Author Description

This is the first full length treatment of volunteer tourism from a longitudinal ethnographic perspective. Unique in combining a comprehensive and comparative study of Thai host community members', NGO coordinators' and international volunteer tourists' perspectives, the book shines an ethnographic lens onto the complexities as well as the contradictions of the volunteer tourism experience in northern Thailand. Drawing cross-disciplinary perspectives in anthropology and geography as well as development, tourism and cultural studies, this book illustrates how the focus on sentimentality in the volunteer tourism encounter obscures the structural inequalities on which the experience is based.