Volunteer tourism and the popular humanitarian gaze

With an increasing number of tourists 'vacationing like Brangelina' (Fitzpatrick, 2007), volunteer tourism has become one of the fastest growing niche tourism markets in the world. In this article I develop the popular humanitarian gaze as an analytic to describe the geopolitical assemblage of institutions, cultural practices and actors (e.g. celebrity humanitarians, alternative consumers and volunteer tourists) that play a critical role in the privatization and depoliticization of popular humanitarian interventions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among three non-governmental organizations that use volunteer tourism as a social and economic development strategy as well as popular media texts, I argue that the popular humanitarian gaze co-produces and extends geopolitical discourses of North-South relations that naturalize political, economic and social inequality. Volunteer tourism in particular, I argue, perpetuates a popular humanitarian gaze that reframes contemporary humanitarianism as an empathetic gesture of commoditized concern.