The Romance of Crossing Borders

Studying and Volunteering Abroad

Neriko Musha Doerr, Hannah Davis Taïeb, Neriko Musha Doerr, Hannah Davis Taïeb

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785333590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

What draws people to study abroad or volunteer in far-off communities? Often the answer is romance – the romance of landscapes, people, languages, the very sense of border-crossing – and longing for liberation, attraction to the unknown, yearning to make a difference. This volume explores the complicated and often fraught desires to study and volunteer abroad. In doing so, the book sheds light on how affect is managed by educators and mobilized by students and volunteers themselves, and how these structures of feeling relate to broader social and economic forces.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Affect and Romance in Study and Volunteer Abroad

Introducing our Project

Neriko Musha Doerr and Hannah Davis Taïeb

Romance is at the heart of our travel fever. We romanticize landscapes, people, languages, and the very fact of moving across borders, of encountering and learning something new, of transforming ourselves as well as others. Study abroad and volunteering abroad are fueled by these passions, by this romance. And along with this romantic passion comes other emotions: fear of the unknown mixed with thrilling attraction to its temptations; longing for liberation; yearning to make a difference; guilt about one’s privilege; moral righteousness; and hope for growth, transformation, and enlightenment.

What kind of affect helps students form deep, long-lasting relationships with people during their travels? What kind of affect thwarts or dehumanizes encounters? What kind of affect drives study abroad students to understand their sociocultural surroundings and participate in wider social activities? What kind of affect leads them to withdraw into transient observer or consumer positions? How do study and volunteering abroad programs generate, shape, or transform such affect? What drives the romanticization of border-crossing and the construction of the border itself? And how does affect tie in to larger social and economic structures around us, to neoliberal and globalist and other world transformations, to the subjectivities of our time? These are the questions that inspired us to put together this volume.

As a collaboration between researchers and study abroad practitioners with diverse expertise—cultural anthropology, geography, education, foreign language education, and psychoanalysis—this edited volume seeks to explore the romantic passions and related affect of border crossing in the context of study abroad and volunteering abroad by students from American colleges and universities.

The framework that we bring to this multidisciplinary volume is that of affect. As we will discuss below, we use the notion of affect to focus not only on bodily response that cannot be signified (Buda 2015; d’Hauteserre 2015), but on how affect is mobilized and managed and how it shapes subjectivities—and how these processes are embedded in broader economic and political processes, in relations of power.

Why examine study abroad and volunteering abroad in this way? First of all, because of the intensity of the affective load that surrounds study and volunteer abroad. Before travelling the destination is often surrounded in the mind by a romantic aura, driving and heightening the desire for change, for discovery. Once the student or volunteer arrives at the destination, other, equally strong emotions may come into play: love, or shame, or guilt, anger or fear, exhilaration, deep disappointment. The strength and importance of these emotions is evident, and is reflected in their use in marketing study abroad and volunteering abroad programs, as well as in the many practices of predeparture and on-site professionals intended to handle these emotions to enhance outcomes defined as optimal, and in the writings of students and volunteers about their experience. Furthermore, in the literature written by and for study abroad and volunteering abroad professionals, there is growing interest in looking at emotions and affect and bringing this aspect of student experience squarely into discussions in the field. Our approach to affect, primarily anthropological but also emerging from other fields, can contribute to these discussions, and is thus of interest for international education and community service professionals.

This book is also geared for anthropologists, geographers, and cultural studies scholars who study affect in globalist/globalizing processes, encounters with cultural Others, travel and tourism, education, and humanitarian work. Our turning of the lens onto study and volunteer abroad contributes a new field of affect analysis that focuses on the construction and sustenance of difference in globalist processes, border crossings involving less apparent relations of power, a field of experiential learning in which what constitutes “learning” is not clear, volunteer and service work, and on intersections of affect and wider political economy.

We consider the field of study and volunteering abroad to be a rich, understudied domain for understanding the emergence of the subjectivities of twenty-first-century selves. Study and volunteer abroad are growing dramatically, but little serious attention has been paid to the analysis of these phenomena, to what they suggest about what young Americans in particular are becoming and are being encouraged to become. Thus this volume, at once geared to the scholar and to the professional.

Our professional motivation leads us to ask questions with proactive intervention and practical suggestions in mind. What kind of affect connects people instead of creating boundaries? How can we make sure our romantic desire and curiosity for the exotic do not make our relationship with the cultural other into voyeurism? How can we harness and redirect emotions in order to humanize the encounter? What kinds of mobilization and management of affect reduce relations of power and domination and instead reinforce egalitarian relations?

