Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience 9781498583268, 9781498583275

Table of contents :
Cover
Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience
Series page
Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
Tables
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
What Is Study Abroad?
How Does Study Abroad Purport to Be an Anti-tourism Experience?
What Are the Common Anti-tourism Components of Study Abroad?
Is Study Abroad Sustainable?
Toward an Anthropology of Study Abroad
References
Chapter 1
“Doing Good” and Doing It Quickly in East African Study Abroad Programs
Introduction
High-Impact Learning Practices
Volunteering and/or Voluntouring?
Study-Abroad Trends
Study Abroad in Africa
East Africa
Semester-Long Study-Abroad Programs, Kenya-Style
Marketing “Africa”
Drop-in Activism in Uganda
Learning from Labor: Sand Dams in Kenya
Learning from Study Abroad
So Now What: Considerations for Doing Good High-Impact Learning
Note
References
Chapter 2
Two Weeks to Global Citizenship?
Course Overview
Prep-Course
In the Field
Data within the Mundane
What Seems to be Working
The Challenge of Assessing Student Work
Discussion
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 3
Safe-Guarding, Social-Pricing, and Labeling
From Border-Crossing to Othering
Fieldwork on Study Abroad
Safe-Guarding: Collective Rituals in Sierra Leone
Social-Pricing: Class Borders in Peru
Labeling: Deciding What Is and What Is not “Immersion” in Spain
Discussion
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 4
The Imperative of Access in Short-Term Study Abroad
The Imperative of Access in Short-Term Study Abroad
Background and Methods
Liminality versus Coloniality
Managing and Selling Difference
Patterns in Study-Abroad Provision: Health, Safety, and the Imperative of Access
Patterns in Study-Abroad Provision: The Cultural Safety Net
Analysis and Discussion
Notes
References
Chapter 5
Forbidden Learning
Introduction
Edutourism and the Logic of Transformation in Perspective
“Being There”: Transforming Perspectives through Ethnographic Methods
Homestays as “Deep Immersion” and Experiential Learning
Unplugged: Authenticity and the Deployment of Strategic Essentialisms
Tourist Imaginaries and Forbidden Cuba
Dancing and Singing: Discomfort and Inversion
“Insider” Knowledge and Embodied Learning
“Frozen in Time” and Nostalgic Neocolonialism
Conclusions
References
Chapter 6
Weekending Daring
Overview
Notes
References
Chapter 7
I Go to Cleanse My Head and Heart
A Note on Study Abroad
Pilgrimage and Tourism
Short-term Missions as Pilgrimage
Discomfort
Forming Bonds
Inner Growth/Transformation
Narratives
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 8
Schooling Taste
Notes
References
Chapter 9
Teaching and Learning Food and Sustainability in Italy
Introduction
Feeling “Like a Local” in an “Authentic” Destination
Betwixt and Beyond Touristic Consumption
References
Chapter 10
Finding Home, Identity, and Meaning in Study-Abroad Programs Targeted to Heritage Students
"Where are you From?"
Factors Impacting Immigrant and First-Generation Students in Study Abroad
Fulbright Study Abroad
Searching for Identity in the Unknown
Defining Home and “Imagined Home” as Part of a Displaced Diaspora
When Study Abroad Creates Discomfort
Reconciling Real and Imagined “Home”
Reflecting on the Study-Abroad Experience
A Home in Two Places
The Lasting Impacts of Study Abroad
Note
References
Chapter 11
Between Tourism and Anti-Tourism
Introduction: The Anti-Tourism Context
Study Abroad as a Historically Situated Form of Anti-Tourism
The Difficult Position of the Professor
Conclusion: The Ethics of Study Abroad
Notes
References
Epilogue
How does COVID reveal the relationship between tourism and study abroad?
What Was the Fallout from COVID-19 on Study-Abroad Programs Featured in This Volume?
What Was the Effect on International Students?
How Will Study Abroad Change in the Future?
Conclusion: Whither a Way Forward?
Note
Bibliography
Afterword
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience

Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility, and Society

Series Editor: Michael A. Di Giovine (West Chester University of Pennsylvania) Mission Statement The Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility, and Society series provides anthropologists and others in the social sciences and humanities with cutting-edge and engaging research on the culture(s) of tourism. This series embraces anthropology’s holistic and comprehensive approach to scholarship, and is sensitive to the complex diversity of human expression. Books in this series particularly examine tourism’s relationship with cultural heritage and mobility and its impact on society. Contributions are transdisciplinary in nature, and either look at a particular country, region, or population, or take a more global approach. Including monographs and edited collections, this series is a valuable resource to scholars and students alike who are interested in the various manifestations of tourism and its role as the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of socio-cultural and economic activity.

Advisory Board Members Quetzil Castañeda, Saskia Cousin, Jackie Feldman, Nelson H. H. Graburn, Jafar Jafari, Tom Selwyn, Valene Smith, Amanda Stronza, Hazel Tucker, and Shinji Yamashita

Books in Series Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience edited by John Bodinger de Uriarte and Michael A. Di Giovine The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond edited by Naomi Leite, Quetzil E. Castañeda, and Kathleen M. Adams Capoeira, Mobility, and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World by Sergio González Varela Rethinking the Anthropology of Love and Tourism by Sagar Singh Tourism and Wellness: Travel for the Good of All? edited by Bryan S. R. Grimwood, Heather Mair, Kellee Caton, and Meghan Muldoon Bourbon Street, B-drinking and the Sexual Economy of Tourism by Angela Demovic Anthropology of Tourism in Central and Eastern Europe: Bridging Worlds, edited by Sabina Owsianowska and Magdalena Banaskiewicz Apprenticeship Pilgrimage: Developing Expertise through Travel and Training, by Lauren M. Griffith and Jonathan S. Marion Cosmopolitanism and Tourism: Rethinking Theory and Practice, edited by Robert Shepherd Tourism and Language in Vieques: An Ethnography of the Post-Navy Period, by Luis Galanes Valldejuli Tourism and Prosperity in Miao Land: Power and Inequality in Rural Ethnic China, by Xianghong Feng Alternative Tourism in Budapest: Class, Culture, and Identity in a Postsocialist City, by Susan E. Hill

Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience Edited by John J. Bodinger de Uriarte and Michael A. Di Giovine

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-4985-8326-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-8327-5 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For our mothers, who instilled in us an early love for travel and exploration, and encouraged us to study abroad. And for our students— may they continue to travel, to learn, and to expand their horizons. IN MEMORIAM Edward M. Bruner (1924–2020)

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

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Foreword: Studying Study Abroad Against the Neoliberal Grain Richard Handler

xi

Preface: COVID-19 and the Shifting Ground of Study Abroad John Bodinger de Uriarte and Michael A. Di Giovine

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Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: Asking Questions about Study Abroad and Tourism Michael A. Di Giovine and John Bodinger de Uriarte

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1 “Doing Good” and Doing It Quickly in East African Study Abroad Programs Jennifer Coffman and Miroslava Prazak

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2 Two Weeks to Global Citizenship? The Problems, Paradoxes, and Successes of Running a Short-Term Travel Course Aaron Andrew Greer and Don D. Schweitzer

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3 Safe-Guarding, Social-Pricing, and Labeling: Technologies of Border Construction and Discourses of Border Crossing in Study Abroad/Away Neriko Musha Doerr 4 The Imperative of Access in Short-Term Study Abroad: Provider Agencies, Liminality, and the Mediation of Cultural Difference Gareth Barkin vii

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Contents

5 Forbidden Learning: The Challenge of Dispelling Post-colonial Tourist Imaginaries of Cuba through Study Abroad Aaron M. Lampman and Kenneth Schweitzer

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6 Weekending Daring: Manufacturing the “Discomfort Zone” and Making the Study-Away Self John Bodinger de Uriarte

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7 I Go to Cleanse My Head and Heart Katharine Serio

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8 Schooling Taste: Culinary Tourism, Study Abroad, and Food Melissa Biggs

215

9 Teaching and Learning Food and Sustainability in Italy: Betwixt and Beyond Touristic Consumption Elisa Ascione

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10 Finding Home, Identity, and Meaning in Study-Abroad Programs Targeted to Heritage Students Annie Nguyen

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11 Between Tourism and Anti-Tourism: The Ethical Implications of Study Abroad Michael A. Di Giovine

281

Epilogue: Questioning the Future of Study Abroad in a Post-COVID-19 World Michael A. Di Giovine and John Bodinger de Uriarte

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Afterword: Keeping Study Abroad Real Lisa Breglia

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Index 351 About the Contributors

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List of Figures and Tables

FIGURES Figure 1.1 U.S. Students Studying Abroad, 1985–2017 46 Figure 1.2 Study-Abroad Participation According to Program Durations, AY 2016–2017 46 Figure 1.3 U.S. University Students Studying Abroad in Africa per Academic Year 49 Figure 1.4 For Kenya, of the Sixty-Four Programs That IIE’s Open Doors Listed, Only Thirty-Six Were Able to Be Used Because the Data Were Current 50 Figure 1.5 For Tanzania, of the Fifty-Eight Programs That IIE’s Open Doors Listed, Only Forty-One Were Able to Be Used Because the Data Were Current 50 Figure 1.6 For Uganda, of the Twenty-Four Programs That IIE’s Open Doors Listed, Only Twelve Were Able to Be Used Because the Data Were Current 51 Figure 1.7 Numbers of U.S. Undergraduates Studying Abroad in East Africa from the 1991–1992 Academic Year to 2016–2017 51 Figure 11.1 Spectrum of Anti-Tourism Forms of Travel 287 Figure E.1 Comparison of Inbound U.S. Study Abroad Students, Inbound Tourists, and COVID-19 Cases in Top 7 Study-Abroad Destinations Among U.S. Students 327

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List of Figures and Tables

TABLES Table 1.1 Percentages of Students Participating in Different Durations of U.S. Study Abroad, Academic Years 2006–2017 (IIE Open Doors 2018) Table 3.1 Background of Participants in the Peru Trip

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Foreword Studying Study Abroad Against the Neoliberal Grain

In September 1968, my parents drove me from our home in a small Western Pennsylvania town to a slightly larger Western Pennsylvania town and put me on a train for New York City, where I was to attend university. My father said (I remember clearly), “this is going to be a great experience for you.” New York City was not new territory for me, since we often visited my left-wing bohemian aunts there, but the world of the university was. We did not use the word “transformational” in those days to talk about the experiences that led to personal growth (Freudian theory was probably still too much believed at that time), but I was nonetheless overwhelmed by the number of brilliant students, teachers and, above all, authors among whom I had gone to live. I had no idea that so many people could think so deeply, from so many angles, about a world that had suddenly become for me far larger than anything I’d known. At that time, we had “junior year abroad” but it was not much promoted. Since I was already involved in a difficult adventure exploring the world of a research university in a great cosmopolitan city during the tumultuous late 1960s, I saw no reason to go further afield. But that was then, the waning post-war era when the United States loomed so large in world affairs (at least, as most of our politicians saw it) that “the global” had not yet come fully into view for us. It would be a mistake to think that the university world of that time was not a creature of U.S. capitalism; one has only to read Thorstein Veblen’s bitterly funny work on “the higher learning in America” (written at the turn of the twentieth century) to be disabused of any such notion. Still, the way U.S. universities fitted into our capitalist economy and our “foreign affairs” differed from what we are experiencing today. Then, protesting students saw their urban universities’ expansion into the neighborhoods around them not as xi

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benign urban renewal (to use the term of the times) but as the gentrification it was (to use today’s term). And anthropologists were coming to see that their work in colonial settings made them not social reformers but handmaidens of imperialism. But neither of these self-critiques invalidated our conventional view of the university itself as an ivory tower, set in capitalism’s city, to be sure, and doing its bidding, but somehow quarantined from its worst effects. The authors of Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience labor under no such illusion. As Michael A. Di Giovine and John Bodinger de Uriarte show in their comprehensive introduction, the study-abroad industry is fully representative of the myriad ways capitalist culture (with its accountancy, risk assessment, entrepreneurialism, and individualistic doctrine of social responsibility) has restructured university practices in the past three decades. We now meet the enemy daily on campus, and they are us. In the fast (sometimes instantaneous) world of contemporary global capitalism, the leisurely junior year abroad is all but gone. It has become more or less unmarketable to students who are not interested in spending years mastering Chinese (not to mention languages with far less value for a business career) but who want instead to pack their resumes with as many international experiences as they can in the shortest amount of time possible. Institutions of higher education quake in the face of ratings systems that rank them according to (among many other things) the percentage of their students who gain some form of global experience during their time in college. At the same time, colleges and universities must defer to their risk assessors who tell them which of last year’s study-abroad sites are still “secure” enough for this year’s students. Such balancing acts will become even more difficult in the brave new world of the global pandemic we all are facing. Given the contemporary need for global experiences quickly acquired—a need which many believe the internet can easily satisfy—we must be especially cognizant of various forms of anti-intellectualism that devalue the classroom and “book learning” in favor of “experiential education.” Let me be clear: we anthropologists both mystify fieldwork and learn from it, but for the most part we do not feel the need to devalue traditional scholarship (the literature of our field, accumulated over the generations) in order to overvalue field experience. Yet, something like that has happened in undergraduate education, where people who should know better speak almost contemptuously of classroom studies being unable to deliver the wisdom that comes from a service trip, an internship or a study-abroad experience. I am perfectly willing to grant them that experiential education has pedagogical possibilities that the classroom lacks, but they should see that the reverse is also true. In sum, in the university world at present there is a frenetic desire among all stakeholders for global experiences but much less appetite for “slow”

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thinking about the political and cultural economy of such experiences. And it is here, in this gap, that Study Abroad: Student Travel and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience will make its contribution. The authors of the present book are grounded in disciplines—anthropology and cultural studies—that have a long history considering these pedagogical issues. In particular, they know how to be wary of the underlying concept— “authenticity”—which is the source of so much confusion. Also, they have themselves engaged in fieldwork that has taught them how difficult it is to learn something about other human beings across complicated cultural and political boundaries. And they have led study-abroad experiences where they have challenged their students to learn in similarly complex circumstances. The critical anthropology of study abroad presented in Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience builds on anthropology’s alwaysalready awareness of its own contradictions. To what degree the chapters gathered here manage to maintain that awareness, while suggesting answers to questions that are perhaps unanswerable, readers will have to decide for themselves. Richard Handler, University of Virginia

Preface COVID-19 and the Shifting Ground of Study Abroad

Work on this volume began in 2018 as we looked to study-abroad scholars and practitioners to raise what seemed to be a fairly simple question: How did student tourism and study abroad differ from mass tourism, and how did study abroad provide a platform for touristic practices while claiming to not be tourism itself? Over the course of our project, we reflected on questions of sustainability and study abroad, delivery on the promise of global citizenship, the value of embodied cultural immersion, and the role of risk and danger management in designing study abroad programs. We worked diligently on these questions, connecting in meetings and panels, visiting lectures and national conferences. Our collective experiences and fields of focus span continents and island nations, and depend on extended networks of providers and colleagues. As the final edits were being completed, and the manuscript was in the hands of the publisher, the world changed dramatically. The global pandemic that began in early 2020 shut down study abroad programs across the globe—students returned to their home institutions in mid-program, those projected for the spring or summer of 2020 were cancelled, and international travel came to a grinding halt. Taken-for-granted global mobility ceased, and speculation about its return grew. As we see now, responses to the pandemic varied by country, and national recoveries from early lockdowns and quarantines has been irregular, to say the least. The global “we” is by no means out of the woods yet. The chapters in this volume do not include considerations of the effects of the global pandemic, since they were completed before it began. However, we have included an up-to-date Epilogue, featuring the thoughts of our contributors, which addresses many of the current questions about the future of study abroad in a pandemic and post-pandemic world. It is our hope that this xv

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in-depth study on the state of study abroad will provide key takeaways as we imagine profoundly changing study abroad practices to meet this new present and future. It is without question that “business as usual” for study abroad will not return in a post-pandemic world; we hope this book will substantively contribute to its transformation. John Bodinger de Uriarte and Michael A. Di Giovine

Acknowledgments

This book grew out of productive conversations at several meetings of the American Anthropological Association, and had its roots in the editors’ shared interest and work in study abroad. We are indebted to a number of institutions, offices, and individuals that laid the groundwork for the content and direction of the volume. John Bodinger de Uriarte: I owe many thanks—without the support of a number of institutions, offices, and individuals, this book would not have been possible. First, I would like to thank the Global Opportunities Program at Susquehanna University for providing the opportunities and encouragement to participate in one of the most ambitious study-away programs in the country. Special thanks to my colleague, Shari Jacobson, for our mutual pursuit of questions connected to the doing of study away and for co-directing a program with me to the Galápagos; and to Scott Manning, the dean of Global Programs at Susquehanna, for providing feedback during an initial drafting of my chapter for this volume. Thanks as well to the different program codirectors I have worked with over the years, especially Ahmed Lachhab— your willingness to think and re-think the directions for the preparatory, in-country, and reflective components of our many programs together has allowed us to keep refining and bettering the model. Michael A. Di Giovine: At West Chester University, thanks to the Center for International Programs including Vishal Shah, Peter Loedel, and Nora Maurer; to Radha Pyati, dean of the College of the Sciences and Mathematics; Gautam Pillay, former associate vice president for Research and Sponsored Programs; and to Hyoejin Yoon, senior associate dean of the College of Arts and Humanities for their support over the years. I would also like to thank The Umbra Institute, especially Daniel Tartaglia, Zachary Nowak, and Elisa Ascione, for providing such a productive partnership. Yet at the heart of xvii

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the volume is a much deeper experience with educational travel stemming first from my family’s travels to Urbino through Ramapo College of New Jersey’s study-abroad program in the 1990s, directed by Rosetta D’Angelo; the BCSP program in Bologna, Italy, in 1998–1999 under the direction of Elissa Weaver from the University of Chicago; and my work as director of operations at International Seminar Design, Inc., in Washington, DC, under the direction of Kennie Ann Laney-Lupton. My chapter, as well as parts of the introduction, grew out of very fruitful and productive conversations over wonderful Umbrian fare with Teresa Cutler-Broyles, Bob Donius, and John Hartsock, and also with Jennifer Coffman in Vancouver. This book was written with the partial support of a CIP Internationalization Grant at West Chester University. At Lexington Books, we wish to thank Kasey Beduhn for her patience and continued, tireless encouragement. The considered and insightful suggestions of the anonymous reviewer were invaluable. We are especially grateful for Lena Morella at West Chester University for her work in indexing this volume. Finally—and most importantly—many thanks to our students who have raised critical questions about study abroad, tourism, their own experiences as student travelers, and the questions and promises of global citizenship. We are indebted to them.

