Voluntourism and Language Learning/Teaching

“This excellent volume exposes anew the entanglements of language, tourism, and neoliberal/ neocolonial capitalism. Each of the eight case studies reminds us how tourism discourse is to global inequality as “color blindness” is to racism: both are slights of hand conveniently serving the interests of the privileged. In this case, we witness travelers-by-choice exploiting their linguistic capital and reasserting their symbolic power, all under the earnest guise of philanthropy.” ­­—Crispin Thurlow, University of Bern, Switzerland “Jakubiak and Schedel have put together an excellent collection of work that will be essential reading for scholars of voluntourism. In focusing on language as a motivation for travel, the authors, collectively and individually, have achieved that rare thing: a coherent edited collection that truly advances our understanding.” —Jim Butcher, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK This edited volume extends current voluntourism theorizing by critically examining the intersections among various forms of work-leisure travel and language learning/teaching. The book’s contributors investigate volunteer tourism and its cognates such as working holidaymaking, international internships, and gap year labor, as discursive fields in which powerful ideas about language(s), their speakers, and pedagogical practices are propagated worldwide. The various authors’ chapters shed light on the hegemony of global English, the social consequences of linguistic commodification and neoliberal rationalities, the ways in which speaker identity positions can alter the exchange value of languages, and how language competencies are tied to power in the labor market, among related topics. This volume will be of interest to readers in Applied Linguistics, Critical Sociolinguistics, Educational and Linguistic Anthropology, Tourism and Leisure Studies, Migration and Mobility Studies, and Language Teaching and Learning. Larissa Semiramis Schedel is a postdoctoral researcher in critical sociolinguistics at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her research interests include language and work (especially in the tourism industry), language travel, and on-the-job language learning. Cori Jakubiak is an associate professor of education at Grinnell College, USA. Her research program examines ideologies of global citizenship, native speakerism, and language as a commodity within English-language voluntourism and language tourism.