International Volunteering

My prior research explored how participating in popular forms of global charity shapes not only young people’s ideas about international politics, but also their sense of their place in UK social hierarchies.  

An ESRC Doctoral Fellowship (2011-14), supported ethnographic research with two London council-estate-based youth groups, following young people’s everyday lives and their short volunteering trips to Kenya and Zimbabwe. This led to a PhD thesis entitled: ‘Transformational Journeys: Volunteer-tourism, non-elite youth, and the politics of the self’. 

Here are some of the key pieces I’ve written from the project: 

Cheung Judge, R. (2020) Refusing Reform, Reworking Pity or Reinforcing Privilege? The multivalent politics of young people’s fun and friendship within a volunteering encounter, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography: [doi/10.1111/anti.12635]

Cheung Judge, R. (2017) Class and global citizenship: Perspectives from non-elite young people’s participation in volunteer tourism, Tourism Recreation Research: [doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2017.1303894]

Cheung Judge, R. (2016) ‘Negotiating Blackness: Young British volunteers’ embodied performances of race as they travel from Hackney to Zimbabwe’, YOUNG: The Nordic Journal of Youth Research: [doi.org/10.1177/1103308815626335]

You can find open access copies of these and several other publications from the project on academia.edu and researchgate.