Introduction Asking Questions about Study Abroad and Tourism Michael A. Di Giovine and John Bodinger de Uriarte

Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience begins with a simple question: How can we think productively about tourism—especially student tourism—within the contexts of study-abroad programs? This book recognizes tourism as a multiplicity of practices associated with voluntary and temporary mobility (Hall 2004, 2015; Di Giovine 2013; Burns and Novelli 2008), many of which are directed at uncovering the “true authentic” of being elsewhere. “Elsewhere” here refers to the elusive site of true engagement with an exotic and imagined—and often pristine and seductive—Other (see Picard and Di Giovine 2014), a cross-cultural experience that represents a notable change from the everyday that both tourists and study-abroad students seek. Early tourism scholars have argued that such sought-after change of pace is useful for recharging one’s proverbial batteries and refreshing and reinforcing the social order by drawing clear lines between labor and leisure (MacCannell 1976; Graburn 1977); when coupled with dedicated learning outcomes as study-abroad travel does, such deviation from the mundane also can be useful in creating high-impact learning experiences (Kuh 2008), aiding in the apprehension and retention of academic knowledge. Furthermore, tourism scholars and study-abroad advocates alike have often argued that such a change may also foster self-transformation (Burn 1985; Lean 2012; Lean and Waterton 2014; Ricci 2014), and indeed, a key learning outcome of many university study-abroad programs is the conversion of young and impressionable students into veritable “global citizens”—critically engaged, globally aware, comfortable with alterity, and socially responsible (Horton 2017; Streitweiser and Light 2009). This aligns with some tourism scholars’ rather utopian assertion that travel can be an effective means of intercultural communication and peacemaking (see Moufakkir and Kelly 2010 for an examination of this thesis), though these lofty goals of self-transformation 1

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Michael A. Di Giovine and John Bodinger de Uriarte

and the creation of global awareness and peace may not always manifest themselves (Bruner 1991; Di Giovine 2010; for study abroad see Pedersen 2010). From a quantitative standpoint, both study-abroad and tourism are experiencing rapid growth in the international market. According to the United States Department of State, which funded the Institute for International Education’s study, Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange (2018), study abroad has consistently grown and diversified in the past decade, with nearly 350,000 students earning credit with their home institutions while traveling. A 2.3 percent increase over the year before, this means that roughly one in every ten college students will study abroad in some capacity. In addition, in the 2016–2017 academic year, 29.2 percent of these students identified as ethnic or racial minorities—a jump of over 40 percent from the previous decade, when the same demographic only accounted for 17 percent of the study-abroad population (Institute for International Education 2018c). Likewise, despite the precarity of travel in a world system plagued with terrorism, warfare, and global economic inequality, international tourism itself has increased along similar lines—to the point that by 2015, the total number of international arrivals (1 billion, according to the UNWTO 2015) well surpassed the total number of military personnel deployed throughout the world (27.5 million, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (2015)). This jump can be related, in part, to the growth of more affluent, mobile middle classes in populous emergent economies such as China and India; according to the UNWTO (2020), China is now the largest outbound tourism market, growing consistently by over 7 percent every year. Thus, just as U.S. study abroad has diversified, so too has international tourism. Indeed, U.S. study-abroad statistics unsurprisingly mirror broader tourism trends—after all, student travelers are included in the UNWTO’s metrics, which are based on arrivals data compiled from national immigration offices, border surveys, traffic counts, and accommodations data (UNWTO 2019), such that—statistically at least—one may conclude that study abroad is a mere subset of tourism. However, despite the fact that study-abroad travel is often definitionally and operationally subsumed under broader tourism rubrics—and critics such as political scientist Jessica Namakkal (2013) have argued that it is nothing but a new form of “neo-colonial tourism” (cf. Nash 1977)—study-abroad practitioners, colleges, and universities, as well as the students themselves, often take pains to police boundaries and distinctions between the two. They argue that study abroad should challenge one’s cultural assumptions and lay gentle, but definite siege to one’s “comfort zone”; it should not be a touristic experience, if tourism is understood as a temporary, leisure-time activity often marked by a certain level of superficiality in engagement with

Introduction

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the local “Other” (see Crick 1989). Thus, since study-abroad programs are increasingly a component of the “university experience,” yet are also both an outcome and a response to global tourism trends, it is worthwhile to inquire into their interrelationships. Are such programs fundamentally transformative and educational experiences or are their appeal and design less transformative and more discursive? What are the components of study abroad that make it a unique form of travel? How do professors and other study-abroad planners and leaders balance the unique promises of study abroad against the structures and imaginaries of tourism? With contributions from anthropologists and cultural theorists who have deep ties and experiences with study-abroad programs, this book examines the culture and cultural implications of study abroad from a variety of theories and perspectives. In particular, the book examines the ways in which study abroad is often differentiated from mass tourism, both in discourse and in practice; indeed, a central premise that the contributors unpack is that study abroad can be considered a form of “anti-tourism”—a relational stance that purports to provide an antidote to some of the more problematic aspects of mass tourism. These contributions are based on qualitative, empirical research—ethnographic engagement with study-abroad students, practitioners, operators, and university administrators. In some cases, the authors have worked as administrators, most have been faculty directors, and many have participated themselves in study-abroad programs when they were students. We recognize that, in many instances, the voices offered here can only be partial—the length of the programs limits our ability to carry out sustained ethnographic research. And yet, many of us rely on our interviews, conversations, careful observation, and other data-collection techniques to keep the instersections and interrelationships between theory and lived experience viable and present. We intend this book to be of use to both faculty and administrators who are interested in creating study-abroad programs but also those tourism and study-abroad researchers who wish to gain important ethnographic insight on this unique form of educational mobility. Indeed, while the insights will be useful for practitioners—especially university studyabroad administrators and planners—this is not a “how-to” or “best practices” book but one that critically engages with discourses and practices of studyabroad programs and its imagined differences with typical touristic practices. The book will be of value to tourism scholars and study-abroad scholars who are looking for qualitative, anthropological works well-informed by tourism and travel studies. Much has been written on study abroad. On the one hand, as universities are increasingly adopting “internationalization” strategies that include growing study-abroad programs, there is a significant amount of “how-to” texts aimed at the technical aspects of adopting and implementing study-abroad programs

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(Lewin 2009; Vande Berg et al. 2012; Whalen 2015). These texts frequently extol the virtues of study abroad, and some are written by study-abroad advocates such as the Institute for International Education (IIE), which also operates the U.S. government’s Fulbright program; or NAFSA: Association of International Educators, which publishes the bimonthly magazine International Educator (see www​ .nafsa​ .org). On the other hand, empirical research has been conducted on study-abroad programs by a particular group of disciplines such as, most prominently, education. Indeed, articles on study abroad are frequently featured in journals such as International Higher Education, Journal of Research in International Education, and The Chronicle of Higher Education; and there are entire journals dedicated to the subject, such as Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad and Beyond: The ISI Florence Studies in International Education, a peer-reviewed journal published by a non-profit study-abroad provider. Language educators have conducted in-depth research on the successes and pitfalls of language acquisition in fullimmersion study-abroad contexts (see, for example, Carroll 1967; Freed 1995). Psychologists and social workers have produced a rich body of literature on a variety of acculturation stresses for study-abroad students (e.g., the most downloaded articles in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations all center on acculturation tensions in study-abroad students; see Smith and Nigar 2011; Presbitero 2016). Increasing contemporary emphases on student wellness and mental health in the higher education context also carry over into the training for the administration and delivery of study-abroad programs (McCabe 2005). Political scientists (Hensley and Sell 1979), geographers (Veek and Biles 2009), sociologists (Fobes 2005), gender studies scholars (Gore 2005), and other social scientists have examined the effects of study-abroad practices, though often still within education-focused publications (see also the interdisciplinary collection of essays in Vande Berg et al. 2012). However, surprisingly, the anthropological literature on study abroad is relatively thin, as is the literature from interdisciplinary tourism studies. This is surprising because, on the one hand, both the anthropology of tourism as well as interdisciplinary tourism studies have flourished in the past thirty years and have diversified in terms of the topics of study as well as the demographics of researchers themselves. On the other hand, it is surprising because anthropological research (“ethnography”) can be understood as a type of study abroad, in that anthropologists (and anthropology graduate students) often travel far distances abroad to study indigenous languages and cultures in ways that may not be structurally too dissimilar from the long-term study abroad experiences of undergraduates. This boundary between the doing of ethnography and the doing of tourism is one carefully policed by anthropologists themselves, even though it can also be productively blurred (see, for example, Claude Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques (1992[1955])). Indeed, as

Introduction

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La Brack and Bathurst (2012: 189–190) argue, the discipline of anthropology itself strongly influenced the ways in which American outbound study abroad developed, since it greatly contributed to the development of intercultural communications studies, which, in turn, has been a leader in researching the effects of study abroad and promoting its best practices. Thus, in addressing the phenomenology of study abroad, its culture and cultural impacts, and the ways in which various stakeholders negotiate tensions inherent in implementing study-abroad programs, this book ultimately contributes to the introduction of a new subfield of study—the anthropology of study abroad. WHAT IS STUDY ABROAD? The terminology associated with study abroad has varied not only across time but also from institution to institution, and in some ways is dependent on the internationalization missions of the institution itself. In general, it is often subsumed under the umbrella category of “international education” or “education abroad,” which, in its simplest form, means education outside of one’s home country (Forum on Education Abroad 2011). Yet this terminology is inadequate for discussing the form of temporary educational experiences that are implied in the phrase “study abroad,” since “education abroad” also includes those instances in which a student matriculates and pursues a full degree in an educational institution in another country, such as, for example, a Japanese national who graduates from an institution in the United States. This is not just a semantic concern; higher educational institutions often simultaneously seek to attract international students (particularly from emerging “markets” such as China and India) for direct matriculation, as well as to create shorter term exchange programs where international students study abroad temporarily while earning credit at their home institution, but they also seek to supplement their own students’ education by offering a course or series of courses abroad. These study abroad courses may be led and taught by an instructor from the home institution. In addition, some institutions eschew the term “study abroad” altogether, preferring the term “study away,” as does one of the book’s co-editors. There are important reasons for this distinction. On the one hand, most definitions of study abroad specify that travel must necessarily be “abroad”—that is, outside one’s own host country. The Forum for Education Abroad, for example, defines it as “a subtype of education abroad . . . or off-campus study that takes place outside the country where the student’s home institution is located” (2011: 12). This poses a number of problems, first of which is viewing this type of travel in terms of geopolitical organization rather than the quality or typology of experience. What about a University of Oregon student studying

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abroad Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada? Surely her experience as a Pacific Northwesterner studying in the Pacific Northwest does not necessarily connote the kind of change-of-pace, culture, and scenery that even traveling domestically to Florida, Texas, or New York would; the difference is that she is crossing international borders. If Vancouver is “abroad” in the experiential sense, then Florida, Texas, or New York surely should be counted in a similar vein. Likewise, many educational institutions, such as West Chester University, where one of the co-editors teaches, considers travel outside of the continental United States to be “abroad,” (i.e., to Alaska and Hawaii, or Puerto Rico, Guam, and other U.S. territories), even if they are geopolitically part of the United States. Thus, an international education program in Hawaii or Alaska would nevertheless fall under the rubric of study abroad, despite the fact that these destinations are not, technically and geopolitically speaking, outside of one’s home country. This has bureaucratic implications, as travel “abroad” to these American areas is subject to different levels of audit within the university (i.e., travel authorization must be granted by the Center for International Programs) and the Pennsylvania State System; different forms of insurance need to be issued, and even how the university calculates its carbon footprint is different (WCU calculates it automatically for international travel but not domestic travel, as the authorization forms are issued by different organizations using different information management systems). It also benefits students differently, as study-abroad students qualify for certain grants while those who, say, travel on a similar course with an instructor to Tucson, Arizona, to study migration in the Sonoran Desert, do not. This becomes an issue of inequality especially when students are mandated to travel “elsewhere” to supplement their education, as, for example, Susquehanna University does. At Susquehanna, a small liberal arts college in rural Pennsylvania, all students must participate in the Global Opportunities program, or GO, which is focused on providing a cross-cultural experience, broadly conceived. To accommodate the varying interests and means of such students, there are three categories of programs: GO Long (i.e., a semesterlong study abroad program—but for one exception, these are not led by SU faculty); GO Short (i.e., a three-week program in Iceland led by faculty); and GO Your Own Way, which provides more flexibility and includes “full-immersion” domestic travel experiences. Such domestic travel experiences—which, in the past, have included internships, study in a different city, and even a homestay with an Amish family—may be less expensive, less time-consuming, or less emotionally or psychologically taxing, while at the same time providing the same experiential value of supplementing one’s formal education by getting off-campus to gain a cross-cultural experiences (and indeed, sometimes this is referred to simply as “off-campus study”

Introduction

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[Forum for Education Abroad 2011: 12]). Thus, “study away” is used at some universities to be more inclusive to domestic student travel—that is, student travel that might not be “abroad” but is still “away” from the student’s academic environment. Indeed, as the Forum for Education Abroad points out, this term tends to be used in campuses where the same office is responsible for international and domestic off-campus study (2011: 12). In compiling this book we had originally thought to use “study away” to be more inclusive and to not distinguish between international travel and other forms that take a student elsewhere to supplement their education but decided on “study abroad” because it is the preferred term in a majority of academic settings (e.g., despite using “study away” in discourse, Susquehanna’s GO website also uses “study abroad”). In addition, all of the contributors to this book have written directly about international travel programs. Thus, our use of “study abroad” is similar to our use of “tourism,” in that it can mean both domestic or foreign travel. In this book, study abroad is defined as a form of mobility in which students voluntarily and temporarily travel elsewhere—off-campus, and, most often, outside of their familiar cultural setting and formal educational institution—to supplement their education through cross-cultural learning. Breaking down this definition yields a more precise understanding of how study abroad is used in this book. First, we situate study abroad within a spectrum of other forms of mobility, in which tourism and associated forms of travel play a part. The mobilities literature is indeed vast since the “mobilities turn” in academia (Urry 1999, 2007; Sheller and Urry 2006; Cresswell 2006; Bissell and Fuller 2011), which is an integrated approach to understanding the movement of people, objects, and ideas across space and time, as well as its implications on society (Schorpp 2017: 10). It is predicated on the contention that globalization has qualitatively enhanced not only the corporeal movement of people across the world but also objects, capital, and ideas—both physically and virtually (Urry 2009: 4–5). Global movements include contemporary tourism, but also business travel, second-home travel, warfare, trade, immigration and forced migration, among others. Just as globalization is not unique—people have always entertained ideas of a world outside of their immediate community borders and have traded and traveled outside of their localities (Sahlins 2000: 488–489; Luhmann 1982: 295)—neither is mobility itself; however, what is new about globalization (and thus contemporary mobility) is its conflation of time and space (Giddens 1991; Harvey 1989) and the conceptualization of the world as a unified whole (Robertson 1992: 8), mediated by new technologies. There are more people traveling in the world today, and traveling farther—but, Urry points out, not spending more time away—as a result of faster, cheaper, and more efficient travel (2007: 4). We see this in

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study abroad demographics as well. For example, while European countries continue to occupy the top five destinations for American students, locations farther afield, such as China, India, and Australia all now occupy places in the top 25, with China in sixth place (Institute of International Education 2018b), even as the length of a study abroad trip decreases (Institute of International Education 2018a); indeed, over 40 percent of students studied abroad outside of Europe in the past decade (Vande Berg 2007: 394; Institute of International Education 2018b; Deresiewicz 2009). Another important concept in the mobilities literature is an acknowledgment that such swift movements of people, things, and ideas—mediated by contemporary technologies—enhances the interconnectedness of peoples across the world. This has significant implications for study abroad. On the “supply” side, such interconnectedness enhances opportunities to create and organize study-abroad programs in increasingly more remote destinations, thereby presenting at least the illusion of adventurously traveling farther afield, outside of traditional tourist tracks. And on the “consumer” side, the expanded social networks that students cultivate while studying abroad are enhanced. On the one hand, the possibility of remaining connected through social media with friends and family at home can serve as a social safety net for the reluctant traveler. Critics, however, have argued that these same technologies present barriers to the mission of study abroad, as students are able to remain in their virtual “bubble” rather than broadening their face-to-face cross-cultural experiences in-country (Huesca 2013). On the other hand, such instantaneous connectivity through social media seems to create more durable social networks across the world, keeping students in touch with others they met in-country. This includes other American students (see, for example, Reinig 2013), but also the “locals” they met while studying abroad. Second, by students, we do not mean exclusively the traditional collegeage student (c. 18–22), though “youth travel” is often related to study abroad; to wit, the Student and Youth Travel Association (www​.STYA​.org), the tour operator Travel for Teens (www​.travelforteens​.com) that promises transformative experiences with the tagline “be a traveler not a tourist,” and the wellknown travel agency Student Travel Association (STA, www​.statravel​.com) all conflate education and travel, promise a qualitatively different experience than tourism, and emphasize the transformative nature of their experiences. However, in this book’s usage, “student” refers to anyone who is engaged in formal learning. Frequently, high schools (and even younger-aged) students participate in study-abroad programs, either sponsored by their institution or by signing up for a private program. In addition, “non-traditional” students— frequently those adults who are close to retirement and may be completing degrees later in life or are seeking to participate in a formal continuing education course—may also participate on study abroad programs. Finally,

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as Katharine Serio’s contribution to this book suggests, it can also relate to those on mission or service trips who might be engaged in spiritual learning with their host churches, since they are supplementing their religious education by engaging in an immersive cross-cultural experience. However, we do differentiate study-abroad students from university alumni or museum docent travelers who participate in the niche tourism form of educational travel, as they do not consider themselves students and are not actively pursuing a formal educational degree in the host institution. Third, this definition also requires that the travel is voluntary and temporary, similar to definitions of tourism (see Di Giovine 2013a; Smith 1977; Graburn 1977). Thus, this does not include other forms of international education, such as “degree mobility” (King et al. 2010)—those who travel abroad to matriculate directly into a foreign institution to complete a degree (i.e., the Japanese national matriculating directly into a U.S. university, or an American who studies for two years in a U.S. institution before formally transferring to a university in the United Kingdom). Unlike these forms, study abroad is temporary because it is limited in time and, like tourism, comes with the understanding of “returning” home, as well as to one’s home campus (at least to collect the degree, if one’s last semester is spent studying abroad). Also like tourism, study abroad should be conceived of as a voluntary endeavor—that is, not coerced or enacted because of immigration, workrelated movements (on the part of the traveler or his/her parents or guardians), fleeing warfare or economic strife, or other forms of migration that would constrain the student to study away from their original home. In all of the contributions to this book, students return home; their behaviors and actions are conditioned by both the voluntary aspect of their participation (despite the mandatory grade that comes along with it), as well as the understanding that the experience is not permanent—though the length of time may vary from only a week to a semester or a year depending on the program. In this respect, writer Annie Nguyen’s autobiographical contribution to this book powerfully pushes the boundaries of home and away, as well as the notion of a return. A Fulbright scholar who studied for a year in Vietnam, her refugee parents’ home country, Nguyen recounts the emotion-ladened experience of “returning” to an imagined homeland she had never visited before, to relatives she had never met. Like many first- and second-generation Americans who cultivate a “hyphenated identity” (Trinh 1991), Nguyen occupies a liminal space between the homeland in which she was born and raised, and that of her family; returning home for her meant a return to a place in which she had never set foot before, but where her roots—and her extended family—were embedded. This study-abroad experience challenged ideas of identity, kinship reckoning, and cultural and national histories. Indeed, many students choose study-abroad sites that allow them to investigate heritage

