Letter by Harng Luh Sin

[Extract] Dear Ladies, When I was pregnant with my first child during the final year of my PhD, I was told/warned/advised/woefully sympathized on – I was never going to complete my PhD now that I was going to have a baby. “Such a pity”, I once overheard. And indeed, I too knew of too many examples of derailed PhDs even without all that negative commiseration. Surely, this must be the end of my academic career

Volunteer Tourism/Voluntourism - Contributions by Harng Luh Sin

[Extract] I often start lectures that I give on volunteer tourism or voluntourism. Voluntourism as a term is often associated with negative associations of the commercialization of short-term international volunteering, and has been critiqued substantially in both popular and academic literature. Volunteer tourism however, was more commonly used in earlier academic literature and while critically discussed, is a far more neutral term to use. However, this area of study has evolved to use both terms substantially. Both terms are hence used interchangeably in this paper – reflecting not just the similarities in fact between what both describes, but also in recognition of the role that popular media critiques had on shaping this field of study by sharing my first ever international volunteering experience – it was in 2002; I was an undergraduate student from the National University of Singapore; and together with 41 other school mates, we went to Guangxi in China to volunteer in two then remote villages. People often ask voluntourists what they achieved in their stint overseas, and at times some would proudly detail what they did – teach English, build schools, dig wells, and other do-good, feel-good activities that fulfils one’s stereotypical ideals about what poverty alleviation and pro-poor development in the Third World looks like

“You're not doing work, you're on Facebook!”: Ethics of encountering the field through social media

This article argues that in a time when respondents and researchers can increasingly be connected through platforms of social media, our access to and encounters with the field through social media require additional attention beyond our traditional deliberations with fieldwork. The complex nature (and the uncertainty) in social media portals and the fact that one-to-one conversations are often posted in spaces highly visible and open to be commented on by third parties radically changes our notions of relationships between researcher and respondent, what are public or private spaces, and who is considered vulnerable or not. This article therefore provides a timely and critical discussion of the diverse ways in which one can integrate social media in research and, in doing so, encourage a much-needed debate on how to better understand the dynamics and ethics behind including online domains as one site among translocal, multisite research urged by other scholars

Letter by Harng Luh Sin

[Extract] Dear Ladies, When I was pregnant with my first child during the final year of my PhD, I was told/warned/advised/woefully sympathized on – I was never going to complete my PhD now that I was going to have a baby. “Such a pity”, I once overheard. And indeed, I too knew of too many examples of derailed PhDs even without all that negative commiseration. Surely, this must be the end of my academic career

Volunteer Tourism/Voluntourism - Contributions by Harng Luh Sin

[Extract] I often start lectures that I give on volunteer tourism or voluntourism. Voluntourism as a term is often associated with negative associations of the commercialization of short-term international volunteering, and has been critiqued substantially in both popular and academic literature. Volunteer tourism however, was more commonly used in earlier academic literature and while critically discussed, is a far more neutral term to use. However, this area of study has evolved to use both terms substantially. Both terms are hence used interchangeably in this paper – reflecting not just the similarities in fact between what both describes, but also in recognition of the role that popular media critiques had on shaping this field of study by sharing my first ever international volunteering experience – it was in 2002; I was an undergraduate student from the National University of Singapore; and together with 41 other school mates, we went to Guangxi in China to volunteer in two then remote villages. People often ask voluntourists what they achieved in their stint overseas, and at times some would proudly detail what they did – teach English, build schools, dig wells, and other do-good, feel-good activities that fulfils one’s stereotypical ideals about what poverty alleviation and pro-poor development in the Third World looks like

When in China, drink as the Chinese do: methodological considerations of alcohol consumption in research and fieldwork

[Extract] It was a strange situation I found myself in – I had accompanied my colleague on fieldwork in China, and was attending an official dinner. My co-author and I are both junior female researchers. I am an ethnic Chinese, while she is a Chinese national educated and academically trained in North America. As a welcome for the research team, we were hosted at a dinner of about 20 adults seated around a long rectangular table, where on one side were members of our research team, and on the other side we were matched in numbers by the local host and his associates. The alcohol was first consumed as part of official reciprocal toasts, and then individuals stood up to toast members of the other party. There was a clear protocol in all this – the toasting seemed predictable and almost systematic to everyone around me. I, on the other hand, was mildly confused and still trying to gauge what I should be doing

Voluntouring internationally on Facebook and Instagram: Photography and social media on constructing the “Third World” experience

This article studies photographic practices in ‘voluntourism’ alongside the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The advent and widespread use of social media platforms today complicates the ethics of photographic practices, as the ease of sharing photographs accentuates and stirs up the unequal relations between the photographer and the photographed. From a conceptual standpoint, the moral and altruistic underpinnings of volunteer work supposedly differentiate voluntourists from their counterparts in mainstream tourism, who are often assumed to be engaged in commoditized and leisure-based activities. However, existing research suggests that voluntourists do participate in conventionally touristic practices, as the pervasiveness of photography illustrates. Using interviews with 16 voluntourists, this article examines the negotiations behind photo-taking and photo-posting in voluntourism. We also consider the case of Barbie Savior, a satirical Instagram account featuring ‘the doll that saved Africa’. The emergence of such online media articles that critique and make fun of voluntourists’ depiction of their Third World experience therefore becomes a self-governing mechanism for how one should behave in encountering the Third World, even as voluntourism itself continues to be seen as a viable way of caring for the Third World

When in China, drink as the Chinese do: Methodological considerations of alcohol consumption in research and fieldwork

10.1080/14649365.2018.1535089Social & Cultural Geography21071029-103