Discourse, power and knowledge in the volunteer vacation industry: An archaeology of poverty

Volunteer vacations, which offer tourists a combination of leisure activities with charitable work, are rapidly increasing in popularity. The majority of these vacations involve travelers from "developed" countries who visit "developing" countries. Along with this emerging industry is a simultaneous rise in the amount of discourse produced by entrepreneurs and vacationers in the form of volunteer vacation advertisements and testimonials. Predominantly, this discourse depicts an Other who is marked by poverty. Following the work of Michel Foucault, this study sees discourse as the vehicle through which power is mobilized in the form of knowledge about the Other. In turn, the relationship to the self is also fashioned. This study looks at the discourse on poverty from the volunteer vacation industry in an attempt to better understand how it affects these social relationships.