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claims more closely or to visit sites understood as significant to their own families’ histories of migration or mobility (Petrucci 2007). Fourth and most importantly, our definition specifies that study abroad foremostly is travel elsewhere—that is, outside of one’s home environment, be it domestic or international. From the educational standpoint, this means that travel outside of one’s home campus (though students often still earn credit through the home institution, and even attend classes sponsored by, and/or instructed by, the home institution, such as West Chester University in Perugia, or Susquehanna University in Morocco). We intend that it could also include travel—if it is temporary and voluntary—to a student’s university’s secondary campus, such as NYU Abu Dhabi or Georgetown’s Villa Le Balze in Fiesole, Italy. However, we also intend it to include participation in domestic travel programs for the expressed purpose of being elsewhere— outside of, and away from, one’s home environment, quotidian culture, or everyday life, so as to engage meaningfully in a cross-cultural experience. Thus, this definition applies to a student from The College of Holy Cross or The University of Chicago studying for a semester in Washington, DC, for example; Washington is clearly not a foreign country, but the student’s intent is to supplement her education by engaging in transformative experiences and coursework outside of her home environment. As the contributions by Bodinger de Uriarte, Lampman and Schweitzer, and Nguyen all reveal, study abroad is intended to take students outside of their comfort zone, their typical and daily environment, so as to provide a transformative and impactful learning experience. Seasoned study-abroad leaders, Bodinger de Uriarte as well as Lampman and Schweitzer discuss in detail the delicate balance studyabroad programs must achieve in challenging students: on the one hand, they must balance adventure and risk with institutional concerns of liability; on the other hand, they must seek to take students outside of their comfortable bubble while nevertheless ensuring their contentment as higher education consumers. This is a key issue for many of the contributors in this book. As Neriko Doerr argues in her chapter, study abroad exists through the necessary erection of boundaries, and all participants—both faculty directors and students— engage in rituals to construct and maintain them. These are acts of Othering: on a study abroad tour in Africa, for example, the incessant passing around of hand sanitizer might appear banal, but Doeer astutely points out that it constructs boundaries predicated on historically and racially situated notions of purity and impurity, safety and danger, health and sickness, strength and weakness, incorruption and corruption—all stereotypes that historically inform Westerners’ latent imaginaries of the African Other. Yet boundary construction is not only undertaken by the mobile, foreign traveler. Doerr points out that, in developing countries such as Peru, site managers often

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create class-based, economic boundaries between wealthy foreigners and impoverished travelers; while ostensibly there are practical reasons for this— locals in many developing countries cannot afford luxury trains or five-star hotels nor do they usually cultivate the same expecations or desires of “quality” (a common discourse in the international tourism sector, for example, is that there are local hotels, European standard hotels, and American standard hotels; see Di Giovine 2009)—but it also serves to reinforce common stereotypes about the Global North and the Global South. And both groups police these boundaries. Travelers may engage in various forms of social sanctions, should one of their own neglect to use sanitizer or become too adventurous to the point that it appears to put them at risk (something Bodinger de Uriarte discusses in his chapter); likewise, local officials will enforce differential pricing between tourists and locals (a prime example is Cuba, which has two sets of monetary systems; see Simoni 2016). But even the average local will play this game; street buskers will charge higher prices to foreigners in these countries than to locals, Doerr shows. Likewise, Elisa Ascione’s contribution reminds us that we should not think that the imposition of sometimes negative stereotypes is a one-way street; locals also have agency to erect these boundaries. Ascione is an Italian anthropologist native to the town in which she teaches food studies to American study-abroad students; through her priviliged position (and linguistic competence), she finds that her local service providers—butchers, chefs, and cooking instructors— may consider her students not only mere tourists, but, because of their lack of cultural competence in exhibiting simple cooking skills that Italian children of both sexes exhibit, they are treated as ignorant outsiders. Ascione’s chapter also brings to light the delicate positionality of the study-abroad faculty member, who often is made to straddle multiple boundaries—student or tourist, local or foreigner, representative of the host institution or advocate for the foreign student (see also Di Giovine’s chapter in this book). Underpinning Ascione’s and Doerr’s chapters are echoes of Fredrik Barth’s classic text, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, which argues that such boundary creation and maintenance “canalizes social life,” fostering both a sense of shared identity among insiders as well as the perception of the “dichotomization of others as strangers . . . [which] implies a recognition of limitations on shared understandings, differences in criteria for judgment of value and performance, and a restriction of interaction to sectors of assumed common understanding and mutual interest” (1969: 15). Yet neither Doerr nor Barth suggest that the American study-abroad student and the host Other are hermeneutically sealed off from one another, or their cultures are static. Rather, all are engaged in a mutual game of boundary negotiation and maintenance, and often stereotypes integral to being accepted in a group are negotiated among insider members. Indeed, Barth’s classic text stands as an

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example of the interconnectedness, fluidity, and socio-cultural construction of identities. The same types of identity negotiation and transformation are promised of study-abroad programs. In many study-abroad promotional materials—regardless of whether they are domestic or foreign programs—the promise is made that the student experience will not be a tourist experience but something deeper, based more closely on building cultural competence or global citizenship (neither an aim of commercial tourism, generally), and that challenging the student “bubble” or comfort zone is a primary goal. In “seeing behind”—often through taking part in service projects or voluntourism (see Vrasti 2012, for example)—students are invited to a seemingly authentic experience and to participate in projects that contribute to the well-being of sites and communities far from what they might consider familiar. But do these experiences actually offer a “backstage” view? And if so, how? And how does backstage access work as a commodity or promise? We base our overall engagement with this field on a careful reading of Dean MacCannell (1976) and Ed Bruner (2005), especially in their use of Erving Goffman’s (1959) concepts of frontstage and backstage, “staged authenticity,” and borderzones between visitor and visited. The book also problematizes notions of education and learning in the context of studyabroad travel. Although the anthropology of tourism literature has certainly grown significantly since these classic texts were originally published (see Leite and Graburn 2009; Di Giovine 2017), they are still insightful, and indeed inform the study-abroad process (Bruner himself began studying tourism while leading student travel to Africa and Asia with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (see Di Giovine 2019)). The idea of study-abroad programs offering an authentic glimpse into other cultural lives and performances is still powerfully compelling in the ways that study-abroad programs are both designed and marketed. This collection looks at a number of critical assessments that engage with questions of the (in)authentic and reveal diverse ways of fostering a “backstage” (MacCannell 1977) experience in the host country for students—from conducting service activities (see contributions by Coffman and Prazak, Serio), to engaging in homestays (Doerr, Nguyen), from instructing ethnography (Greer and Schweitzer, Barkin, Di Govine), to integrating seemingly “adventurous” experiences into itineraries that may also foster discomfort (Bodinger de Uriarte, Serio, Biggs), and other forms of bodily engagement with the host community, such as dancing (Lampman and Schweitzer) or eating (Biggs, Ascione, Di Giovine). Last in the definition is the notion that study abroad is intended to supplement one’s education. Taking a student outside of his or her environment, engaging with difference, negotiating change, and conducting hands-on learning in environments that cannot be accomplished on one’s home campus

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all create a value-added element for one’s education. And there can be persuasive arguments for this goal—without this opportunity, what better way to expose “selves” to “others”? Its lauded objectives are more often than not either over-promised or fully unrealistic, and there are definitely cautions and approaches that make more sense than others. But one danger of a blanket condemnation of study abroad as an extension of colonialism is to lose the opportunity for these interactions at all. Supplements can include a course or a series of courses that are meant to enhance one’s formal learning. It is not intended to supplant, nor to become, one’s sole form of education. Nevertheless, it can be sponsored by the student’s same institution or, as is becoming increasingly more popular in the neoliberal university marketplace, organized by third-party providers. These include other academic and nonprofit study-abroad providers, such as Arcadia University or the Institute for International Education (IIE), who operate the Fulbright program, but also for-profit study abroad operators such as the American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS) or CEA. HOW DOES STUDY ABROAD PURPORT TO BE AN ANTI-TOURISM EXPERIENCE? We can already see how study abroad is related to tourism, which the United Nations defines as “the activities of persons traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for no more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited” (2010: 10). Both are temporary and voluntary pursuits, often undertaken within a fixed time period and a pre-planned date of return; both are unremunerated by entities in the host country (if one even counts course credit as a form of remuneration), and most importantly, both are travel elsewhere, outside one’s usual environment. Even tourism statistics take into account study-abroad numbers, and many study-abroad programs are offered by specialized tour operators. Yet this book argues that study-abroad programs specifically position themselves in opposition to mass tourism, in both discourse and in practice. A number of different strategies have unfolded recently as part of this process of differentiation. First and foremost, study abroad is considered an academic pursuit, a form of deep and impactful learning that requires not only rigorous planning on the part of the professor but also some measure of effort and work on the part of the students; it is not all leisure, though as study-abroad leaders know, much of the transformative learning experiences in a studyabroad program occur informally, outside of the classroom. Complicating this formal–informal learning process is the increasingly more rigorous

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systems of assessment that are applied to these programs by the neoliberal university. Thus, forms of engagement are formalized, among them the service-learning components of many study-abroad programs (see Cororaton and Handler 2013; Conran 2011, for example), as well as the implementation of educational tours, demonstrations and field trips; sometimes the use of tour operators (or for-profit study abroad companies) are preferred because of their cost, range of educational visits, and streamlined services. Paradoxically, such experiences are often embraced by the mass tourism sector. For example, “edutourism” (Keith and Keith 2010; Loveless 2014; Yfantidou and Goulimaris 2018; see also Edutourism International www​ .edutourism​.com​.au) is a growing sector of an increasingly expanding and multiple tourist market, and “voluntourism” is a $173B industry as of 2017 (see Pariyar 2017; Vrasti 2012; Sin 2009, 2010; see also www​.voluntourism​ .org, www​.gviusa​.com, www​.discovercorps​.com, and www​.savethechildren​ .org​.au). Such tourist industry sectors also involve elements of service as components of travel and tourism, and study-abroad programs that include service are specifically focused on primarily college-age students, including but not limited to “gap-year” experiences. Such programs trouble distinctions between tourism, education, and service. They also participate in powerful popular discourses about studying away from one’s local, comfortable environment as an important process for self-discovery and the formation of a more cosmopolitan “global citizen.” What are the mechanisms of engagement or facilitation that lead study-abroad experiences to foster or claim more authentic and transformative experiences, if they do so at all? And what are the pedagogical practices involved as part of carrying out these promises? In many ways study abroad programs, both those that involve service projects and those that do not, are understood as practicing a particular kind of “anti-tourism.” Although tourism researchers have occasionally used the term “anti-tourism” since the turn of the millennium (see Foster 2009; Mee 2007; Welk 2004; Williams and Lawson 2001; Jacobsen 2000), the term has become part of the popular lexicon in recent years, thanks to highly publicized movements contesting “touristification” (Lanfant 1994) and “tourist gentrification” (Gotham 2018) that have swept through Europe and elsewhere starting in mid-2017. Fueled by a perception of “over-tourism”—that is, governments’ and other powerful stakeholders’ unabashed aim to maximize the amount of highly transitory tourists who often spend little time in a location and are often uneducated about local history or culture, as well as the tourist gentrification that has occurred as locals find it more profitable to rent their homes on temporary bases through AirBnB, thereby threatening the social fabric of local communities—these indigenous anti-tourism (and, arguably “tourismophobic” [Milano et al. 2019; Zerva et al. 2019]) movements urge that less is more, that to be sustainable, fewer aggregate visitors must spend

Introduction

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more quality time interacting with, and understanding, host communities. As Hughes (2018) argues, it has become a veritable social movement in its own right, often a heated protest against neoliberal urbanization processes and market values. Yet as Di Giovine argues in this book, while the current anti-tourism movement may be a recent phenomenon, its ethos is not (see also Doxey 1975; Butler 1980); forms of temporary, touristic mobility from pilgrimage to backpacking to the historical Grand Tour, from VFR tourism (“Visiting Friends and Relatives”), to conducting ethnography and to study abroad itself, often mark themselves in contraposition to traditional touristic travel: their practitioners, and the visitors themselves, often take great strides to position themselves as traveling “above and beyond” traditional tourism, despite embracing similar imaginaries, engaging in comparable activities, and using the same infrastructures, as mass tourism (Di Giovine 2013a, 2013b). Rather, this book focuses on anti-tourism forms of visitation that are conceived of as an antidote to tourism, especially within the frame of study abroad. As the name implies, anti-tourism is often discursively used to indicate a negative relation; it is a relational category that presents a set of practices to avoid in the pursuit of the real, the formative, the deeply engaged. In this paradigm, if mass tourism is “fast tourism”—quick, short-term, and superficial—then study abroad as an anti-touristic form is slow, longer term, deeply engaged and educational; if mass tourism employs “staged authenticity” then study abroad is authentic; if mass tourism is a leisure activity then study abroad should require effort. Yet Di Giovine’s chapter also argues that antitourism is an ethical discourse, a weighing of moral options to determine just action—what behaviors ought to be carried out. As an ethical form of travel, study abroad thus presents a solution for what tourism ought to be, what outcomes participants ought to gain out of the experience, how visitors ought to behave, how locals ought to be treated. In many ways, ethical stances such as these underlie the missions of the institutions that inform study abroad: study abroad ought to be a high-impact learning experience; it ought to be sustainable; it ought to create just, socially conscious “global citizens” (see also Greer and Schweitzer, this book). Indeed, as Di Giovine shows, “anti-tourists”—visitors participating in these alternate forms of travel—frequently see themselves as something different than tourists altogether, based on the ethical forms of engagement they perceive as an antidote to modern tourism pressures. He proposes that antitourism forms of visitation exist on a spectrum of ethical ideals, at the center of which lies study abroad. Study abroad is both an ethical stance against tourism—educational, engaging, high-impact, sensitive to alterity—as well as a strategy of travel that incorporates other anti-touristic forms. The spectrum proposes service as an antidote to socio-economic inequality that has

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been critiqued foremostly in these recent protests, education as an antidote to the stereotype of touristic superficiality, and relationship-building as an antidote to staged authenticity and the separation between stakeholders in the tourism field. Our use of “anti-tourism” in this book, therefore, is threefold: First, it is a recognition of the promise of study abroad as not being primarily a touristic experience but one that involves a more extensive and “behind-the-scenes” engagement with the host culture; second, that such programs may be seen as antidotes to standard tourism, especially in terms of their promised breaking down of distance between a program participant and an imagined Other; and third, a recognition that the current pushback on influxes of tourists with seemingly little time or interest in more carefully engaging with host cultures—as evidenced in recent protests in Barcelona and Venice, for example—offers a different way to think about and value programs that stress a longer in-country stay that includes local engagement on local terms. Indeed, study-abroad programs, which have traditionally focused on living for extended periods of time in a place to learn local history and culture, are often compared as superior to regular tourism by offering students a way to see behind the public facades of places and events shaped for tourist consumption and providing a more formative, educational experience. However, one challenge to this thinking may be seen in the growth of shorter term study-away programming, often managed or created by domestic colleges and universities and led by their own professors and staff. Indeed, in this book, many of the chapters—including those by Coffman and Prazak, Greer and Schweitzer, Barkin, Lampman and Schweitzer, and Bodinger de Uriarte—focus on such programs and the challenges they present in trying to offer “immersive” experiences. WHAT ARE THE COMMON ANTI-TOURISM COMPONENTS OF STUDY ABROAD? Each contribution to this book takes the notion that study abroad is an “antitouristic” form of travel as a point of departure and discusses both the ways in which study-abroad programs position themselves structurally and behaviorally as different from tourism, as well as the individual strategies that studyabroad leaders have used to achieve these goals. They roughly correspond to three distinctive elements: maximizing the educational component of study abroad such that it is a “high-impact educational practice” (Kuh 2008); creating more socially conscious, cross-cultural engagement that can transcend the front-stage/backstage element of tourism through service activities; and inculcating more socially conscious travelers to produce global citizens. It

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is important to note that neither we nor the contributors take these terms at face value but rather the chapters think critically and reflexively about these terms and the promises of study abroad to actually effect such formative transformations. Education This book engages with the largely imagined distinctions concerning the formative abilities of travel in tourism and study-abroad experiences. In the past century, anthropologists have looked at tourism as separate from more serious, educational forms of studying (and researching) abroad—such as ethnography (Crick 1985, 1995); Lévi-Strauss’ memoir, Tristes Tropiques (1992[1955]), simultaneously criticizes tourists (“I hate traveling and travelers”) while romanticizing his own travel-related exploits. Like Lévi-Strauss, more recent critiques of intersections between tourism, travel, and anthropology, as in Dennis O’Rourke’s classic 1988 ethnographic film “Cannibal Tours,” or Ilja Kok’s more recent 2011 film Framing the Other, offer a critical portrayal of both tourism and popular or folk understandings of cultural difference. O’Rourke straddles a line between a critical analysis of tourist discourses about Otherness and how such discourses borrow from folk understandings of “culture,” anthropology, and modernity—a borrowing that also informs many students who participate in study-abroad programs. Taking the trope of the cannibal, and examining the creative way that both host and guest negotiate a liminal “borderzone” (Bruner 2005), O’Rourke’s film begs the question, who is the cannibal? Who is really consuming whom? However, despite these critiques, early anthropology of tourism scholars, such as Nelson Graburn (1977), nevertheless point out that tourism is a “sacred journey,” a ritual experience intended to create a break from the everyday, to refresh and renew the social order. An entire niche group of educational travel (see, for example, the Educational Travel Consortium: http://educationaltravel​.travel/) emerged in the first half of the twentieth century as educators like John Dewey and others toured seemingly progressive schools in the Soviet Union (see Ravitch 2000; Dewey 2008). Dewey modeled his ideas, in part, on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Grand Tour—a precursor to Anglo-Australian “gap year” practices—in which wealthy Northern Europeans supplemented their classical education in history, archaeology, Latin, and Greek by living for extended periods of time in Southern Europe, the perceived cradle of their European civilization (Brodsky-Porges 1981). As Jeremy Black states (1985: 234), such travel was also undertaken to allow these young men to mature, and “the principle motives advanced for foreign travel were that it equipped the traveler socially and provided him with useful knowledge and attainments.”

