ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on volunteer tourism in historical perspective and on global citizenship. The aim of the book is to contrast this type of volunteering with the more contemporary volunteer tourism and gap year industry of recent decades, decades in which so many of the assumptions people held about politics and their place within it have changed. It situates volunteer tourism within wider trends in development thinking. It considers volunteer tourism as the expression of private emotion and experience coming to occupy the place in political and social consciousness previously held by ideology. It establishes that volunteer tourism is illustrative of a politics of ethical lifestyle. Tourism lifestyle has long been invoked in cultural politics, from the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century to the hippie trail of the 1960s and 1970s.
