Abstract
Helene Snee’s A cosmopolitan journey? Difference, distinction and identity work in gap year travel (2014) explores the cultural frames through which gap year youth (‘gappers’) interpret and recount their gap year travels. Snee examines blogs produced by gappers aged between 17 and 19 years from the United Kingdom in order to examine the relationship between gap year youth and social status. She argues that gappers tend to justify the worthiness of their year abroad by framing the journeys as opportunities to attain good taste and cosmopolitan worldviews which hold cultural capital when they return home. Through this argument, Snee outlines an emergent moralising discourse that constructs gap years as less about asking youths to question their global positions of privilege and more about allowing youths to unlock the cultural capital that a gap year can afford them.
In Chapter 1, Snee attempts to define the gapper as a person of class privilege, by suggesting that gappers are typically from upper-middle-class backgrounds with the financial capital to embark on long international journeys. She also introduces motifs of gap year travel that recur throughout the book, including the notion of taking a gap year to ‘find one’s self’. Chapter 2 attempts to separate the implied connection between gap year travel and cosmopolitanism, which she defines as ‘a commitment to exploring one’s global position’ (Snee, 2014: 44). Snee argues that the act of seeing the world does not necessarily mean that youths are critically engaging with their experiences, and therefore, the link between gap year travel and a heightened critical engagement with difference and diversity is tenuous at best.
Chapter 3 takes a theoretical turn by exploring the well-worn sociological debate over structure versus agency and applies those debates to her Bourdieu-inspired theoretical perspective. Snee outlines the uncontroversial claim that Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of habitus undervalues individual agency; however, she also argues that other theses such as the notion of reflexive modernisation from the likes of Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992) – which accounts for a less structured global environment in contemporary times – afford too much agency to the individual and overlooks structural limits of social life. Of note here is Snee’s argument that gap years might be about freedom and escape from the structures of life back home, but are nonetheless influenced by gappers’ social and cultural understandings of ‘good taste’ on the road. Throughout the subsequent chapters, it becomes clear that Snee interprets the blogs primarily from a Bourdieuian perspective.
Chapter 4 examines the methodological considerations of a blog analysis study and is an interesting read for researchers who use the Internet as a primary data generation source. While skirting around methods for gleaning Internet data and touching lightly on issues of discourse and online identity, she does use this chapter to delineate exactly what fits within the frames of reference for her study, and in this sense, it reads very much like a traditional thesis methodology chapter.
In Chapter 5, the first analysis chapter, Snee explores gappers’ use of cultural frames of reference to interpret differences, arguing that gap year bloggers’ recounts of difference are concerned with telling the ‘right story for audiences back home’ (p. 19) and don’t necessarily indicate significant changes in ‘nostalgic idealisation’ (p. 86) of the global South. Through the blogs, it remains the north framing the south. In Chapter 6, Snee turns her focus to the idea of the gap year of being ‘in good taste’. She argues that gap year travel demonstrates the exercise of upper-middle-class taste, wherein the gapper is not a tourist but a traveller whose journey involves frugality, adventure and risk. She highlights bloggers’ reflexive understandings that they need to be doing the right kind of travel, involving ‘roughing it’ in order for gappers to ultimately garner the kind of ideal cosmopolitan disposition and its associated cultural capital whereby ‘roughing it’ represents authentic experience and proper dues. In this sense, going travelling is not enough: a youth must have experiences with difference and must experience the hardship of the third world in order for their journey to have value ‘back home’.
The work of Chapters 5 and 6 builds towards the final analysis chapter, Chapter 7, which puts forward the thesis that there is a moralising and self-enterprising dimension to gap year travel, which gappers employ to frame it as a ‘worthwhile’ endeavour. It is through this moralising discourse, Snee argues, that gap year travel garners its cultural capital. The gap year is justified by the gap year youth in terms of the economic and educational advantages it provides. Such benefits are understood here as including resilience, a volunteerist ethic and ‘requirements to be enterprising’ (p. 162). Snee effectively shows that gap year youth shape their overseas experiences to fit a moralising discourse in which their own self-interest, and that of their dominant class culture, prioritises the attainment of cultural capital is paramount.
It is here where Snee could make a broader and more potent reflection on the relationship between youth travel and the neoliberal economic system at work. Snee leaves unanswered questions about the commodification of gap year travel, wherein she inserts the odd quote from gap year industry websites without significant additional critical discussion. As Snee notes on occasion, gap years have been commodified by the gap year industry so that they are less a means of exploring the intrinsic value of people and places of the world, but are instead framed within a worldview that evaluates experiences in terms of economic value. With gappers reproducing such narratives of making a gap year a resume virtue, it seems there is more to be said about how neoliberal perspectives that place economic self-enterprise above all else, and particularly on the shoulders of young people as enterprising, are emphasised not only within gappers’ accounts of their trips but also within the gap year industry.
In terms of methodology, Snee’s lack of interest in images, videos and hypertext that emerge in online blogs leaves some questions. If Snee is to use online narratives as her primary data source, it would have been worthwhile for her to also examine the images and videos that gappers take, in order to provide a fuller picture of the ways the gappers choose to construct gap year travel. Nonetheless, one thing Snee does very well methodologically is an outline of the ethical considerations required to conduct a blog analysis, and it will be a chapter I will return to when considering ethical concerns in my own blogging research.
This is a thesis that is well thought out, readable and builds a strong argument from which academics and research students examining youth travel and youth identity work in global times could garner significant insights. The book provides an engaging examination of the identity work youth undergo while overseas, and particularly in the global South, and holds value in sociology of youth and cultural studies disciplines. With more to be said about the values discourses employed by the gap year travel industry, this book provides insights that will motivate the scholar to do further research into youth travel and youth cosmopolitanism.