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In fact, in tracing the evolution of the Grand Tour, John Towner (1985) found that, as travel became cheaper and more accessible to an emerging European middle class, the length of time in-country diminished to the levels that John Dewey and others suggested for American trips abroad (but see Contreras 2015 for a counter-narrative to this). Nevertheless, as Michael Vande Berg argues, study abroad was rather elitist “in intention and practice” up to the turn of the millennium; its goals were “vague and undefined,” as it was assumed students “would in some mysterious way learn through exposure to, through contact with, another culture” (2007: 393). Indeed, as Gore argues, throughout its development in the United States, study abroad was framed less about gaining valuable book knowledge, as it was about “gaining social standing and enjoy[ing] personal pleasure” (2005: 32). Two changes occurred in the past twenty years that shaped present-day study-abroad programs. First were changes in the neoliberal university which altered the way study abroad was conceived; Vande Berg calls this the shift from the under-defined Junior Year Abroad—where top-performing (and wealthier) students were sent abroad on a vague Grand Tour-like mission to learn (about the place, about oneself)—to a Student Learning Paradigm, in which study-abroad travel is subject to measurable pedagogical and outcome assessment. The growth of assessment metrics in higher education—especially when modeled on an outcomes-focused framework borrowed from neoliberal corporate discourse and practice—has been the subject of numerous critiques in the last twenty-five years (see Shumar 1977; Starthern 2000; Tuchman 2011; Hyatt et al. 2015, for example). But the “cross-cultural experience” offered by many study-abroad providers and programs is difficult (if not impossible) to quantify within “audit culture” (Strathern 2000) terms. Part of the rise of predictable outcomes as an element of higher education and the connected rise of public critique of liberal arts education as potentially disconnected from practical career preparation has placed some of the promises of study abroad under closer, market-minded scrutiny. And many universities, Susquehanna among them, have shifted to include promoting study abroad and cross-cultural experience as marketable resume builders. As Talya Zemach-Bersin notes, in this scenario “education itself has become a product that is packaged and sold to student consumers” (2009: 305). Indeed, this “product” is consumed as part of a larger process that imagines a particular career return on investment, and this is no less true for study-abroad programs and offerings. Indeed, to draw from Zemach-Bersin once more: “Students are told that they can purchase not only international travel itself, but also cross-cultural understanding, global citizenship, personal advancement, and adventure” (305). This complex set of engaging activities produces what George Kuh (2008) calls “high impact educational practices.” Seen in contradistinction to

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surface-level learning, these practices focus on integrative, deep approaches, which, according to Kuh, tend to produce students who “earn higher grades and retain, integrate and transfer information at higher rates” (14). They achieve these superior outcomes, he argues, because they (a) demand that students devote considerable time and effort to purposeful tasks; (b) place students in circumstances that compel them to interact meaningfully with peers and the faculty member; (c) engages students in diversity through crosscultural contact with people who are different from themselves; (d) students are given feedback about their performance; (e) opens students eyes to how learning works in different settings “on-and-off campus”—that is, they are opportunities to “integrate, synthesize, and apply knowledge”; and (f) they are transformative and life-changing, in that it creates self-reflexivity and awareness of one’s positionality in the world (3–17). Kuh specifically lists study abroad as a high-impact educational practice; even short-term study abroad demands a considerable amount of dedicated, uninterrupted time, it puts them in closer contact with peers and the faculty director, it specifically is intended to engage in cross-cultural contact, opening students’ eyes to understand how learning works on and off campus, and, as a consequence, requires performance feedback and fosters self-reflexivity. The recent, renewed emphasis on experiential learning represents some serious shifts in the academy and, at least partly, represents a response to increasing insistence on outcomes-based learning that focuses on “deliverable” (and directly employment-relevant) “skills” (see Uriciuoli 2010, 2018) as important elements of higher learning as measured by the neoliberal marketplace. In referring to neoliberalism, we draw from Wanda Vrasti’s definition as “a set of power relations that extends the logic of market relations to the entire social field, from macroeconomic policies to public policy, education, labour, recreation and personal conduct” (2012: 20). Additionally, as shorter programs often rely on tour providers to make lodging, event, and travel arrangements, how do you make clear to the students that they are involved in an academic endeavor and not simply an organized group tour? One of the key distinctions is between leading a student-populated tour group and leading a class focused on learning through experiences and assignments while abroad. The dynamics of the full-time nature of the program is also challenging: while any college course may have a range from diligent and engaged students to those trying to coast with as little effort as possible, the 24/7 framework of the program makes it more difficult to make this range fully workable for all students involved. A disaffected student in one class for three hours a week is far different than one as a constant for three weeks, for example. The second major shift can be considered the commodification or neoliberalization of study abroad. On the one hand, universities have conceived

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of study abroad as a product to market (much like the university experience itself); on the other hand, as indicative of other neoliberal processes, universities have shifted some of their study-abroad operations to private and nonprofit tour operators, who are seen as possessing more specialist and technical knowledge of study-abroad travel than the average professor. These operators approach study abroad from the perspective of educational tourism, a niche form of travel promoted for museum members and university alumni associations. Indeed, as study-abroad programs become more and more “taken for granted” as a component of the liberal arts college experience, building distinctive offerings also fits within a larger array of the marketplace of higher education (see Donoghue 2008; Tuchman 2009; Giroux 2007; Washburn 2006). We invoke the marketplace here with some caution. Our question is not only about the marketability of college programs but also about the marketability of college graduates, where service and study-abroad experiences work as resume builders, and as some sort of practical experience; nor is it that a career in manual labor is a projected post-graduate outcome but that the romanticized understanding of manual labor—as insulation against privilege, perhaps, or as a gumption-builder—carries its own particular unquestioned value (see Bodinger de Uriarte and Jacobson 2018). Thus, as Tayla Zemach-Bersin suggests, “study abroad is often seen as a commodity, as an entitlement, as a non-academic adventure” (2009: 303; see also Loveless 2014; Ogden 2008). Indeed, many colleges and universities offer educational tour packages, often led by faculty, for their alumni (see the Vassar Alumni Travel Program, for example). While often packaged in educational terms as “lifelong learning,” an extension—albeit shorter—of their original study abroad experiences, it is used as a way to foster a sense of identification with one’s alma mater, which, it is hoped, leads to economic support down the line (Di Giovine 2009). In the current neoliberal university system, the educational alumni travel model has begun to be embraced by universities for their current students, marketed especially to those whose work or increasingly siloed plan of study does not allow for the traditional semester- or year-long study abroad experience. Such edu-tourism models are often brief trips (1 week–10 days) during spring break or the summer that nevertheless couple pedagogy with the tourism experience (see Keith and Keith 2010). Stemming as well from the Grand Tour, educational travel is intended to be more formative, more “authentic” and more insightful, than daily, middleclass travel experiences (Di Giovine 2009); yet many are also ways to assert class differences. A hallmark of high-end educational travel, other than the quality of the hotels and services, is the inclusion of what the industry calls “privates”—private “behind-the-scenes” visits with curators, museum directors, and locals—even counts and countesses who open their homes and villas

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for luncheons with the group, often at exorbitant prices (Di Giovine 2009: 163–165). While eschewing the expensive hotels and garden luncheons, study-abroad programs such as those described in this book by Ascione, Barkin, Lampman and Schweitzer, Biggs, and Di Giovine frequently involve such behind-the-scenes tours and “slower” engagements with hospitable locals (also at significant economic price, unbeknownst to the students) that differentiate the experience from the faster, more superficial forms of tourism. Sometimes carefully guided instruction that places students outside of their comfort zone are undertaken; anthropologists Barkin, Greer and Schweitzer, and Di Giovine all teach and require some form of ethnographic research on their trips. The bread-and-butter of anthropological research, ethnography is the set of qualitative research methodologies that are intended to allow the researcher to “grasp and then render” (Geertz 1973: 10) the “imponderabilia of everyday life” (Malinowski 1961: 20) through extended engagement with “locals” that includes participant observation, conversations and interviews, and oral history elicitations. Ethnography is very much an embodied, totalizing form of research; it requires the student to taste, feel, hear, smell as well as to see life—to temporarily be “the local,” while also reflexively being an outsider. Thus, Lampman and Schweitzer’s students engage in ethnography while participating in indigenous dances and festivities, and Di Giovine’s students’ research projects focus on foodways, requiring that they literally get a “taste of ethnographic things” (Stoller 1989). Other tactics of getting students out of their comfort zone include integrating more adventurous experiences with alterity—experiences that range from utilizing homestays as Doerr discusses, to eating foods that might be difficult and unusual to the Western palate, even to the faculty director, as Biggs admits in her contribution. Sensitive to the different thresholds of each student, others offer extra side-trips, organized by adventure tourism operators. Bodinger de Uriarte problematizes these types of experiences in particular, focusing not only on the obvious commercial aspect of these experiences that complicate the study-abroad program’s anti-tourism ethos but also brings to the fore the very real concerns that risk-adverse students, parents (who are the ultimate paying clients), and the university itself have. Service and Service Learning Many of the book’s chapters focus on attaining the elusive backstage touristic experience through service and hands-on learning, experiences that purport to provide students with opportunities to delve deeper than a superficial tourist experience. Under the aegis of practical, community service, and interactive coursework, many study-abroad programs promise insight into the inner workings of local organizations or practices that the traditional tourist cannot

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obtain, often through educational connections the instructors or study-abroad operators possess (see Lampman and Schweitezer, this book, for example). Our invocation of “backstage” indicates MacCannell’s (1976) concern, building from Goffman (1967), with the mystification of presented appearance as an effort to more deeply inscribe that experience with the flavor of an imagined “authentic.” Service, as a component of study abroad, is another set of practices for student engagement that is flavored with the authentic, an important component of transforming the strange into the familiar through lived experience. But the growing role of service, especially within student experiences, potentially flattens this distinction—all are imagined as “giving back” to some sort of universalized whole in need of individual hands-on help from members of the developed West (Bodinger de Uriarte and Jacobson 2018; see also Serio et al. this book). Service—with its projected outcomes and its (largely) physical labor offers a set of affirmations that also might potentially distinguish the study-away experience from mass tourism. (Some NGOs, such as the Tucson-based humanitarian NGO Borderlinks, also offer service opportunities that cater to both adult FITs and study-away student groups and are often marketed in similar ways as university study-abroad programs (see www​.borderlinks​ .org; see also Salazar 2004); these are often subsumed under the category of short-term voluntourism (see, for example, Mostafenazhad 2014)). Yet, as Di Giovine argues in his chapter, despite the altruistic aims of such service learning-cum-voluntourism projects, such engagement may not be as clearly ethical as it seems. On the one hand, critics argue that study-abroad students often do not possess the skills necessary for the services they render, leading the locals to incur additional costs that sometimes outweigh the benefits. Furthermore, the students may not possess the cultural competencies to engage in such service-oriented interactions nor may they understand the culturally specific behaviors and taboos or culturally sensitive ways of interacting with locals. On the other hand, service learning often becomes yet another means of constructing the types of boundaries that Doerr discusses in her chapter, perpetuating stereotypes between the white savior and the needy primitive Other. That is, especially when enacted in developing countries, service learning projects obscures the neoliberal, neo-colonial policies that create the very inequalities which enable the volunteer experience in the first place (Mostafanezhad 2013b: 150), those that “allow some to take a cheap vacation holiday in other people’s lives” (Vrasti 2012: 8). In many ways, study-abroad service projects make little sense in strictly market terms. It would be hard to argue that the cost of travel and lodging and meals for groups of students from affluent countries to spend a limited period painting a school room or working to establish a park trail is fully cost efficient. On the local end, furthermore, the use of untrained laborers

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frequently costs more than they ultimately produce; one story that circulates in study-abroad circles is of locals tearing down houses, walls, other construction built by volunteers to be able to rebuild them correctly once they have left. If the ultimate goal is to improve infrastructure or resources in a particular site, it would make more strictly financial sense to send monies directly to sites in need to create or support professionally trained local painters, builders, or trail blazers, keeping the funding outcomes within the local economy, ensuring a correctly done project, and greatly reducing the carbon footprint of national and international travel. We suggest that many service components of study-abroad programs are not primarily about getting schools painted or trails cleared. They are about providing a careful immersion into Otherness (Picard and Di Giovine 2014) that does little to challenge established tourism imaginaries (Salaar and Graburn 2014), including that “they” need help that only “we” can provide—what Mary Mostefanazhad and others have called the “Angelina Effect” of broader neoliberal voluntourism efforts (see Mostafenazhad 2014; Mostafenazhad and Hannam 2014) and which is lampooned in social media by Barbie Savior (www​.barbiesavior​.com). Our provision of “helping” insulates us from being rank tourists, elevating our experience to a field of affective “giving back.” At the same time, the currency of such helping—realized as labor hours or value given—also participates in a larger contemporary discourse about subjecting “the college experience” to an increasingly ubiquitous structure of neoliberal measuring. Many colleges and universities have yearly campaigns to meet and surpass goals for the number of service hours performed by their students, faculty, and staff; how these are counted, and whether the service completed successfully meets a clearly identified need, is less clear. This giving back is also projected as a means to getting students out of the bubble of study away as a part of seeking the authentic in-cultural otherness. This, of course, is paradoxical. As the contributors to Picard and Di Giovine’s book Tourism and the Power of Otherness: Seductions of Difference (2014) argue, tourism is predicated on notions of otherness, and John Urry’s classic notion of the “tourist gaze” (1999) shows that tourists approach the toured through oppositional categories of difference. Yet these differences are often constructed by locals and industry professionals (MacCannell 1976), and frequently tourists and the toured encounter each other in a liminal borderzone (Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2005), in which both attempt to act out, and negotiate, tourism imaginaries of each other (O’Rourke 1988; Salazar and Graburn 2014; Graburn and Gravari-Barbas 2011; Gravari-Barbas and Graburn 2012). Yet as Salazar (2014) argues, guides may play on these seductive—if not factually correct—imaginaries to engage in “sedutainment,” seduction for edutainment purposes. Salazar builds on the concept of “edutainment” innovated by Walt Disney (1954) to teach moral lessons while

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entertaining, allowing for its willing and unknowing consumption by children (Fjellman 1992). Some heritage sites and museums—particularly science and childrens’ museums—embrace this as a means of instructing scientific or historical knowledge about the world in a fun and accessible way (Balloffet et al. 2014; Hertzman et al. 2008; Jones 2007). But young children are not the only ones to be “edutained”; at its best, educational tourism—with its emphasis on leisure and entertainment—is a form of edutainment, and study abroad is not different. Like mass tourism packages, study-abroad programs are marketed as a fun, exciting, and engaging way to learn, a way to “get outside of the classroom”; to wit, a resource packet for study-abroad faculty compiled by NASFA: Association of International Educators suggests they emphasize that a program “lets you expand your academic learning outside the classroom” (www​.nafsa​.org), the University of Denver advertises, “At our University, you’ll have the chance to get real-world experience outside the classroom” (https​:/​/ww​​w​.du.​​edu​/a​​cadem​​ics​/o​​utsid​​e​​-cla​​ssroo​m), and Goabroad​.c​ om extols, “the world is our classroom!” Building on this, a Ramapo College of New Jersey news article entitled “Study Abroad Extends Learning Outside of the Classroom” begins with the well-known quote by St. Augustine, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page” (Garcia 2016). Likewise, for-profit companies have invented a number of “edutainment” and dating apps that are specifically marketed to study-abroad students interested in enhancing their social and linguistic experiences through social media (Kennett and Jackson 2014). Much of the current literature on study abroad offers exercises or cautionary tales to get one’s students out of the bubble or away from taking in “the view from the veranda” (Ogden 2008). Service allows a way for students to imagine that they are outside of the bubble, that somehow they have successfully challenged or breached their comfort zones through the discomfort of labor (Urciuoli 2010, 2013; Cororaton and Handler 2013; Hickel 2013). Indeed, breaching the comfort zone, in and of itself, is sometimes projected as the goal of study abroad (see Bodinger de Uriarte, this book). We suggest that, rather than a confirmation of authenticity, service potentially confirms the absence of falsity as experienced through the body—the risk of perforating comfort zones, itself, guarantees the truth of the experience. At the intersection of tourism and study abroad, our questions focus more on the increasingly individualized set of expectations and measurements for one’s experience “elsewhere.” Here the pursuit is less for a confirmation of authenticity—“here is true, unstaged alterity,” one might say—and more for a confirmation of experience through individual discomforts and uncertainties. Indeed, an inherent contradiction in study-away programming is the desire to push students out of their comfort zone while at the same time designing programs to deliver consistently predictable, measurable, and safe

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experiences (see Greer and Schweitzer, and Bodinger de Uriarte, both in this book). As Robert J. Gordon observes: “Paradoxically, the destination has to be both accessible and inaccessible, distant from civilization yet comfortable, dangerous yet safe” (2006: 21). Discomfort can actually be seen as an issue to be managed or erased, especially as student evaluations are an increasingly important element of faculty review and evaluation procedures. Internationalization and the Creation of Global Citizens By offering an array of shorter student edu-tourism experiences—sometimes coupled with a course on-campus during the regular school year—universities are not only able to demonstrate their support for “high-impact learning” experiences but they are also able to deepen their “internationalization” missions. UNESCO (qtd. in Vincent-Lancrin et al. 2015: 40) defines internationalization as a form of higher education that takes place in situations where the teacher, student, programme, institution/provider or course materials cross-national jurisdictional borders. Cross-border education may include higher education by public/private and not-for-profit/ for-profit providers. It encompasses a wide range of modalities in a continuum from face-to-face (taking various forms from students traveling abroad and campuses abroad) to distance learning (using technologies and including e-learning).

Yet as Subrata Kumar Mitra argues for the case of Indian higher education, internationalization requires “an institutional vision to motivate people to change the whole to think globally and collaboratively. It is a way towards an ever-changing, diverse external environment that focused on global environment” (2010: 105). The support for edu-tourism and study-abroad experiences, therefore, is perceived to help produce “global citizenship,” what Zemach-Bersin defines as “an ideology that attempts to appeal to notions of global responsibility, community, mutual learning across cultures, and idealism” (313). At the turn of the millennium, there was a concern that universities were not preparing students to meet the needs of an increasingly globalizing society; Virginia Strauss, Executive Director of the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, writes that a 2003 Global Attitudes Survey, distributed internationally by the Pew Research Center, revealed “a widespread belief among people in most nations that their culture is superior to others,” with the United States at the forefront of this ethnocentrism (2005: xiii). Many attributed culpability to higher education institutions; in Our Underachieving Colleges, Derek Bok contends that students obtain “very little preparation either as citizens or as

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professionals for the international challenges that are likely to confront them” (2006: 233; qtd. Braskamp 2008). Vrasti identifies this as “the depoliticizing logic of multiculturalism” (2012: 26), where the political and economic contexts that make these programs both possible and desirable are elided. Courses on the study of study abroad are called for, opportunities to offer a critical and differently appreciative lens for considering the promises—both false and possible—for the development of a multicultural “global citizenship.” And, as Vrasti observes, this quality or goal is currently often promoted in terms of its marketability. Bok’s choice of words are important, as they reveal the concern with operationalizing outcomes of study abroad; one engages in the experience to develop of a particular set of skills and competencies needed to solve new kinds of problems brought about by globalization and the greater interconnectedness of peoples—from immigration to international law and business—and to live in that world. Indeed, such a goal is increasingly framed as a way of “professionalizing” students to be more competitive in the job market, providing advantages for those intending to enter the increasingly disembedded, global business field. From this “neoliberal approach” to study abroad (Mule et al. 2018: 23), a global citizen is one who can “live and work effectively anywhere in the world” (Noddings 2005: 2–3). This increasingly includes integrating “responsible leadership” training, as Sroufe et al. (2015) argue for MBA-focused study-abroad programming. Yet as Suárez-Orozco and Sattin point out, this perspective seems outmoded, thanks to the dissolving of geopolitical boundaries and the intensification of global mobilities: “Competition is yesterday’s challenge. Today’s challenge is collaborating to solve global problems that spill over national boundaries” (2007: 59). They argue that purely business-oriented conceptions show how “out-of-sync” schools are with the global world and decry the glacial pace with which educational institutions are evolving to meet the sophisticated challenges of globalization (58; see also Gardner 2004). Students must be instructed, they argue, to employ critical thinking, communication, language, technology, and collaborative skills—all components of a good study-abroad program. Scholars who subscribe to this way of thinking approach study abroad and its outcomes from two distinct directions, argue Mule et al. (2018: 23), and often fall along different disciplinary lines (Reysen et al. 2012). On the one hand is the radical/conflict approach, which tends to focus on a critical analysis of global structures, inequality, and power relations; on the other hand is the critical/transformationalist approach that focuses on activism and social transformation. The former, they argue, are arguably emphasized in disciplines such as education, which promotes awareness; while social work may embrace the more activist interpretation of global citizenship (Mule et al. 2018: 23). Indeed, as Kinginger (2010) argues,

