Volunteer Tourism and the Moral Self

Volunteer Tourism and the Moral Self, offers a new lens to conceptualise volunteer tourism through the ‘moral self’. It moves the conceptualisation of volunteer tourism to the broader discussion around ways of being and becoming a moral self. It is the first volume of ethnographic research of Asian experiences of volunteer tourism which has been a field of study premised on Western participants and weighted with Western assumptions and ethical models.

Drawing on concepts and theories in geography, anthropology, sociology, tourism and education, Volunteer Tourism and the Moral Self explores how a moral self is cultivated, experienced and (hopefully) re-invented through volunteer tourism. It navigates with volunteer tourists from Hong Kong and Taiwan to examine how volunteer tourism has become a social trend. This social trend emerges from the interplay of institutionalised service obligation in schools and the culturally rooted ethical dispositions. It also manifests the search for rebuilding social ties in different forms of moral communities and new ways of being.

Yim Ming Connie Kwong is a human geographer, with an interdisciplinary background in cultural geography, tourism and sustainability. She holds a PhD in Geography from Durham University, and an MPhil in Geography and BSocSc. (Geography and Sociology) from the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests lie in three interdisciplinary areas: 1) cultures, values, identities and practices; 2) moral geographies, tourism and development; 3) community building and sustainable co-development. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research. She has conducted interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and fieldwork as well as supervising student projects and theses of different levels in East, Southeast and Central Asia, Latin America and East Africa. She is co-editor of a recent volume ‘Navigating the Field: Postgraduate Experiences in Social Research'.