ABSTRACT
Examining the impact of international service learning (ISL) on host communities raises critical questions of the power and privilege embedded within and mediated through relationships between ISL participants and host communities. As Marianne Larsen contends in the introduction to this volume, a critique of international service learning must begin by addressing the asymmetry intrinsic to the term “service learning.” Taken in an instrumental way, the notion of service immediately raises issues of neo-colonial relations between participants from the global North and host partners located in the global South (Tiessen, 2012, 2014; Tiessen & Heron, 2012; Razack, 2002). It resonates with charitable activities designed to respond to immediate needs but that do not challenge the deeper root causes of inequality (Langdon & Agyeyomah, 2014). Within the context of the contemporary popularity of voluntourism, there is a growing concern among researchers and practitioners that ISL relationships increasingly resemble those of tourists who simply combine travel with a period of volunteer work (Conran, 2011 Simpson, 2004). More troubling to ISL practitioners concerned with social justice, voluntourism has contributed to commodifying and depoliticizing volunteering, transforming humanitarian responses to crisis into short-term, limited-responsibility relationships (Chouliaraki, 2011). These findings align with research by David Lewis (2006), who suggests that international volunteering “may privilege the needs and desires of the server over the served, and act as a powerful and influential framing mechanism for the social construction of ideas about development, poverty and the ‘third world’ ” (p. 8). These examples of sanctioned ignorance toward the needs of communities in the global South are a critical concern for ISL practitioners concerned with equitable and just practices.