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an activist stance is necessary to combat the “sheltered” program designs and the interest in meeting the desires of the students-as-consumers, which mark much of the study-abroad programming. Either way, if such critical engagement can be gleaned through a travel program, then it promises to provide an “anti-touristic” form of engagement. But while the development of global citizenship is often pitched as an “anti-bubble” and transformative outcome for study away, it takes a number of presumptions of access and mobility for granted, as well as assuming a particular fixedness to nation-state boundaries as easily breachable “culture boundaries,” promoting globalism over nationalism. After all, Jim Butcher (2017: 127) points out, “global citizenship does not come with its own passport” even as it references the obligation of (global) citizens to be active and knowledgable participants in social and political processes. Indeed, Butcher and Smith point out, global citizenship involves a shift away from political citizenship toward a more moral form of citizenship, recognizing commonalities in the world even as it asserts difference and attempting to act on it (2015: 94). Consequently, Benjamin Feinberg (2018) argues, students are often forced to negotiate the tensions between assigning and acknowledging cultural differences, and then trying to transcend them. Thus, students tend to “focus on the cosmopolitan community as limited to people like themselves (and in contrast with less powerful “locals”),” while also “escaping into an imaginary cosmopolitan space of individual interaction (outside of particularistic identities),” states Noel Salazar (2018: 190). While identifying with a global community is privileged over that of a certain nation (Bianchi and Stephenson 2014), Butcher and Smith disagree with the fundamental globalist premise of global citizenship which posits traditional national citizenship as limited or parochial or that engaging in activism within the nation-state does not have global consequences (2015: 94). It is through engagement in national politics, such as voting, campaigning, attempting to change laws and advocating for the ethical treatment of individuals, within one’s country can large-scale change be effected (92; Parekh 2003: 12). But some suggest “the nation-state is fading as the principle site of identity construction” (Lewin 2009: xiii–xiv; see also Di Giovine 2009), even as others point to an contemporary international rise in nationalist movements that may trouble the ideals of a globalist future. Programs that focus on delivering both cultural difference and global citizenship through border-crossing practices may under-problematize the roles of hybridity and diasporic communities in identity-building. In assessing the promise of global citizenship, which is tied to many study-abroad programs as a “value added” (Tarrant et al. 2013) and deliverable outcome, careful attention should be paid to both the promise of global citizenship and the privilege of assuming such status. Study abroad may make the false promise of developing global

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citizenship while really affirming the development of positioned global consumers (Zeymach-Bersin 2009), or exercises in cosmopolitan tourism (Feinberg 2018), or the opportunity “to help liberal subjects consolidate their social capital and social mobility because, ultimately, the world is made for their inhabitation” (Vrasti 2012: 23). To draw from Lewin again, in the search for authentic culture “elsewhere,” identifying that cultural Other “becomes a means and end to itself rather than a means for understanding its relationship to the global forces surrounding it” (2009: xvii) or a direction for learning that might have greater implications for thinking about a more complicated understanding of extended citizenship. In the current higher education marketplace, things like global citizenship are presented as a “value added” for the commodity of study abroad (Stoner et al. 2014). Problematically, it thus must be featured as a measurable outcome of the experience (Stoner et al. 2014; Chang 2016) not necessarily as introductions to ways of thinking, influx and undergoing critical and ongoing reflection. The problem with an outcome-based emphasis in program evaluation (which also reflects the current neoliberalization of higher education as a predictable set of purchasable commodities and anticipated-to-guaranteed effects) is that such nuanced states of becoming are more difficult to sell. They also are difficult to articulate, both by study-abroad promoters as well as the students themselves (Streitwieser and Light 2009). Indeed, such a form of education is ultimately intended to mold students to be “culturally sophisticated enough to empathize with peers of different races and religions and of different linguistic and social origins. Education for globalization should aim to educate the whole child for the whole world” (Suárez-Orozco and Sattin 2007: 58)—how does one promote this to employers? How does one utilize these skills after they return home? Thus, as Young and Reminton (2014) argue, the study-abroad experience does not end when students return to campus but rather the skills supposedly gleaned must be developed. They propose that career counselors should understand what skills can be harvested from study abroad and how to “help these students understand the significance of their newly acquired status as a global citizen,” they write. Such understanding needs to engage thoughtfully with assertions that study-abroad students “acquire expertise and self-esteem during their travels and translate their enjoyment into entrepreneurial advantages” (Vrasti 2012: 25). IS STUDY ABROAD SUSTAINABLE? Ultimately, these chapters deal with the question of the sustainability of study abroad. By sustainability, we mean the ways in which study-abroad programs can self-perpetuate, particularly given the tensions program directors face in

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negotiating neoliberal market values and the intent to produce lofty ethical outcomes. Yet we also mean sustainability in the broader sense, as the ability to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of the future (William McDonough and Associates 1992: 3). Sustainability studies is a burgeoning field of inquiry, as scholars, politicians,and business leaders attempt to address pressing global crises on what the United Nations calls the “three pillars” of sustainability: environmental, economic, and social. With growing global inequality, ecologically damaging climate change, and human rights exploitation, scholars argue that there is an ethical imperative from the Global North—who are, incidentally, the largest producers of mass tourism and study-abroad students—to address these problems (Moore and Nelson 2010; see also Brundtland 1987). Interdisciplinary tourism studies itself is concerned with sustainability; entire journals are dedicated to the theme, such as The Journal of Sustainable Tourism. Indeed, the anti-tourism movement itself can be seen as a commentary on the perceived unsustainable nature of mass tourism: critics argue that it is damaging to the environment, particularly when airline or cruise travel in involved; its proclivity toward “vertical integration” (De Kadt 1976) and domination by multinational businesses exacerbates economic inequality and harms the social fabric of communities; and unequal development without community buy-in, as well as “over-tourism” pressures on the host population, threatens the loss of tradition and a sense of place, as well as the marginalization of indigenous communities. Furthermore, climate change, rising sea levels, and the increase in natural disasters threaten natural and cultural heritage resources, locals’ livelihoods, and tourist flows themselves. Yet while purporting to address many of these issues, study abroad, as a form of privileged travel, contributes to many of these same environmental, economic, and social ills. While it is largely out of the scope of this book to address environmental sustainability—as this is not directly an element that study abroad, as an anti-tourism movement, addresses—the chapters in this book do engage productively with the complex social and economic implications of study-abroad programs, particularly in their impacts on both the student traveler and the local. Beyond purely academic pursuits, sustainability is also a growing operational concern within the university, and different institutions address the growing need to be sustainable and ethical actors. Yet study abroad poses unique tensions, particularly if a university’s Strategic Plan emphasizes both internationalization and sustainability. For example, in 2017–2018, 536 West Chester University study-abroad students alone visited 45 countries and logged 4.5 million miles of air travel not including faculty members. In line with its Strategic Plan, which emphasizes internationalization and the creation of global citizens, the university aims to increase study abroad by 50 percent

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in the next two years. Yet it also aims to be at the forefront of environmental sustainability and has adopted a Climate Action Plan to be carbon neutral by 2025. Paradoxically, these goals conflict: an increase in international travel by students and faculty increases its carbon footprint. However, the potential for positive environmental change through study-abroad programming can be vast, if the transformative nature of study abroad can truly be realized. Each program provides opportunities for learning, as well as for changes in attitudes and practices. As the chapters in this book show, the decisions that faculty study-abroad directors make, both programmatically and behaviorally, can very well affect the university’s environmental sustainability, as well as the economic and social sustainability of its students and the communities that they come in contact with during the course of their experience abroad. TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF STUDY ABROAD Designing and executing study-abroad programs thus presents a set of practical and theoretical challenges, for example: the duration of the program; the balance of “down time” and academic work; the distinction between tourist activities and non-tourist or anti-tourist activities; running potential damage control on tour guide narratives framed to emphasize the exotic; the 24/7 nature of study-abroad programming and responsibilities; and moving between the roles of professor, research leader or colleague, counselor, administrator, and unwilling concierge. In recognition of such challenges we ask, what practices can we put into place to overcome or mitigate them? The chapters in this book illustrate different efforts to deal with some key issues: immersion, for example, or negotiating virtual and other connections to home. How do expectations of global citizenship both erase and reaffirm boundaries of the nation-state? What sort of elements need to be present in a successful preparatory class? A successful post-trip reflection class? What sort of research or other work could or should be carried out in the studyaway site? How do students navigate the freedom of being away from their host campuses with the academic expectations of different study-abroad programs and sites? And how might reflective, post-study abroad assignments and projects be imagined and executed? The contributions in this book therefore interrogate the often-taken-forgranted notions by universities and other stakeholders that study-abroad opportunities are distinctly different from tourism, indeed that they can serve as an antidote for the typical touristic experience, if not a form of anti-tourism. With a number of the book’s contributions based on long-term university collaboration and partnerships with service providers, many interrogate the idea that study-abroad programs achieve deeper connections with the touristic backstage

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than typical short-term tourism does. While the notion of staged authenticity has been thoroughly discussed in interdisciplinary tourism studies, the studyabroad literature has not adequately addressed the subject. This book, then, represents one of the first to bridge both the anthropology and sociology of tourism literature with what can be called a nascent anthropology of study abroad. In addition, authors examine the multiple ways in which stakeholders assert their agency—from service providers to study-abroad centers, from university short-term “in-house” programs to semester-long programs in partnership with host universities. They also examine the extent to which study- abroad experiences are truly transformative, questioning how such transformations are substantively different from those claimed as an element of standard touristic experiences (see, for example, Graburn 1977), and what the promise of global citizenship may actually mean in the delivery of study-abroad goals. As a form of travel that purports to be high-impact, educational, engaging and transformative, study abroad often is often set apart, in discourse and practice, from other forms of mobility. Stemming from the Grand Tour and other historical forms of anti-tourism, its goals are lofty and ethical, promising to produce “educated” students in the holistic sense of the word: “being able to see the connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways” (Cronon 1999: 12). The contributions in this book examine these premises, problematizing the taken-for-granted assumptions concerning study abroad. Utilizing deep ethnographic engagement with students, faculty, locals, and other stakeholders, they illuminate the unique, epistemic culture (Knorr-Cetina 1999) of study abroad, contributing—it is hoped—to the development of a more robust body of literature on the anthropology of study abroad. As the world seemingly becomes more polarized and views become more ethnocentric, and as higher education struggles to meet the lofty goals of high-impact educational practices while transforming (troublingly) into more neoliberal, market-driven entities, there is a need for more research on the efficacy of these promises, study abroad’s function in higher education, and the impacts of study-abroad programs—on students, educational institutions, and locals, as well as the environment—and its overall sustainability. The stakes are indeed high.

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Chapter 1

“Doing Good” and Doing It Quickly in East African Study Abroad Programs Jennifer Coffman and Miroslava Prazak

INTRODUCTION In the past few decades, the number of U.S. undergraduates studying abroad has greatly increased. Though still only a small segment of the overall trend, study abroad in Africa has also grown significantly, mostly in the form of short-term programs, and more recently still, incorporating more servicelearning or internship opportunities into their programming. Many U.S. students who pursue study-abroad opportunities in East Africa say they are motivated to do so by a desire to travel and learn about some place “unusual” (to them) in a non-tourist manner, pursue personal development, and expand their resumes. Another compelling reason they choose that part of the world is, to quote numerous application essays, “to help.” In East Africa, volunteer programs have proliferated, borne of entrepreneurial efforts by for-profit tour companies and nongovernmental organizations—some international, some East African, some a combination. These entities seek to capture some portion of foreign revenue that pours into the area via classic safari tourism, and student groups are among those targeted consumers. The notion of volunteering appeals to a general desire to “do good” and anti-touristic mentalities possessed by many student visitors to East Africa. Study-abroad programming has responded with increased emphasis on service-learning and short-term internships as means of explicitly integrating “doing good” toward others via experiences that are meant to be high impact for the students themselves. Many scholars have rightly asked how social scientists, study-abroad practitioners, and the wide range of participants in such programming might better approach and assess how the motivation of young Americans to “do good” overseas often leads to individual student/volunteer’s self-transformation (“feeling good”) but without comparable benefit 41

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to those who were targeted by the volunteer work (see Bandyopadhyay and Patil 2017; Luh Sin et al. 2015; Mostafanezhad 2013a, 2013b, 2014; among others). This recent spate of literature connects short-term volunteerism to the oft-critiqued concept of “voluntourism”, and trends of short-term volunteerism raise questions about how high-impact learning for U.S. undergraduates might also impact the local communities in which such pedagogies are realized. In this chapter, we examine the growth trends of study abroad in general and East Africa in particular, international volunteerism, the rise of creditbearing study-abroad programs in East Africa, and the ways in which these trends impact one another and the locales in which they happen. In doing so, we grapple with the concept of “voluntourism”—and accusations that some study-abroad programs have veered into it amidst trends of shorter, flashier study-abroad programming. This chapter also approaches how shortterm programs’ structures and delivery impact the ways in which student participants and host community members make meaning about and for one another, articulate their understandings of the histories and environments they encounter together, and assess issues of power that accompany their encounters. We provide two vignettes that outline aspects of those issues. We conclude by offering thoughts about what can make for a high-impact program that accomplishes the “doing good” ideal—good for host communities, students, and teachers. HIGH-IMPACT LEARNING PRACTICES As is well documented, international education via study abroad is considered a high-impact learning practice that expands participants’ perspectives, often qualitatively changing their sense of personal responsibility at home and globally (Kuh 2008; Stebleton et al. 2013). Advocates, such as Institute of International Education President Alan Goodman and Stacie Berdan, argue that study abroad is the best way to gain the “international experience, language capabilities and cross-cultural communication skills necessary to succeed in the global economy” (Goodman and Berdan 2014; see also AIFS 2013; Anderson and Lawton 2011; Braskamp et al. 2009). They also state that the wide variety of study-abroad programs, their flexible timescales, and variable costs, have significantly eroded barriers posed by financial need, disabilities, ethnicity, and sexual orientation (ibid). And in fact, the numbers and percentages of U.S. undergraduates studying abroad have increased dramatically in the past 30 years, with recent statistics indicating that one in ten U.S. undergraduate students now studies abroad prior to graduating (IIE Open Doors 2018).

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Scaffolding refers to support provided by a teacher or other individual to assist a student via temporary, adjustable instructional techniques that build on one another and move the student toward understanding and greater independence in learning and applying knowledge (Smit et al. 2013; Holland 2001). Scaffolded learning involving knowledge acquisition and application through high-impact practices, such as internships, community service/ service-learning, and/or research components, during study abroad—already a high-impact practice—seems an indisputable “best practice” to educate about the global and collective nature of knowledge production and learning today (Kahn and Agnew 2017). As argued elsewhere in this volume, studyabroad programming has been pitched as an alternative and perhaps even an antidote to standard tourism. Many of the authors within this volume have led overseas programs and thus draw on those experiences to suggest that contextualized, place-based learning, with its promise of breaking down barriers between and among ourselves and so-called “other” people, places, and practices, can be done well, or at least better. Close encounters with people, places, practices, and possibilities—with the intent not just to understand but also to share such understanding—are at the very heart of the discipline of anthropology. Such encounters, scripted and unexpected, and learning motivate those of us involved with this book and fuel our larger research projects. As for how to manage those encounters, their outcomes, and representations: the devil is in the details, and, as most of us know, the learning is ongoing (see, for example, Tucker 2014). When we willingly take students to what they may initially perceive as some romanticized contact zone, the unjaded among us have accepted responsibility to help them understand from whence such imaginaries have come (Salazar and Graburn 2014; Salazar 2012; Pratt 2007), as well as how to overcome them. If study abroad is meant to be an antidote to the production of “tourism imaginaries” (Salazar 2012), then those of us involved in study-abroad program design and leadership have effectively enrolled (Latour 1987) in the project of promoting intercultural competence, summarized as knowledge about cultural issues, as well as the skills, abilities, and motivations to act in intercultural contexts (Williams 2009; Deardorff 2004). Intercultural competence depends on in situ sense-making, in which “complex network[s] of relationships, values, and consequences” are negotiated (Roberts 2018). VOLUNTEERING AND/OR VOLUNTOURING? A clever word that is indeed listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, voluntourism refers to “tourism in which travelers spend time doing voluntary work on development projects, usually for a charity” (OED 2015).

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According to the OED, the term first appeared in 1991, coined by members of the Nevada Commission on Tourism to recognize Nevada residents who “volunteered” to support “tourism.” Then-Governor Bob Miller established the VolunTourism Award to honor those who did it well. The phrase caught on and has since gone viral. While the word itself is relatively new, its roots can be traced back to mass movements of American volunteerism, including the establishment of the Peace Corps in 1961 and its promoting service learning around the globe; the burgeoning of university-approved study-abroad programs in the 1970s and the 1971 launch of the Earthwatch Institute’s Volunteer Vacations (now Earthwatch Expeditions); the 1980s growth of ecotourism to combine tourism with learning about or at least supporting environmentally conscious accommodations and tours; and the rapid post-Cold-War proliferation of volunteer vacations, specialized travel agents, and internet connectivity in the 1990s. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the attendant declaration that the Cold War had ended, launched a period marked by new wealth in northern countries, a wave of democratization, trade liberalization, cheaper air flights, and increased tourism (Mowforth and Munt 2015). These past three decades have also seen some efforts at corporate social responsibility that manifested in 1995 through Action without Borders, which led to entities like idealist​ .o​rg and the expansion of gap year and academic voluntourism (Calkin 2015; McGloin and Georgeou 2015; Zeddies and Millei 2015). There have been compelling arguments about how voluntourism—often sought out as responsible travel—exists because of neoliberal conditioning that enables safe and predictable volunteering in exotic (to U.S. citizens, at least) locales through commodified (read: priced) experiences that cater to a relatively elite and largely female customer base and depend on having that customer base stand in marked contrast to an “underprivileged” community in need of help (Keese 2011; Bandyopadhyay and Patil 2017; Mostafanezhad 2013a, 2013b, 2014). Now there are dedicated organizations that have embraced the term “voluntourism,” such as VolunTourism​.or​g, which describes its mission as “quite simple: To Educate, To Empower, and To Engage” and its approach as “the integrated combination of voluntary service to a destination with the traditional elements of travel and tourism—exposure to arts, culture, geography, history, and recreation—while in the destination” (voluntourism​.o​rg). Of course, there are also variations on the theme, and many luxury voluntourism opportunities have arisen, with agencies that specialize in high-end ecotourism with a bit of volunteering, or companies, like Travelocity, that refined their search options to include “Travel for Good” itineraries. Numerous specialty providers partner with higher education institutions to offer for-credit international volunteering opportunities, and short-term studyabroad programs reliant on third-party providers and/

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or non-academic partners have also been subject to serious critiques (see Barkin 2018; Cororaton and Handler 2013). The rise of volunteering parallels the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The term “non-governmental organization” and its acronym “NGO” were launched along with the United Nations in 1945–6. NGOs became a growing alternative/complement to IGOs (inter-governmental organizations) and began to proliferate rapidly, with many promoting an apolitical pro-development agenda (Ferguson 1990). In the 1990s, the so-called global north sought new channels for funding to so-called “developing” nations, given the widely acknowledged failure of state-sponsored development, the corruption of national governments, and attempts for multinational aid institutions to discipline countries via structural adjustment programs. NGOs became the vehicle of choice for humanitarian and development projects. Today, at least ten million NGOs exist around the world, and 1.5 million of them operate within the United States alone, according to the U.S. State Department. Frequently, NGOs are set up to provide opportunities for willing do-gooders, and frequently, such volunteers and their contributions are critical to operations. For many international NGOs, partnering with U.S. universities seems like a no-brainer, and therefore working with students already studying abroad seems to make perfect sense as those opportunities expand the volunteer pool and enhance the legitimacy of the NGO enterprise. STUDY-ABROAD TRENDS In 2014, the Institute of International Education (IIE) launched its “Generation Study Abroad,” a five-year initiative to double the number of U.S. undergraduate students who study abroad to 600,000. The 2019 deadline marked the 100th anniversary of the IIE, as the organization was established in 1919 in the aftermath of World War Iby a trio that included two Nobel Peace Prize winners.1 They believed that lasting peace could only come from greater understanding between nations—and that international educational exchange formed the strongest basis for fostering such understanding (“History” 2017). This latter claim may not only seem fairly reasonable, it also resonates with some of the ideals described above in conjunction with voluntourism. How, then, to increase international educational exchange? As noted above, IIE President Alan Goodman and Stacie Berdan (2014) claim that the wide variety of study abroad programs—variable according to structure, topic, timing, and cost—have significantly eroded barriers for university students to study abroad. The wide variety of credit-bearing study abroad program structures can be categorized according to common structural patterns, outlined by Williamson (2008) in the following four models: island,

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Figure 1.1  U.S. Students Studying Abroad, 1985–2017. Data source: IIE Open Doors 2018.

integrated, hybrid, and field-based. Island programs are typically sponsored by U.S. universities and/or third-party providers with curricula specifically targeting American students, and those American students study alongside other American students. In integrated programs, American students enroll directly in courses alongside local students at a host university, while program sponsors may provide additional services required by non-local students, such as assistance with course registration and language tutoring. A hybrid program blends elements of both island and integrated programs, so

Figure 1.2  Study-Abroad Participation According to Program Durations, AY 2016– 2017. Data source: IIE Open Doors 2018.

