paper I address the “politics of aesthetics” in volunteer tourism. By “aesthetics,” I mean two things. First, I adopt Jacques Ranciere’s notion of aesthetics as the structured way human sense is organized. I argue that volunteer tourism perpetuates an aesthetic structure that systematically depoliticizes the global economic inequality on which the experience is based. Second, drawing on recent scholarship in critical tourism studies as well as 16 months of ethnographic research in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I illustrate how volunteer tourists aestheticize the host community members’ poverty as authentic and cultural. This reframing contributes to the legitimization of volunteer tourism as a celebrated cultural practice that perpetuates the aestheticization rather than the politicization of poverty in the encounter.