Abstract
‘My family owned a beautiful marble floor, right by the beach. Whenever a boat with refugees was about to arrive, people would rush onto our property to save the day. Braking, turning, skidding around with their rental cars, destroying the marble. At one point one of them got out of the car, and asked “Excuse me, who are you?” I replied, “Who are YOU? We have everything under control, and you just ruined my marble. Why?” Locals were already helping, tourists were already helping. There should be an awareness of where you are and what you can do.’ (local business owner, Lesbos Greece)
Voluntourism refers to the performance of leisure activities in combination with volunteering for a good cause, often involving travel to a disaster-stricken country. This arrangement makes sense at first glance. Why not travel somewhere beautiful and enrich your experience by doing something helpful? However, voluntourism can also be highly problematic, as well-intentioned efforts can lead to harmful consequences if they do not consider the complex local reality. For instance, though providing education to orphaned children through a paid voluntourism agency might seem noble, it can inadvertently incentivize impoverished communities to intentionally orphan and mistreat children to attract wealthy voluntourists (Rosenberg, 2018). In such cases, relatively well-off travellers get their voluntourism experience, while those directly affected by tragedy suffer the consequences.
I had not heard of voluntourism before I set foot on the Greek island of Lesbos in 2017. I was a PhD student, there to study collective sensemaking in the local response to a refugee crisis (van der Giessen, Langenbusch, Jacobs, & Cornelissen, 2022). However, many of the local community members were quick to voice their frustrations about the thousands of volunteers who had come and gone over the years ‘because it is sexy. You take a few photos and post them on Facebook, and you are a hero’ (local community member). It also did not take long before comparisons between voluntourism and my own research in Lesbos came up: ‘You are here for one month to do your thing and then you go back. You will present your thesis and it is a success for you’ (local volunteer).
In retrospect, the parallels between voluntourism and academic fieldwork are as obvious as they are uncomfortable. I also travelled to a disaster-stricken area and sought to contribute to a good cause, by investigating the local response to a refugee crisis. I also drove a rental car and volunteered through various organizations, though I labelled it as participant observation. I did not destroy any marble floors, but I did ‘do my thing’ and published an academic paper.
There is a dire need for responsible scholarship on what we often call organizing in extreme contexts, grand challenges, or more generally the most pressing issues of our time (Meyer & Quattrone, 2023). The past year alone, floods in Brazil, earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, and the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict have left millions hurt, dying, dead or displaced. However, the line between responsible scholarship and academic voluntourism is as thin as the sheets of paper we publish on. In this Agora I argue that our current practices are not sufficient for the complex and emergent moral reality of the challenges we are called to engage with. To illustrate, I share two experiences from my fieldwork in Lesbos and reflect on how we, as organizational scholars, may inadvertently act like academic voluntourists as we grapple with where we are and what we can do in these contexts.
The Lifejacket Graveyard
Over 500,000 refugees arrived on the shores of Lesbos in 2015. The first to respond (yet often last to be considered in studies of organized responses to crises) were the local communities who had lived and worked on the island for generations. Many locals shared stories of the countless times they had assisted arriving refugees and showed us pictures of the aftermath; beaches littered with lifejackets and personal possessions that had been discarded in the scramble. Local communities quickly organized to clean up the coastline, as each remnant of tragedy might scare off tourists.
During an interview, a restaurant owner told one of my co-authors and me about a lifejacket graveyard hidden in the northern hills and suggested we go see first-hand just how many of them had been removed from the shoreline. On our way there, our rental car drew the attention of a small group of people on horseback. They quickly surrounded us, started hitting our car with their riding whips, and briefly chased us as we kept driving – slowly to prevent injuries. Nobody got hurt, but the encounter left us frightened and confused. Why were they so angry with us?
The next day a local medical professional told us that there are powerful and contradictory tensions at play between volunteers who post images of despair on social media to attract funding and locals who are reliant on tourism to provide for their families and therefore seek to minimize negative publicity. Accordingly, the riders likely mistook us for volunteers looking to take dramatic social media pictures. However, he also told us that locals spent weeks moving lifejackets to these graveyards and out of sight. They would not want anyone to undo their efforts and perpetuate negative publicity, be it in the form of dramatic pictures or an academic article.
Fresh Cuts and Soothing Water
We did not approach refugees themselves due to risks to their well-being, but some inhabitants of the refugee camps would nevertheless come up to us. As I was leaving the Moria reception centre after a day of participant observation, a young man stepped in front of me and bared his arms to reveal a multitude of fresh, self-inflicted cuts. He asked me, ‘please, give me a knife.’ The volunteer who had been chaperoning me for the day immediately stepped in. She told me to keep walking and that she would help him.