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that students may undertake a portion of their coursework at a host university and the remainder at a study center or other locales. Hybrid programs are common in countries where the primary language of instruction is not English. Finally, field-based programs refer to programs that involve a thematic and geographic focus, with students undertaking field study training and usually completing an independent study project. While there are indeed benefits and drawbacks to each of these, the current growth tends to be in the island and field-based styles of programming. Further, the average duration of study-abroad programs is declining; now, two-thirds of students who study abroad do so on short-term programs of eight or fewer weeks. A more detailed summary of the study-abroad programs in which U.S. undergraduates participate appears in table 1.1 below. Another significant pattern to note is that study abroad continues to attract mostly women. According to the IIE’s most recent Open Doors (2018) data for academic year 2016-7, women comprised 67 percent of the student Table 1.1  Percentages of Students Participating in Different Durations of U.S. Study Abroad, Academic Years 2006–2017 (IIE Open Doors 2018)

Note: Percent distribution may not total 100.0 due to rounding.

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population studying abroad. For comparison, in the fall of that academic year, women accounted for 56 percent of total undergraduate enrollment (“Undergraduate Enrollment” 2018). The growing trend of volunteering in study-abroad programs, as described above, often occurs in the form of internships and service-learning components. However, engagements with volunteer work abroad vary greatly. The number of undergraduates participating in service-learning or volunteering opportunities, such as non-credit-bearing volunteering through the home university or mission trips, is difficult to calculate, as programs report anything from a few hours to more sustained engagements within that category. Still, IIE’s Open Doors (2018) data reported a minimum of 6 percent of undergraduates studying abroad participated in service-learning or volunteering opportunities. The notion of “giving back”—embedded in service-learning and also tied to some internships—is highly attractive to prospective students making their choices about overseas programs and has become a significant marketing angle (IIE Open Doors 2018). The desire to see another part of the world and be helpful in the process seems good and decent. In fact, some students come from programs at their home universities that more or less guarantee that they will make a difference in the world through scholarship and community service (Cororaton and Handler 2013). What, then, are the ideological underpinnings of the “helpfulness” undergraduate students anticipate providing and the ways in which they understand such assistance contributing to the host community in the short and long-term? Just traveling somewhere does not guarantee global citizenship and experiential learning, and a “‘student as customer’ model of higher education” is likely not the best approach when trying to achieve something akin to pedagogical value (Barkin 2018). After some context regarding study-abroad trends in Africa, we shall provide two vignettes that underscore that claim. STUDY ABROAD IN AFRICA In keeping with growth trends summarized above, study abroad in Africa has also grown significantly in the past three decades, and also mostly in the form of short-term programs (IIE Open Doors 2018). For American undergraduates, studying in Africa for an entire semester is quite rare, as is direct enrollment in African educational institutions. In examining trends in study-abroad programming in East Africa, we began to try to piece together the extent to which service-learning or internships have been incorporated into those experiences, as well as considerations of capital flows and ebbs in host communities. These

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foci are means to assess the extent and types of benefits participating students, programs, and host communities accrue as a result of study-abroad experiences. We are also very interested in how host communities and other Africabased providers of services respond in instances when study-abroad programs are shifted or cancelled due to local or global emergencies. The overall number of U.S. undergraduates studying in Africa experienced a general upward trend between the 1970s and 2009, during which this demographic leaped from a mere 0.5 percent to 5 percent of the overall population of U.S. undergraduates studying abroad and many-fold increase in raw numbers. From 2009, the numbers held relatively steady for two more years, before registering a notable decline. Between the academic years of 2012-13 and 2013-14, numbers of U.S. undergraduates heading to Africa dropped 12.5 percent, and then another significant decline of 8 percent was reported between academic years 2013-14 and 2014-15. Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a decline of 19.7 percent from 2013-14 to 2014-15. The 2012—2015 decline has been tied to the economic downturn, as well as security concerns and perceptions of disease threat (e.g., concerns that highly localized outbreaks of Ebola affect regions much larger than they do). Numbers then began rising again, with a 5.5 percent uptick in the 2016-17 academic year, the most recent period for which data are available. Like the trends noted above regarding study abroad in general, study abroad in Africa is also dominated by short-term island and field-based programs. These kinds of programs, from a management perspective, have different sets of obligations than semester and year-long programs, the latter

Figure 1.3  U.S. University Students Studying Abroad in Africa per Academic Year. Data source: IIE Open Doors 2018.

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of which typically have long-term leases, significant capital investments in durable goods, and year-round staff. We looked more closely at the three East African countries of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, as we have worked in that region for many years, to help us better contextualize the numbers and trends, as well as their impacts. IIE’s Open Doors (2016) included a list of some of the major programs about which they had collected data, and we followed up by examining their websites. For those for which websites were listed, we found the following: Some of the websites have not been maintained because many programs had indeed shut down temporarily or permanently, which resonates with the study-abroad trends for those three countries in recent years. As noted above, most students participate in short-term island and fieldbased programs. With this in mind, how do investments—in student learning, local communities—vary?

Figure 1.4  For Kenya, of the Sixty-Four Programs That IIE’s Open Doors Listed, Only Thirty-Six Were Able to Be Used Because the Data Were Current.

Figure 1.5  For Tanzania, of the Fifty-Eight Programs That IIE’s Open Doors Listed, Only Forty-One Were Able to Be Used Because the Data Were Current.

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Figure 1.6  For Uganda, of the Twenty-Four Programs That IIE’s Open Doors Listed, Only Twelve Were Able to Be Used Because the Data Were Current.

Figure 1.7  Numbers of U.S. Undergraduates Studying Abroad in East Africa from the 1991–1992 Academic Year to 2016–2017. Source: IIE Open Doors 2018.

EAST AFRICA The authors of this paper are both long-term field workers in East Africa and have both led study-abroad programs in the region. We are generally supportive of the IIE initiative to increase the number of U.S. undergraduates who study abroad, as we, too, support the learning outcome of intercultural competency (knowledge about cultural issues, as well as the skills, abilities, and motivations to act in intercultural contexts) as integral to critical thinking

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and communication skills (Williams 2009; Deardorff 2004), valued by and nurtured through a liberal arts education. We are interested in how an expansion of U.S. undergraduates studying abroad may affect the growing market of study-abroad programming, or at least accommodation of study-abroad programming, in particular regions of East Africa, as security concerns in some areas have led to concentrations in others. Further, we would like to know the degree to which students demonstrate increased skills tied to highimpact learning, such as “increases in critical thinking and writing skills, greater appreciation of diversity and diverse viewpoints, and higher levels of engagement, both in and out of the classroom” (Kuh 2008), and the kinds of programming that seem to promote those skills effectively. Having analyzed trends in study-abroad programming for U.S. students, we now discuss some specific examples of international internship, servicelearning, and volunteerism opportunities via short-term study-abroad programs in East Africa. We have interviewed program providers, students, and NGO directors or sponsors. From this, we have refined our key issues of “degree and kind” to focus on program quality, assumed and demonstrated impact for student-learners and host communities, and long-term planning for program sustainability. Further, these interviews have prompted us to consider the ways in which East African internship or service-learning opportunities deal with essentialist images of Africa as a “place in need” of outside help. How can we, as learners, researchers, and educators, think productively about study-abroad programming as an antidote to what many critics have described as crass and/or extractive tourism (Salaar and Graburn 2014)? SEMESTER-LONG STUDY-ABROAD PROGRAMS, KENYA-STYLE One author (Coffman) benefitted from a semester-long study-abroad program through St. Lawrence University’s (SLU’s) Kenya Semester Program (KSP) during her undergraduate career. Founded in 1974, SLU’s Kenya program has been one of the longest-running study-abroad programs in East Africa. Located in a leafy suburb of Nairobi, the KSP operates from a permanent facility that serves as home to directors and staff, as well as home base for the students. During the author’s program, she participated in three separate homestay experiences—one in a rural, agricultural community, one in a middle-class urban community, and one in a rural, pastoralist community—for what SLU directors have called “total cultural immersion” and binary deflation; the program design purposefully placed students in multiple homes to build intercultural competence as described above. SLU manages expectations and “homestay family fatigue” by rotating locales for homestays every three years, which host families know in advance. Instructors include

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teaching faculty from Kenyan institutions, international nongovernmental organizations, and SLU in New York. The semester concludes with a month long internship—described as an independent study—for each student and selected to meet his or her individual interests. And, with some of the money generated by study-abroad participants, two Kenyans per year are given full scholarships to attend SLU in Canton, New York, to earn their undergraduate degrees. SLU has many fixed costs—the center itself (land and built infrastructure), permanent staff, vehicles, and maintenance. Other regular costs are shared among different locales through working with different host communities and other learning partners over time. The SLU program has demonstrated long-term, multi-faceted investment within Kenya. With perhaps fewer fixed costs, other longstanding semester-in-Kenya programs, such as those operated by the School for International Training (SIT), University of Minnesota, and American University, still have plenty of obligations, including each with its own contracted staff. They have also shifted programming and some locales over time for reasons similar to SLU and to share the resources that these programs have historically brought into the regions where they conduct their programs. Major economic contributions to local communities include being hired on as permanent or temporary staff, and also being paid to serve as host families to visiting students. The issue of expectations of and responsibilities to host families thus looms large in program management. That Kenyan families might compete with one another to host an American student is not surprising. The idea is that while Americans who study abroad gain immeasurable educational experiences, they also contribute to the communities in which they live, both culturally and financially (Coffman 2000). In recent years, all four of the aforementioned study-abroad programs have run below their capacities, for example, operating in fall 2016 with between one-third and two-thirds of enrollment ideals of around thirty students per term. Discussions with program directors and some instructors around that time indicated a range of possibilities to explain this, the most prominent being fears of illness or insecurity. While neither Ebola nor Boko Haram have a presence in East Africa, each of those had been cited as reasons for students not going to “Africa”—any part. Further, there are changes in students’ preferred foci—including many students’ searching for short-term study-abroad programs that still include service-learning opportunities, internships, and/ or public health practicums. Thus, there is increasing competition from shorter term academic and third-party provider programs, many of which emerged with those very foci driving their programming. As one program director noted, “There are pressures to neo-liberalize,” meaning to become more economically competitive by staging cuts to portions of programming and, in some instances, outsourcing certain modules so as not to bear direct costs. Some semester programs have launched their own short-term summer

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options, as well, in an effort to gain some of that market and thus subsidize their semester programs. Still, when numbers are low, or when programs must cancel (e.g., due to post-election violence in Kenya in spring semester 2008, low enrollments), expectant host families and other partners suffer, too. SLU and SIT have both responded to such cancellations by paying out a portion of expected revenue to homestay families, for example, but unless student numbers increase again, this cannot be sustained. All programs have restructured to some degree, and negotiated new and different partnerships. Short-term programs, such as those that run only during the summer months for U.S. institutions, avoid some of those problems, but many directors still report difficulties when programming must be cancelled or relocated and the negative impacts that has on host families and other partners. After all, these programs are not funded by charities and cannot give donations, but rather are ventures nested within non-profit state or private university administrative contexts. MARKETING “AFRICA” Just before our current batch of undergraduates were born, something major was happening: the dawning of social media and greater accessibility to the world via the information superhighway (as the internet was called in 1994). An overwhelming amount of data has been at their fingertips since they can remember, and yet “othering” persists (Calkin 2015; Holden 2013), as seen in international headlines that continue to highlight “Africa” as a place of promise and a place of need. To return to the IIE goal of doubling the number of U.S. undergraduates who study abroad: Why do that? According to NAFSA (“Trends in U.S. Study Abroad”) and IIE (IIE Open Doors 2018), the number of students studying abroad at any given time still represents about 1.6 percent of all U.S. students enrolled at institutions of higher education in the United States, meaning around 10 percent of all U.S. graduates will have studied abroad by the time their degrees are conferred. Going back twenty years to the 1994-95 academic year, and the dawn of the internet, 76,000 U.S. students studied abroad, vs. 332,727 for academic year 2016-17, an increase of 340 percent, while the overall number of students attending undergraduate institutions increased only 40 percent. For the 1997-1998 academic year, the approximately 3,000 American students who did choose a study abroad program to Africa favored the following five countries, ranked in descending order: South Africa (617 students), Kenya (606), Ghana (486), Zimbabwe (286), and Tanzania (224). In all five countries, English is widely spoken. These countries accounted

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for 2,219 of the 3,000 students traveling to Africa, nearly 74 percent. To compare study abroad elsewhere during the same academic year (19971998), 25,900 American undergraduate students chose to study in Great Britain, a country that, by the way, previously maintained a colonial presence in all five of the aforementioned African countries. It appears that linguistic comfort is important both psychologically and materially, enabling students to imagine that they will have more meaningful interactions with the people whose communities they visit. This is even more of a key variable the shorter the trip, as it relates to what Barkin (this book, chapter 4) describes as promoting a discourse of access. That and other chapters (Doerr, chapter 3; Bodinger de Uriarte, chapter 6) also describe efforts in programming to manage risk while still producing a sense of authentic engagement and daring or discomfort—while carefully orchestrated—that trigger feelings of investment and achievement. These are reasonable attempts among study abroad directors to protect their students while educating them, to steer students away from hedonic activities and more toward eudemonic—in sense of promoting well-being—engagements. And indeed, a sense of purpose and “doing good” has been described as essential for a meaningful life, as well as a healthy one; students, among others, can quickly turn against people and projects they find disingenuous (Gunderman 2017). DROP-IN ACTIVISM IN UGANDA During a recent winter term, a small group of students from a progressive liberal arts college in the northeast traveled to Uganda to learn about the work of grassroots activists involved with AIDS education and awareness raising to halt the spread of the disease in their communities and to offer support to their efforts to teach the activists to make videos to use in spreading their message. This was an optional, applied, credit-bearing course carried out between semesters. The goal of the program was to expose students to social activism, as well as the mixed effects of Western commerce, tourism, and foreign aid. They also witnessed how NGOs and grassroots organizations, both those run by Ugandans and by foreigners, grapple with the legacy of colonial structures and the present-day reality of market capitalism in a country the World Bank (2018) continues to describe as low income. Prior to travel, the students learned about the challenges and practical impediments such NGOs face against a background of pervasive North-South power dynamics and inequality. While in Uganda, their task was to train NGO staff in video skills and in using digital video as a powerful medium for social change. The program in Uganda lasted for five weeks.

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Before departure from the U.S., students had learned the rudiments of videography: image and sound recording, editing with Adobe Premier Elements, and message shaping. They became instructors using the “Train the Trainers” model. They carried out one round of training in Kampala, and another in a small town in the southwestern corner of the country, on the border with Rwanda and Congo. Participants in Kampala were selected by the directors of two umbrella NGOs, both with grassroots membership organizations throughout the country. Eight activists in Kampala were trained, then four of them accompanied the group to the southwest to train another eight people. Each round of trainings took six days. The students bought and donated the video equipment — four full sets, one for each local partner organization. The trainings in Kampala proceeded with hitches due to timing, punctuality, and lack of preparation. The activists had not been prepared for participation ahead of time, so trainings interfered at times with personal schedules, and levels of participation varied. The activists were unhappy that the student group did not pay them or provide any other significant form of compensation; they were well aware of other visiting groups and NGOs that compensated well. Disgruntled with receiving only their fares and food, and with the equipment at the end of training belonging to the partner organizations and thus not the individuals, participants did not see free training as an adequate benefit. The American students, who had paid all the costs of the trip, were shocked by this expectation. This reality largely reflects the extent to which NGOs compete with each other in their target settings to attract a clientele with what they offer. The students had stepped into a much larger context that they did not understand. Keen to help fight AIDS, the students were uneasy with the choice some groups made to produce a film addressing other issues, such as youth unemployment or maternal health. This raised serious questions of whether the activists were really free to choose topics they viewed as important, or were they to comply with the group’s agenda of exposing our students to working with issues of HIV/AIDS? Even when asked to share their experiences as AIDS activists with the students, the sharing was minimal, and the exposure to their work on the ground only happened after the trainings were completed, and only by a couple of the activists. Mostly, they were not inclined to show the students the work they did. And most disappointing for the students, the activists showed very little interest in the students and their motivations for coming to Uganda. The activists also ridiculed the students and challenged the legitimacy of their endeavors because they were not “expert” videographers. When the group arrived in the small town to the southwest of Kampala, despite the assurances that NGO groups were waiting to be trained, we encountered only a fledgling activist group in a region where HIV/AIDS carried a heavy stigma, with only

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a couple of activists willing to be trained because being trained equated with being seen as people living with AIDS. Our contact, an elementary school head mistress, brought several of her students to join the trainings, and in time, other individuals, especially peer mentors from the hospital came forward. However, it was challenging to use a particular model and then discover the infrastructure necessary to support the model simply was not there (see also Cororaton and Handler 2013), including the fact that only one of the activists being trained had ever worked on a computer before. The students struggled with how to teach editing to a group lacking even basic computer skills. Again, there had been a mismatch of intentions, skills, and resources, and the egalitarian dream (Ibid) was dashed. While in Uganda and certainly thereafter, the nagging question emerged of whether this particular endeavor would be categorized as service learning or voluntourism. Before we left the U.S., all the students were against taking part in poverty tourism (visiting impoverished areas to witness how people there live; typically an “authentic urban-poor” site for the tourist gaze (Urry 1990)). Those of us who agreed to lead the trip certainly considered the program one of service learning, which is meant to be an approach to tackling real-life problems in partnership with members of a particular community, in this case AIDS activists in Uganda. The students wanted to empower AIDS activists who were dedicating their lives to helping others. They saw that teaching video skills would provide a powerful medium for the activists to broadcast their messages, to educate and enlighten other Ugandans about the dangers and strategies of living with HIV/AIDS. At the end of the trip, the students struggled to hold on to some sense of accomplishment. For the leaders of this service-learning trip, the ephemeral nature of what our hosts gained (other than the very solid equipment) became clear—we had been one more group coming through only briefly, and the simplistic nature of our relationship with the places and people we visited was obvious to the activists who chose to engage only minimally with our group. Less clear but still quite striking is what the students gained: many insights that challenged their understandings and perceptions of their contributions and responsibilities to those they met in Uganda, to their home communities, and to their places in the world. These were tough lessons, but full-fledged reflection enabled them to see how much they learned through the experiences in the places they visited. They could no longer be comfortable with simple binaries; their understandings became much more complicated, and they had to contend with the reality that dropping in with good intentions cannot alone cure AIDS. Their frustrations and thoughtful reflections converted their seemingly failed efforts at volunteering into a significant, if humbling, learning process. This particular example, being a “one-off” program, had minimal investment in infrastructure and no long-term financial investment in the individuals

