The Construction of Space in International Volunteering and the Global/Local-Split

International volunteering is an increasingly popular practice in the field of development: Young people from the Global North go to the Global South to work in social projects there. While the North/South divide includes more than geographic locations, international volunteering depends upon a material movement in geographic space: The volunteer has to go to a specific place, which automatically acquires a symbolic meaning through that. Even though the North/South distinction is downplayed in most programmes, this place is necessarily located in the Global South. Without this location, and what is associated with it on a symbolical and discursive level, the practice would not be possible.

Examining the websites of volunteer sending organisations with a discourse analytical approach, I analyse how the global space is separated in volunteer sending and volunteer receiving places. I argue that a part of this construction is the dissolution of the significance of space for some, while it becomes very important for others. This leads to a global/local-split: Global people, who are detached from a specific location, go to a fixed point in time and space to perform their role as volunteers there. Those who receive their services, on the other hand, are closely associated with their local place. These results will be complemented with an analysis of the perception of space of people involved in international volunteering in Ecuador, based on both interviews and blog entries.

On a methodological level, I focus on the question how, with the means of discourse analysis, the spatial dimension can be analysed in a practice where it is, at the same time, very present and very absent. For this purpose, I will follow traces of space in a mixed sample of materials, including blog entries, photographs, websites, and interviews.