In what follows, we will first present a broader theoretical framework and an overview of our approach to affect. We will then go on to situate this volume’s contributions in four fields whose interests touch upon the issue of affect and border crossing: affect in the national belonging and the global, affect in the encounter with the cultural Other in relations of power, affect in learning, and affect in helping others. After introducing the chapters in this volume, the chapter ends with a postscript that explains how this project began.

Affect: Theoretical Frameworks

There is no single theory of affect (Seigworth and Gregg 2010). For Brian Massumi, one of the influential scholars of affect writing today (cf. Massumi 1995, 2010), the distinction between emotion and affect is central, as they follow “different logics and pertain to different orders” (1995: 88). Massumi uses the word “emotion” to mean the quality of experience from that point on defined as personal; it is a “qualified intensity” to be inserted into the system of meaning. Affect, in contrast, is irreducibly bodily and autonomic: passion. Eric Shouse further clarifies Massumi’s distinctions, writing that “[f]eelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal”; affect here is “a non-conscious experience of intensity” (Shouse 2005: 5). Julia Kristeva, as discussed by Karen Rodriguez in this volume, distinguishes the emotions, shared with other vertebrates, from the passions, which are human and involve reflexive consciousness (Kristeva 2011: 80, quoted in chapter 3).

Some (e.g., Besnier 1990) are wary of such distinctions, however, because they impose West-centered taxonomies of psychological process. They also warn about the assumption that affect can exist independent of and prior to ideology and to shared meanings (see Leys 2011 for discussions). For our part, though we do see Massumi’s, Shouse’s and Kristeva’s distinctions as key for some purposes, in this work we do not focus on the distinction between feeling, emotion, passion, and affect. Thus, we avoid imposing researchers’ interpretation of these processes. Instead, we use these terms synonymously, using the term affect interchangeably with feelings, or emotion, or sentiments, and focusing on the relationship of affect to broader social, economic, and political processes. In so doing, we follow the approach of Richard and Rudnyckyj (2009: 57) who use affect as a way to conceptualize “the relationship between structures and sentiments.”

This also contrasts with earlier anthropological approaches to emotion as culturally mediated (Geertz 1973; Rosaldo 1984) that relied on a static and bounded notion of culture. Instead, we pay attention to wider political, economic, and social forces that shape “culture” as well as affect—passion, desire, romantic feelings, discomfort, fear, anxiety, etc. This approach allows us to link subjectivity and action, to explore in meaningful ways the connection between lived experience (including its visceral manifestations) and broader processes, “the shifting relationships between the state, market and society” (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009: 57).

In particular, our volume examines the mobilization and management of affect, which then shapes actions and fosters particular subjectivities. For individuals choosing to study or volunteer abroad, the main affect connected to these activities is positive, at least initially: the emotions that drew them to participate. Therefore, our main focus is on romance and the other alluring feelings that draw people to study or volunteer abroad. However, other types of affect are also discussed.

What does it mean to talk about how affect is mobilized? A flight attendant may mobilize her empathy for passengers and her good humor to live up to her employers’ promises of providing “sincere smiles” to customers (Hochschild 2003); a care-giver from the Philippines or Sri Lanka, separated from her own loved ones, may divert her affections and transform them into love for those she has been hired to nurture (Hochschild 2004). Letter writers in the Nukulaelae Atoll in the Pacific mobilize love or alofa to control the flow of gifts with their relatives living abroad (Besnier 1990); leaders of Mexican NGOs “build bridges of love” between local people and foreign volunteers, fostering solidarity that will lead to ongoing donations and structural assistance, all the while trying to avoid “emotional blackmail” (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009: 67). Not only love and affection but fear can be analyzed in this way; for example, in the post-9/11 United States fear was mobilized to bind subjects together (Ahmed 2004; Massumi 2010).

In this volume, we ask: How is affect mobilized, through what discourses, by whom and to what ends? How is the affective experience of students and volunteers aroused by marketing materials, by orientation sessions, by on-site interventions (Rink, Taïeb et al.)? How is our romantic search to be helpful to others and make a difference shaped through media images and news reports in ways that move us across the globe (Jakubiak) and how does it intersect with other types of discourses such as modernism and anticolonialism (Li)? Are there paradoxes involved in study and volunteering abroad—practices that must emphasize difference to evoke romantic passion in potential “customers,” but must overcome difference to some extent to be successful? How do these processes fit in with the larger economic and social context—what kind of desire, fear, guilt, and aspirations do current neoliberalist, globalist, and other world transformations inspire, and how do these direct our movements and actions?