To try and distance ourselves from the experiences of the day, two of my co-authors and I decided to go to a spa that evening. The spa was undeniably beautiful. Opening the door to the inner courtyard revealed an infinity pool with soothing spring water that seemingly stretched into the Aegean Sea. To us however, the spa was also a mirror, providing a dreadful reflection that juxtaposed the pervasive powerlessness among refugees and local community members with our own freedom as relatively well-off visitors.
The next day I interviewed a volunteer who had dedicated his life to providing humanitarian aid. As a former refugee himself, he stressed that he was helping from a position of equality, alongside, not for refugees. He spoke highly of many likeminded volunteers. However, he also expressed contempt for volunteers who spend their evenings partying, spending hundreds of euros on alcohol, or indulging – for instance – at a spa. In his view, they are despicable voluntourists who are flaunting their freedom. He confronted us with the problematic nature of our presence on Lesbos. Not just as well-off visitors, but also as Europeans, and as such complicit in the immigration policies that have turned Lesbos into a gatekeeper for the displaced. My heart sank. I felt guilty for visiting the spa and ignorant for not anticipating that my presence and actions might be interpreted as academic voluntourism.
Organizing for Responsible Scholarship
As organizational scholars engaging in complex societal challenges, we are just one stakeholder in a web of moral tensions that only become apparent through our engagement. Though it may not be possible to entirely avoid academic voluntourism, perhaps the notion can help shed light on the limitations of our practices and identify avenues to innovate scholarship in these contexts.
We adopted a multi-method and multi-disciplinary approach for our study, which helped us become sensitized to many potentially problematic aspects of our engagement. We also practised methodological reflexivity to position ourselves as new tensions emerged. For instance, we elaborated our interview protocol to investigate the local community perspective following the lifejacket graveyard encounter. As we became sensitized to the possibility of being perceived as voluntourists, we also refrained from unnecessary tourism and volunteering activities. Reflexivity is a reactive strategy however, and as such does not prevent the conflicts we encounter and perhaps cause. Accordingly, we need more proactive methodologies that allow us to anticipate and organize for context-specific emergent tensions.
Participatory methodologies are commonly advocated and might provide a way forward as they enable the co-creation of engagement with stakeholders who are already embedded in the tensions we would otherwise reflexively navigate. However, participatory approaches are relatively rare (Daouk-Öyry, 2023) and often limited in their inclusivity. To prevent academic voluntourism, participatory methodologies must evolve beyond being just a makeshift bridge across the theory–practice gap and embody epistemic inclusivity. This entails moving from co-created solutions to co-created methodologies, and engaging not only with formal organizations, but also with the often-sidelined communities who ‘were already helping’. The inhabitants of Lesbos had been dealing with refugees for years, yet they were pushed aside by formal organizations and felt ignored by the scientific community. We should involve these communities, along with relevant stakeholders from the public and private sectors, as early as possible. We could co-create research questions to be mutually relevant and collaborate on study design and data collection to anticipate conflicts and acquire novel insights. Cross-sector research collaboration is more prevalent in the fields of public management and technology and innovation, which may offer inspiration to innovate our own practices.
Any serious reflection on responsible scholarship should also consider the instruments that hold us accountable. Academic institutions increasingly require a priori ethical approval. We obtained ethical approval, ensuring adherence to data protection regulations and the formulation of strategies to mitigate anticipated risks. Many risks cannot be anticipated however; we did not anticipate the perception that we might cause harm by perpetuating negative publicity of Lesbos as an island in crisis, or that we might negatively represent our profession by going to a spa. Furthermore, academic voluntourism does not require harm. It is sufficient to merely ‘go for a month and do your thing’. Accordingly, to prevent academic voluntourism, our ethical instruments should transcend our own academic-institutional focus on harm prevention and additionally govern the co-creation of knowledge and solutions with stakeholders who are embedded in conflicting moral orders.
Last, it is tempting to define academic voluntourism in its most extreme form, as an evil caricature of scholarship on a ‘sexy’ societal issue and at the expense of those affected by tragedy. However, the reality of organizational scholarship is more complicated. My co-authors and I strove to adhere to our current best practices and nevertheless found ourselves on the ‘wrong side’ (Frenkel, 2023, p. 304), drawing the anger of locals who had hidden what we sought to find, and invoking judgement from volunteers who – in contrast to our own privileged position – embodied solidarity. There is a dire need to innovate responsible research practices if we are to gain legitimacy as a stakeholder in these contexts. When we set foot on a shattered marble floor in the future, I hope we can confidently say that we are not academic voluntourists. Instead, let us be trusted partners in the pursuit of knowledge and solutions and jointly address the greatest challenges of our time.