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or organizations with which it partnered. There was a disbursement of “gifts,” in this case the camera equipment, but no promise of follow-up or assistance with maintaining the equipment or further training the staff. Inadequate efforts to build meaning into the study-abroad program—to build trust and understanding between the American visitors and their Ugandan hosts— undercut what had looked like a purposeful, focused project, and revealed that the project’s conception on the U.S. side had not considered the desired outcomes on the Ugandan side. LEARNING FROM LABOR: SAND DAMS IN KENYA For several summers in a row, students from a large public mid-Atlantic university partnered with a local NGO called Utooni Development Organization, in south central Kenya for a portion of a two-month-long study abroad program that visited many locales in Kenya. Utooni was formally established by Joshua Mukusya in 2002 and registered as a Kenyan nongovernmental organization in 2005, but emerged from a history of self-help projects tracing back to 1978. Utooni works with registered community self-help groups who approach them for assistance. Utooni’s main activities include: sand dam construction as a way to capture and store rainwater; tree planting of indigenous droughtresistant species; terracing; improved crop production, using droughtresistant crops and conservation agriculture; and community-to-community participatory learning exchanges. Our program’s visit to Utooni followed significant preparation in the U.S. and in Kenya and built on previous interactions with the organization. Students had already completed readings, three weeks of classes, a 1.5-week homestay, and many discussions with program leaders and local staff about expectations for their engagement with Utooni. In other words, significant efforts were happening to promote intercultural competence. The initial visit to Utooni for the students lasted four days. Utooni’s Kenyan staff gave the first day on-site orientation and program overview. The next two days students performed intensive labor alongside members of a self-help group to construct a sand dam in the area where they lived. The fourth day was dedicated to reflection and visits to completed sand dams and their associated horticultural projects. This schedule was largely crafted by Utooni’s Kenyan staff, who were clearly in charge of this portion of the program. The physical labor was tough and initially disheartening to most students as they saw themselves struggling to establish the work rhythms and efficiencies of their Kenyan partners. This became a great learning moment for most

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students, as they overcame their discomfort, generally safe and carefully orchestrated as it was, and learned from those with whom they were working. But, first, some turned on each other as they dealt with that discomfort—some claimed to be working harder than others or blamed others for disrupted work flow, and some suffered crises of confidence about their own abilities. In the early afternoon of the first day of laboring alongside members of the self-help group, a student who tended to lead whenever he could said to one of the authors, “We are getting our asses handed to us. We need to do better.” He had viewed the students’ discombobulated efforts as failure instead of process. Fortunately, our hosts helped the students overcome self-doubts and hyper-competitiveness, and by the end of the first day, the students came closer to the patterns of work they admired among their Kenyan hosts and engaged in many small jokes or bigger conversations with them, too. They learned that the physical labor was easier and more enjoyable with social interaction. The second day of labor went much more smoothly, and there was invariably great joy among the students as they observed what they had helped to accomplish in two days. The students had to admit that they slowed down the group they were trying to help, and thanked them for their patience and mentoring. Students learned a great deal throughout the entire study-abroad program, and those of us grading their written work can attest that their content knowledge and analytical skills were, on the whole, impressive achievements. But, for many students, these accomplishments were less tangible—i.e., they began to recognize they had not mastered intercultural competence—and thus many reported really enjoying doing “dirty work,” by which they meant literally getting dirty as they built things to which they could refer later as what they did (see also Bodinger and Jacobson 2018). With a variety of assessments measures we learned that it takes a while—and lots of reflection—to process the larger contextual issues. As one Kenyan insightfully told me, “Americans smell like soap and think they can fix everything.” He added that he learned to be patient and teach them how Kenyans deal with their own problems, and in the process, he had come to admire the U.S. students’ work ethic and desire to “do good.” Critiques of university-age volunteers’ conflation of “doing good” and “feeling good” rightly abound (Bandyopadhyay and Patil 2017; Mostafanezhad 2013a, 2013b, 2014; Conran 2011), and yet there is also room to see these students’ in situ responses and privileging of labor-as-accomplishment as part of a longer process of learning and becoming better doers and thinkers. The students did indeed have formal and informal means by which they continued to think about the work they undertook and the larger projects happening at Utooni. For many at Utooni, the opportunity to interact with and

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teach visiting Americans had become a source of enjoyment or at least occasional amusement, often tied to Swahili malapropisms, and part of their own ongoing learning. “And their money helps,” another staff member added. With that, the value of this intercultural exchange—of ideas and resources— became clear and helped to validate the partnership. LEARNING FROM STUDY ABROAD The two examples from Uganda and Kenya highlight some of the problems that can emerge in well-intentioned volunteer projects abroad, including role ambiguity (Palacios 2010) and inadequate preparation or skillsets among the volunteers. As seen in both examples, volunteers often overestimate how helpful they can be, and frustrations can arise for all involved when those being targeted for assistance ask questions or request specific skillsets to which the volunteers cannot respond. Disappointments among members of the host community can arise as they find what the volunteers offer as mildly or largely irrelevant to their more immediate goals, akin to the “top down development” models for which larger aid organizations are justifiably criticized. Intra-group conflicts over work happen, with such contestations being fairly common within student groups when some students view themselves as more committed or more “genuinely” involved than others. Feelings of frustration during or after the trip can emerge, as volunteers suspect they were short on both time and skills to affect real, positive change. While any or all of those may be tough for students and even trip leaders to handle, each outcome can allow for better, deeper learning to emerge, as also seen in both examples. To be frustrated and challenged in such a way as to be humbled seems far better than another possible result of such efforts: a disturbing reification of Eurocentric attitudes when target populations defer to volunteers’ input and recommendations. Tucker (2014: 199) suggests we move away from “assumptions of fixed cultural positions in tourism encounters, and towards focusing on the fluidity and mobility of positions and relations between so-called ‘tourists’ and ‘toured’” or, as seen in the above examples, service-learning hosts and guests. Tucker does this very thing as she reflects on her earlier work and how she herself had enrolled in the project of seeing and reporting on binary divisions and emphatic difference in her field site in Turkey, only to realize later that things are, well, more complicated. Learning, as noted above, is ongoing. Can we thus not expect this to be the case for at least some of our students and ourselves, despite the bounded rationality through which we may first (and subsequently, though the bounds change) perceive an encounter?

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SO NOW WHAT: CONSIDERATIONS FOR DOING GOOD HIGH-IMPACT LEARNING Bringing together the rapid growth trends in study abroad, the desires that many students have to “do good” and have it be meaningful and purposeful for themselves and others, and understanding that most opportunities to engage in these high-impact practices are going to be via short-term programs, we have a few recommendations of what to consider for the design of study abroad and service-learning and/or internships therein. First, scale matters. When considering a partner organization or focal project, determine whether it is appropriate, manageable, and sufficiently localized. Ask whether it addresses cultural, political, environmental realities? Is it flexible—can it respond to changes in the above factors? Can we contribute meaningfully even if briefly, and how will it continue without us? A common error is scaling up too fast (or at all), as seen with the ambitious video project in Uganda, as described above. Another key consideration is tied to monitoring and evaluation. Given that the recent discussion of “high-impact” learning practices has turned to a discussion of what specific activities lead to improved student learning, it seems we should tentatively approach determining “best practices” for community-engaged study-abroad programs, a phrase that irritates the authors of this chapter as there is often little evidence to support such claims. Therefore, we recommend sharing assessment protocols and data— overseas partners to program leaders before the study-abroad program starts, program leaders to the larger community of international educators so we can learn from each other about how programming and quality learning can be improved. That means talking about what goes wrong, as seen above, and how to manage it on-site. Failure, after all, can provide some of the best teachable moments. A difficult topic to broach in the worlds of academia and NGOs, is the issue of the cult of personality. Can a structure—study abroad program, NGO, site partner—survive changes in leadership? How long is too long for an individual to be in charge of programming? And, relatedly, what happens when a working relationship is halted, due to concerns about insecurity or changes in leadership? What are the responsibilities that study abroad program leaders have to host communities? Despite the potential risks noted above when study abroad programs enroll fewer students than anticipated or are forced to cancel programming in a locale altogether, there are still many significant benefits. For the host organization and host communities, there would have typically been contributions to the host organization’s operating budget and to host families’ incomes; the promotion of efficiency and legitimacy within the host organization, as it should report out how any investments are expended and be able to articulate

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the short- and long-term benefits thereof; and, as Palacios (2010) notes, an “expansion of the host organization’s network base through post-volunteer involvement in promotion, fundraising and other types of supportive activities”—sometimes that short-term volunteer student makes a long-term and very meaningful commitment to the organization. We have seen that with our own students, and it has made a significant difference in the lives of many. For the students, study abroad in East Africa and elsewhere, when done thoughtfully and with an emphasis on engagements that nurture meaning and self-realization, promotes cultural immersion, civic engagement, and commitment to sharing skills and other resources (including funds); supports professional and personal development in a structured setting; encourages humility and opens up the opportunity to learn from others. It may also be worth recognizing the great learning and maturation project of university students in their late teens and early twenties—many are busily encountering new-to-them systems, knowledge pools, and people at home and abroad.2 The impulse to act on emotion may, in part, explain the allure of tourism imaginaries that drew some of our students to East Africa in the first place. For both students and hosts, study abroad with service-learning and/or internships can indeed provide long-lasting, useful experience by building on the desire to “feel good” to promote intercultural competence and figure what “doing good” can mean and look like (Palacios 2010), opportunities to understand and implement transformative learning (Knollenberg et al. 2014), and psychological support and hope through the relationships built through such programs. The not-very-shocking conclusion is that context and flexibility matter greatly in study abroad programming. While guidelines could be established to increase the likelihood of successful international internships, servicelearning, and other volunteering components of credit-bearing study-abroad programs, and there have indeed been efforts toward that end, program success in achieving the ideals of high-impact learning still comes down to the commitment of the people involved in organizing and getting people to reflect on the work they have done and the context in which they are doing it. Further, pedagogical intent does not guarantee the same outcomes in every student, of course. There is no simple metric to evaluate who “gets more” out of these experiences, although it is easier to guess in some circumstances than others.

NOTE 1. IIE was established by two Nobel Peace Prize winners: Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, and Elihu Root, former secretary of state, and by

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Stephen Duggan, sr. professor of political science at the College of the City of New York and IIE’s first President (“History” 2017). 2. See, for example, neuroscience approaches to explain these processes as outlined by Arain et al. (2013).

REFERENCES American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS). 2013. AIFS Study Abroad Outcomes: A View from Our Alumni 1990–2010. Stamford, CT: American Institute for Foreign Study. Arain, M., Haque, M., Johal, L., Mathur, P., Nel, W., Rais, A., . . . & Sharma, S. 2013. “Maturation of the Adolescent Brain.” Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 9: 449. Ayobami, O. K., & Ismail, H. N. B. 2014. “The Phenomenology of Voluntourism Paradigm as a Catalyst for Rural Revitalization.” Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research 22, no. 11: 1630–1641. Bandyopadhyay, Ranjan, & Patil, Vrushali. 2017. “‘The White Woman’s Burden’— The Racialized, Gendered Politics of Volunteer Tourism.” Tourism Geographies 19, no. 4: 644–657. Barkin, G. 2018. “Either Here or There: Short‐Term Study Abroad and the Discourse of Going.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 49, no. 3: 296–317. Berdan, S., Goodman, A., & Taylor, C. 2013. A Student Guide to Study Abroad. New York, NY: Institute of International Education. Berg, M. V., Paige, R. M., & Lou, K. H. 2012. Student Learning Abroad: What Our Students Are Learning, What They’re Not, and What We Can Do About It. Herndon, VA: Stylus Publishing. Bodinger de Uriarte, J., & Jacobson, S. 2018. “Dirty Work: The Carnival of Service.” In Urciuoli, B. (Ed.). The Experience of Neoliberal Education. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Braskamp, L. A., Braskamp, D. C., & Merrill, K. 2009. “Assessing Progress in Global Learning and Development of Students with Education Abroad Experiences.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 18: 101–118. Calkin, S. 2014. “Mind the ‘Gap Year’: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Volunteer Tourism Promotional Material.” Global Discourse 4, no. 1: 30–43. Carrigan, A. 2014. “Reply to ‘Mind the “Gap Year”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Volunteer Tourism Promotional Material’.” Global Discourse 4, no. 1: 47–48. Castañeda, Q. 2012. “The Neoliberal Imperative of Tourism: Rights and Legitimization in the UNWTO Global Code of Ethics for Tourism.” Practicing Anthropology 34, no. 3: 47–51. Coffman, J. E. 2000. “Study Abroad in Africa Considered within the New World Economy.” African Issues 28, no. 1/2: 49–53. Conran, M. 2011. “They Really Love Me!: Intimacy in Volunteer Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 38, no. 4: 1454–1473.

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Cororaton, C., & Handler, R. 2013. “Dreaming in Green: Service Learning, Global Engagement and the Liberal Arts at a North American University.” Learning and Teaching 6, no. 2: 72–93. Corporation for National and Community Service. Available at: http://www​.nat​iona​ lser​vice​resources​.org/ Deardorff, D. K. 2004. “In Search of Intercultural Competence.” International Educator 13, no. 2: 13. Ferguson, J. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frean, A. 2006. “Gap Years Create ‘New Colonialists’.” Times Online, 15 August. Available at: http:​/​/www​​.time​​sonli​​ne​.co​​.uk​/t​​ol​/tr​​avel/​​holid​​ay​_ty​​pe​/ga​​p​_tra​​vel​/a​​​ rticl​​e6092​​59​.ec​e Goodman, Alan, & Berdan, Stacie. 2014. “Every Student Should Study Abroad.” New York Times, 12 May. Gunderman, R. 2017. We Come to Life with Those We Serve: Fulfillment Through Philanthropy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. “History.” 2017. Available at: https://www​.iie​.org​/Why​-IIE​/History Holden, A. 2013. Tourism, Poverty and Development. Abingdon: Routledge. Holland, D. 2001. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Institute of International Education (IIE). 2018. Open Doors. Available at: https​:/​/ww​​ w​.iie​​.org/​​Resea​​rch​-a​​nd​-In​​sight​​s​/Ope​​​n​-Doo​​rs​/Da​​ta Kahn, H. E., & Agnew, M. 2017. “Global Learning Through Difference: Considerations for Teaching, Learning, and the Internationalization of Higher Education.” Journal of Studies in International Education 21, no. 1: 52–64. Keese, J. R. 2011. “The Geography of Volunteer Tourism: Place Matters.” Tourism Geographies 13, no. 2: 257–279. Knollenberg, W., McGehee, N. G., Boley, B. B., & Clemmons, D. 2014. “MotivationBased Transformative Learning and Potential Volunteer Tourists: Facilitating More Sustainable Outcomes.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 22, no. 6: 922–941. Korten, D. C. 1990. Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda. Boulder, CO: Kumarian Press. Kuh, G. W. 2008. High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Washington, D.C.: American Association of Colleges and Universities. Landon, A. C., Tarrant, M. A., Rubin, D. L., & Stoner, L. 2017. “Beyond “Just Do It”: Fostering Higher-Order Learning Outcomes in Short-Term Study Abroad.” AERA Open 3, no. 1. Larsen, J., Urry, J., & Axhausen, K. W. 2007. “Networks and Tourism: Mobile Social Life.” Annals of Tourism Research 34, no. 1: 244–262. Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Luh Sin, H., Oakes, T., & Mostafanezhad, M. 2015. “Traveling for a Cause: Critical Examinations of Volunteer Tourism and Social Justice.” Tourist Studies 15, no. 2: 119–131.

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McGloin, C., & Georgeou, N. 2015. “‘Looks Good on Your CV’: The Sociology of Voluntourism Recruitment in Higher Education.” Journal of Sociology 52, no. 2: 403–417. McGray, Douglas. 2004. “The Rise in Voluntourism.” Travel and Leisure, February. Available at: http:​/​/www​​.trav​​eland​​leisu​​re​.co​​m​/art​​icles​​/goin​​g​-the​​-dist​​ance-​​​febru​​ary​ -2​​004 McIntosh, A. J., & Bonnemann, S. M. 2006. “Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF): The Alternative Farm Stay Experience?” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 14, no. 1: 82–99. Molz, J. G. 2015. “Giving Back, Doing Good, Feeling Global: The Affective Flows of Family Voluntourism.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 46, no. 3: 334–360. Mostafanezhad, A. P. M. 2014. Volunteer Tourism: Popular Humanitarianism in Neoliberal Times. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Mostafanezhad, A. P. M., & Hannam, K. (Eds.). 2014. Moral Encounters in Tourism. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Mostafanezhad, M. 2013a. “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Angelina’: Celebrity Humanitarianism and the Cultural Politics of Gendered Generosity in Volunteer Tourism.” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 3: 485–499. Mostafanezhad, M. 2013b. “The Geography of Compassion in Volunteer Tourism.” Tourism Geographies 15, no. 2: 318–337. Mowforth, M., & Munt, I. 2015. Tourism and Sustainability: Development, Globalisation and New Tourism in the Third World. Abingdon: Routledge. Palacios, C. M. 2010. “Volunteer Tourism, Development and Education in a Postcolonial World: Conceiving Global Connections Beyond Aid.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 18, no. 7: 861–878. Pratt, M. L. 2007. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Abingdon: Routledge. Roberts, C. 2018. “Educating the (Dark) Masses: Dark Tourism and Sensemaking.” In Stone, P. R., Hartmann, R., Seaton, T., Sharpley, R., & Whte, L. (Eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Salazar, N. B. 2012. “Tourism Imaginaries: A Conceptual Approach.” Annals of Tourism Research 39, no. 2: 863–882. Salazar, N. B., & Graburn, N. H. (Eds.). 2014. Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Smit, J., AA van Eerde, H., & Bakker, A. 2013. “A Conceptualisation of Whole-Class Scaffolding.” British Educational Research Journal 39, no. 5: 817–834. Smith, J. H. 2008. Bewitching Development: Witchcraft and the Reinvention of Development in Neoliberal Kenya. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Sobania, N. 2015. Putting the Local in Global Education: Models for Transformative Learning Through Domestic Off-Campus Programs. Herndon, VA: Stylus Publishing. Stebleton, M. J., Soria, K. M., & Cherney, B. T. 2013. “The High Impact of Education Abroad: College Students’ Engagement in International Experiences and the

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Development of Intercultural Competencies.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 22: 1–24. “Trends in U.S. Study Abroad.” 2018. NAFSA. Available at: http:​/​/www​​.nafs​​a​.org​​/ Poli​​cy​_an​​d​_Adv​​ocacy​​/Poli​​cy​_Re​​sourc​​es​/Po​​licy_​​Trend​​s​_and​​_Data​​/Tren​​ds​_​in​​_U​ _S_​​_Stud​​y​_Abr​​oad/ Tucker, H. 2014. “Mind the Gap: Opening Up Spaces of Multiple Moralities in Tourism Encounters.” In Mostafanezhad, M., & Hannam, K. (Eds.). Moral Encounters in Tourism. Farnham: Ashgate. “Undergraduate Enrollment.” May 2018. National Center for Education Statistics. Available at: https​:/​/nc​​es​.ed​​.gov/​​progr​​ams​/c​​oe​/in​​dicat​​​or​_ch​​a​.asp​ Urry, J. 1990. Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Urry, J. 2016. Mobilities: New Perspectives on Transport and Society. Abingdon: Routledge. “voluntourism, n.” September 2015. OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: http:​/​/www​​.oed.​​com​/v​​iew​/E​​ntry/​​34245​​729​?r​​edire​​ctedF​​rom​=v​​​olunt​​ ouris​​m& (accessed October 12, 2015). Wearing, S., & McGehee, N. G. 2013. “Volunteer Tourism: A Review.” Tourism Management 38: 120–130. Williams, T. R. 2009. “The Reflective Model of Intercultural Competency: A Multidimensional, Qualitative Approach to Study Abroad Assessment.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 18: 289–306. Williamson, Wendy. 2008. Study Abroad 101, 2nd edition. Illinois: Agapy Pub. World Bank. 2018. “Country and Lending Groups.” Available at: https​:/​/da​​tahel​​pdesk​​ .worl​​dbank​​.org/​​knowl​​edgeb​​ase​/a​​rticl​​es​/90​​65​19#​​Low​_i​​ncome​ Zeddies, M., & Millei, Z. 2015. “It Takes a Global Village”: Troubling Discourses of Global Citizenship in United Planet’s Voluntourism.” Global Studies of Childhood 5, no. 1: 100–111.