Another way we look at affect is in terms of how it is managed. This management of affect can be part of a “technology” for governing individuals (Good 2004), as modes of governmentality shift from welfare states that sought to govern “through society” to advanced liberalism that seeks “to govern through the regulated and accountable choices of autonomous agents . . . and . . . through intensifying and acting upon their allegiance to particular ‘communities’” (Rose 1996: 61). The shift toward neoliberalism has been shown to involve the production of subjectivities through the management of affect. For example, affect-laden spiritual development sessions known as ESQ, Emotional and Spiritual Quotient, were instituted in Indonesian corporations, mixing management techniques with Koranic verses, with employees and high-level managers, leaders, and participants sharing in tears that showed “an open heart” and that led to a renewal that would improve business practices (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009). Those who established these practices shared in the affect and were moved themselves to new kinds of subjectivities. A second example can be seen in the work of Ana Ramos-Zayas, who shows how emotions like belonging or pride in one’s desirability or commercial viability can be managed to enhance an individual’s “Blackness” and overall worth in terms of race, sexuality, and gender in the current wider race politics (2009). In the example mentioned above concerning Mexican NGOs, the affect elicited for volunteers by hard work with local people and shared food is purposefully molded by local leaders into warmth that will lead to ongoing partnerships. The NGO local leaders conceive of this as a kind of therapy, working against the alienated emotions and “coldness” that they see as characteristic of human relations for their foreign volunteers, and fostering warmth, creating solidary subjectivities (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009: 67).

It should be clear from these examples that the management of affect can occur in very different sites and with very different goals. In the field of study and volunteering abroad, we can ask: How is affect managed, by whom (students and volunteers themselves, local partners on-site, education abroad professionals, researchers)? To what ends? What discourses and political, economic, and social environments move students and volunteers to overcome certain affect, such as fear of the unknown, anxiety about novel experiences, and a sense of guilt about privilege in the face of social injustice? What neoliberalist and globalist restructuring of higher education and employment pushes us to think about what affect and what affect-management skills a successful employee should have? What kind of interpretative strategies are used to “read” students’ affect in order to manage it?

In this volume, we see how curiosity about and desire for the romantic “dark continent” (Africa) or the “City of Love” (Paris) can be reframed and problematized by study abroad professionals and students, in contexts involving laughter, urban exploration, and study (Rink, Taïeb et al.). Other authors consider how students’ themselves manage their affect—various degrees and contours of fascination about the destination—in ways that may highlight the sometimes contradictory goals of studying abroad (Doerr, Kumagai); or how the affect evoked by volunteering abroad—ranging from a sense of being useful and loved to guilt and doubt—are managed by participants as they evaluate their experience (Jakubiak, Li).

Affect also shapes our subjectivities and our own and others’ actions. The notion of affect has a double aspect—it is a noun and also a transitive verb. This fits well with the idea that affect simultaneously is what one has and acts on others: a particular form of affect, such as the feeling of shame for example, shapes others’ actions, while shaping oneself as a subject (Richard and Rudnyckyu 2009).

In this volume, our authors explore how passion for the language of the destination transforms subjectivities and shapes the borders of the self as well as the surrounding social terrain (Rodriguez). Romantic attachment to destinations makes the study abroad students observant as they hope to become like local people by copying their behavior and attire but also become critical and reflexive when romanticism turns into disappointment (Taïeb et al., Doerr). The desire to serve others generates for volunteers a sense of themselves as good and caring (Jakubiak) but also guilt as they come to view themselves as colonialist imposers of “Western values,” depending on the type of project and context (Li).

While our main theoretical frames are thus analyses of affect as it is mobilized, is managed, and produces subjectivities and actions, our discussions intersect with four fields of research, to which we turn below.

The Global, the National, and Affect

Current study and volunteering abroad are often framed within the notion of the global. Researchers and administrators, as well as guidebooks and brochures, highlight the merit of these experiences as ways of gaining “global/intercultural competence” (Savicki 2008) and becoming “global citizens” (Lewin and Van Kirk 2009, see Chapter 2 of this volume for extensive discussion of these issues). The notion of the global is often uncritically viewed as positive (for exceptions to this see Doerr 2012, 2014; Grünzweig and Rinehart 2002; Johnson 2009; Woolf 2007, 2010; Zemach-Bersin 2009, 2011). The notion’s reliance on pre-existing differences among people (see Doerr 2012, 2013) and how this relates to students’ affect are rarely discussed. In this subsection, we review the notion of the global and discuss its relation to affect, starting with the research on nationalism/nationhood that serves as the unit of “difference” to be noticed, learned, and bridged.

The sense of belonging to a nation—patriotism, Volkgeist, etc.—has been a major topic of investigation in studies of nationalism. How does one come to feel attachment and belonging to fellow nationals in the bounded territory of the nation-state—people that one may never meet in one’s lifetime? This question was at the heart of the now class...