Chapter 2

Two Weeks to Global Citizenship? The Problems, Paradoxes, and Successes of Running a Short-Term Travel Course Aaron Andrew Greer and Don D. Schweitzer

As Mark Twain famously said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts” (Twain 1984). In recent years, many universities have instituted a variety of programs aimed at creating “global citizens” of their students. The purpose of these programs, framed largely in the same terms, is to create students who are globally aware and engaged in processes and projects aimed at helping global others. These programs often take shape in short-term courses of anywhere between two to six weeks. They typically involve service learning, development projects, culture and/or language immersion, and various types of field schools. Our own experiences running a two-week ethnographic field methods course, open to students from any academic major, to the West Indies alerts us to the challenges and problems of living up to the rhetoric of the “global citizen.” This chapter explores the challenges of generating an “authentic” travel experience in distinction to the supposed superficiality of conventional tourism. In this chapter, we interrogate the language of global citizenship, asking whether an intensive two-week fields-methods course truly does more to create a global citizen than any other type of travel. In so doing, we explore the paradox found between the lofty rhetoric of global citizenship and the realities of running a short-term travel course.1 Social theorist Raymond Williams offers as one among several definitions of “culture” that it is a state of being learned, studied in the long duree of Western intellectual thought, and sophisticated in tastes (Williams 1983a, 1983b). To be cultured, in this sense, is to be elite, both intellectually and in socio-economic class. The term “global citizen,” currently in vogue in the American academy, carries a similar gloss as the now dated cultured. 67

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The term, though often vaguely defined (if at all), is presumably intended to evoke notions of a cultured student—one who is broadly educated in the liberal arts and who knows a thing or two about global others. For many university programs, the term global citizen is often meant to evoke images of students who are, “caring, embrac[e] cultural diversity, promot[e] social justice and environmental sustainability” and who have “a sense of responsibility to act for the betterment of the world” (Reysen et al. 2014: 5). The international anti-poverty organization, OXFAM (2015: 5), developed resources to help educators create curriculum around the notion of global citizenship for students of all ages. They state that a global citizen is one who; • Is aware of the wider world and has a sense of their own role as a world citizen • Respects and values diversity • Has an understanding of how the world works • Is passionately committed to social justice • Participates in the community at a range of levels, from the local to the global • Works with others to make the world a more equitable and sustainable place • Takes responsibility for their actions In this iteration of global citizenship, as with many others in university settings, pressure is placed on teachers to produce students who understand the complexities and problems of global dynamics and who accept responsibility for its improvement. Indeed, the role of instructors is critical as “research on the influence of university instruction revealed that how university administrators discuss globalization and how professors frame the concept of global citizenship for students influences students’ degree of identification [as] global citizens” (Blake et al. 2015). As a relatively recent pedagogical paradigm and learning outcome, global citizenship requires instructors then not merely to promote global awareness but also to instill a sense of identification with global others. Interestingly, however, there is little discussion in these types of definitions that include an individual’s rights, which the term citizen ordinarily implies. The label global citizen then carries a paradoxical gloss as the term citizen implies both rights and responsibilities typically conferred by a nation-state. To speak of global citizen then is to suggest a kind of “denationalized” citizen, to use Sassen’s language (2013: 280), who in some sense abdicates, or at least minimizes, his or her role as citizen of a nation-state. “Citizenship here resides,” Sassen points out, “in identities and commitments that arise out of crossborder affiliations” (213:282).

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The global citizen, therefore, is not only educated in the Western philosophical and methodological canon but is now also informed about the lives and cultures of global others, and importantly feels responsibility both for certain rights as a citizen and a sense of commitment to other citizens in this now globally “imagined community” (Anderson 1991). Importantly, the student is also able to identify as a global citizen who, in addition to being an active agent for social change, participates in the on-going discussion about what it means to be human (Byers 2005). The replacement of culture (in the class sense) with global citizen then marks an epistemological turn in the modern academy away from allegedly ethnocentric pedagogies and toward inclusion and activism with cultural others. It is a turn toward a recognition of the implicit value of the knowledges of global others and the pedagogical value for American students in situating Western intellectual history as one among many such histories. The confrontation of these different histories carries unquestionable power differentials and a radically disproportionate access to resources. The Western imperial project, designed largely for the purpose of extracting all manner of resources from global others, certainly cannot be ignored as an ethical problem inherent in our course. After all, the very premise of the course asks the students to extract data from West Indians so that they can become better researchers and thinkers. As Talya Zemach-Bersin has pointed out, “American students who study abroad cannot be removed from the political and national contexts from which they come” (2007: 25). However, while students may not be removed from the cultural and geo-political contexts from which they come, we believe that they can be compelled to think and act differently in the world. In other words, simply because someone comes from an imperialist country does not ipso facto make them an imperialist when they go abroad. In response to global citizenship skeptics, Ross Lewins draws artfully on debates within the Frankfurt School on the problems and potentials of mass production in the age of modernity. While Adorno and Horkeheimer see a bleak future inaugurated by a culture industry designed only to promote consumerist ideology, their colleague, Walter Benjamin sees the potential for a democratization of art through mass production. Likewise, Lewins claims, study abroad, particularly those programs with institutional support, can democratize learning experiences previously open only to an elite few. And though there is undoubtedly a consumerist element in universities’ marketing of global programs, this is merely a reflection, Lewins claims, of the larger process of globalization and, as such, “Perhaps we need to jump full force into this mass culture and open up a space for students to think about how it functions” (2009: xvii). Building on Lewins’ point, we could also note that the entire university experience, not only study abroad programs, is deeply

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enmeshed in consumer culture. As Fredric Jameson (1990) has accurately stated, capitalism has penetrated every corner of our lives, leaving little room for escape. The belief that study-abroad programs are somehow compromised by a link with consumer-based tourism overlooks the glaring fact that participation in capitalist practice is not something one chooses to opt into or out of—it is always/already present. Furthermore, students, as with most consumers, are not passive dupes. They are active intellectual agents (see Gramsci 1992) whose “expectations constantly form and re-form as [they] proceed through . . . the touristic ritual” (DiGiovine 2009: 168). As anthropologists of tourism have noted, tourists bring their own interpretive schema to travel events and encounters just as consumers of any media or particular cultural institution do. However, the interpretive frames by which they read the unfolding cultural dramas around them are often shaped by popular perception, which is ever willing to truck in resilient essentialisms. Our goal, as instructors of a methods course for all academic majors, is to attempt to mitigate the approach of travel as a fulfillment of one’s desires and fantasies of the other, as much tourism, particularly in the West Indies, is often approached (Gmelch 2003). Rather, our efforts focus on encouraging students to apply ethnographic skills (really just good life skills) of listening to others, observing carefully, and thinking creatively about what they’ve seen and heard. Fulfilling the mission of turning out global citizens has resulted in the rise of global/international studies majors, study-abroad programs, and short-term travel programs intended to accomplish this goal through language/culture immersion, service learning, and field methods. According to the Institute for International Education (2018), the number of U.S. students participating in any type of travel course increased almost 46 percent (223,534 to 325,339) from the 2005–2006 to 2015–2016 school years. Moreover, during those same years, participation in short-term travel classes (defined as 8 weeks or less) rose over 2.5 times from 57,895 to 154,861. However, does simply traveling to another country create a global citizen? Or does a course such as we have designed amount to little more than glorified tourism? How do we get students to be in a place where they begin to understand the value of global citizenship? Our developing expertise rests in a field methods course, which we run every other year in the English-speaking country of Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies. To date, we have taken four classes totaling over ninety students (there have also been four additional trips with 1–3 students to conduct more in-depth ethnographic projects). Among the many lessons we have gleaned in our experiences with the course is the grounding realization that there are infinite ways of being in a place, and as such there is little guarantee of any kind of consistent epistemological outcome. Unlike in a conventional classroom

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setting, being in the field is a much less predictable, one might say controllable, environment. As such, students must have the skills necessary to learn something from and within that dynamic public space. Most students are typically not overwhelmed or radically disoriented in most classroom settings, however they can be, and often are, in bustling field sites like Trinidad’s capital city, Port of Spain. Needless to say, it is difficult to learn much of anything when overwhelmed or disoriented, hence the reason our prep-course focuses on skills that give them concrete practices to focus on while in the field. To know more about, say, the colonial history of Trinidad and Tobago and how that has shaped present realities, requires being in a place as a learner of that complex and on-going process. That holds true for any subject a student may broach with Trinidadians. If they are there as students of a process, in the Geertzian sense of not studying people but processes among them (Geertz 1973), then there is some possibility of achieving, however fractional, the goal of global citizenship. In essence, what we strive to avoid are field accounts one might hear from a holiday traveler. As Clifford Geertz has acerbically remarked, the dreariness of travel writing is that it reads like “one damn thing after another” (Geertz 1988: 37). While students bringing their fantasies and desires to Trinidad, as a tourist might, may be unavoidable, we can prepare them to bring some analysis to bear on their experiences. The dilemma we face as instructors then is rather obvious—how do we ensure that, once in the West Indies, students are present, intellectually and interpretively, as learners of Trinidad and Tobago? The problem is a nagging one for a host of reasons; regulating others, especially college students in the Caribbean, presents obvious challenges, for example, getting them to conduct fieldwork rather than play, keeping them from drinking to excess, and asking them to work together cooperatively have required creative and vigilant effort on our part. Assessment (both on written work and their field methods) is wrought with contingencies (e.g., how much and of what kind of writing is acceptable?). If their field methods are strong, but writing is comparatively weak, how do we assign an accurate grade? Or the reverse, if they write well and make meaningful observations, but their methods of implementation seemed comparatively thin, how do we measure their performance fairly? Finally, fieldwork is messy, and knowledge is always already incomplete, patchy, discontinuous, and subjective. In light of fieldwork’s (life’s) messiness, how do we bring some order to bear on the ways in which students engage while in the field? In this chapter, we will describe our course methods and experiences, identify some key challenges and a few successes, and share our experiences in view of the epistemological goals of global citizenship in contrast to the goals of most tourist experiences. We argue that although achieving the status of global citizenship remains an elusive target, through the use of ethnographic methods, one can

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expect, following Lewins and OXFAM, that students become more aware of the wider world, more respectful and valuing of diversity, and gain a better understanding of how the world works. Ideally, they also begin to think about their position in the world and how they might use that to work with others toward a more equitable world. Additionally, we also argue that the intensive focus on methods and analysis separates this from a conventional tourist experience. We intend our course design to offer students of all majors enough methodological tools to allow them to conduct meaningful (albeit limited) research projects. Through the prep class and the design of the fieldwork portion, we push students to look beyond the expectations of pleasure and reward tourists often bring with them (Kempadoo 1999) and instead focus on developing methods that cultivate philosophical inquiry and critical reflexivity. Furthermore, the course endeavors to offer students a skill set that attunes them to the different contexts of global others. All this together gives them what they need to go out into the field and engage with global others in a more focused and meaningful way. COURSE OVERVIEW Every other year, we offer a short-term travel course to Trinidad and Tobago, which occurs during a 3-week winter term in January. In order to be approved for that course, students are required to enroll in a semester-long prep-course that is 2-credits and meets weekly for 90 minutes in the fall immediately preceding traveling. In the prep-course, students learn about the socio-political history, as well as the contemporary life, of Trinidad & Tobago. Students are also instructed on the skills of fieldwork and develop a research project they will carry out during the travel class. Additionally, we take along a teaching assistant, often a student from a previous class. For the January travel class, we fly into Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago’s largest city and stay in apartments that can accommodate five to seven students each. The apartments are fully furnished, including kitchens and a washer and dryer. Students are encouraged to shop at a grocery store close by to save money on food as well as be introduced to local foods. The first day in Trinidad (a Friday) is spent orienting the students to Port of Spain, the public transportation system, and taking care of other logistics required for the course (e.g., obtaining cell phones for student teams). The weekend is spent taking group excursions (a walk downtown to get a lay of the land, a trip to the Asa Wright Nature Preserve, to Maracas beach) and ensuring students are ready to start work first thing Monday morning. These trips are intended to introduce students to Trinidad —its social and ecological landscape—as

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well as to get them comfortable meeting people, asking questions, and finding their way around. Additionally, the second Sunday, we take a four-hour ferry ride to Tobago where we stay for three nights, affording them the opportunity to engage with Tobagonians. On Wednesday of week two, the class returns to Trinidad where we hold a group meeting for final reflections (written reflections are due the last day) and preparations are made to return to the United States. Students in this course are expected to be highly independent; they are out of the apartments by 10:00 AM each morning and return shortly before sunset. Each evening there is a group meeting where students share key experiences they had throughout the day. Plans are solidified for the following day and then students are free to go back out into town (within designated areas).2 Throughout the week, students are required to write posts to discussion questions via an online discussion forum. These questions take into account how long students have been in Trinidad & Tobago, asking for more as their experiences deepen. For example, their first post, due the first Tuesday after they arrive, will ask them merely to reflect on some of the differences they have been observing between Trinidad & Tobago and the United States and to describe the kinds of conversations they have been having. The second post, due after they have been in Trinidad for a full week, includes questions on how personal interactions are different/similar than in the United States and to reflect on any times they may have felt like an outsider. We also include questions that ask them to reflect on the methods they are using and the types of results those methods are producing. For example, we ask if they have been able to ask several different people the same questions in order to get a sense of how Trinidadians and Tobagonians variously interpret their own social world. In a more challenging vein, we ask them to link what they are seeing and hearing with the material we read in the prep class. The third post is due after spending three days in Tobago and asks them to compare and contrast Tobagonians and Trinidadians and how their perspectives on issues germane to students’ projects may differ. The fourth and final post is due the morning they depart back to the United States and asks them to reflect on their experiences as a whole and discuss skills learned. In addition to these discussion questions, faculty meet with students one-on-one throughout the week to hear about their progress and help students think more analytically and reflexively. What we hope the prep-course achieves is a deeper understanding of the history and cultural patterns of Trinidad and Tobago and, importantly, how to use ethnographic methods to observe and analyze specific features of Trinidadian life. Following McClellen and Hyle (2012), we use a multimodal approach, which involves readings, writings, in-class activities, such as interviewing classmates, ethnographic games, and observation development,

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the prep class attempts to prepare students for the challenges of conducting fieldwork among people with radically different approaches to daily life. The benefits of a course like this are that it asks students to observe the social arrangement of political otherness and the fashioning of moralsymbolic worlds that are every bit as human as anyone else’s. It asks them to take notice of the myriad ways in which political life is ordered and can be ordered. And it suggests, however implicitly, that the ways of being human are as numerous and complex as each individual with whom we share a world. Thus, the awareness of Trinidad and Tobago our students gather from the readings and activities from the prep-class comes face to face with the lived realities of the country when they land and must begin interacting with its citizens. In this sense, the course combines traditional in-class knowledge gathering through readings and lectures with in-field knowledge gathering through ethnographic methods and international experiences. PREP-COURSE One of the first challenges we face as instructors of an elective field methods course to the Caribbean open to all majors is getting students to take the semester-long preparation component seriously. Taken together, the prep-course and the travel course have three main outcomes (outlined in the syllabi): (1) increased knowledge of the social-political history of Trinidad and Tobago, (2) a deeper understanding of ethnographic methods and their application, and (3) greater confidence to negotiate foreign contexts independently. Were all the students advanced-standing social science majors, the task would be made somewhat easier as the students would appreciate, at some level, the difficulty of social research. Our students’ majors, however, cover a wide range and many come to us with little to no training in social science research design and implementation. As such, we have observed, through the development of their field projects, many students, particularly those from the natural sciences, carry the dispiriting bias that social science is the easy science, and thus should not present much of a problem once in the field. The “soft science” (Cassell 2002) bias thus requires creative and insistent course lessons designed to disabuse them of a belief that will not serve them well once in the field. Anything short of that would allow them to believe, mistakenly, that the course is a vacation to the West Indies punctuated by a few obligatory conversations with locals. Students infected with this bias then struggle to apprehend the critical importance of methods training before going into the field. To mitigate this problem, we have students develop

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projects early in the semester and begin collecting data on it within the first few weeks. Telling students that collecting, interpreting, and analyzing social science data is difficult does little to alter their assumptions about our discipline’s complexity. However, having them do it for themselves does. As one student stated, “It’s one thing to read an ethnography in class and talk about the concept of field research, but it’s another thing entirely to get to do that research for yourself.” Students are free to explore any topic they wish, within certain parameters. We encourage students to choose research areas that build on their majors or interests. We also steer them toward projects that would offer readily available interlocutors. More importantly, we want them to have projects that allow for a variety of different sources from which to draw data. Some common projects focus on art, ecology, politics, economics, and gender and sexuality. Thus, students interested in art are expected to contact galleries, dance studios, or artist collectives of whatever type of art they are interested in. Students of environmental studies reach out to naturalists, environmental activists, and writers concerned with ecological preservation. Students interested in issues of gender and sexuality will schedule meetings with members of LGBTQ outreach and activist groups. With the advent of the Internet, accessing data, making local connections, retrieving secondary sources (e.g., journal articles, newspapers, monographs, etc.) and setting up meetings for when they arrive while in the prep-course are relatively easy to accomplish. By the end of the semester, students have an annotated bibliography (somewhere between seven and ten sources) from which they draft a prospectus (research proposal) on their chosen topic. The thing that all projects share in common is broad accessibility to ethnographic data that does not require specialized expertise. In other words, they design projects and generate questions that nearly all Trinidadians and Tobagonians can discuss at some level. Historical and cultural content shares nearly equal space with methods instruction as we attempt to prepare students to conduct ethnographic fieldwork, albeit at an introductory level. By the end of the semester, just before takeoff in January, students should not only have a strong sense of the place they are going to, and the history that shaped it, but also a fully developed research project. Moreover, students are ready to apply fundamental skills of social scientists—interview techniques (including how to follow-up), notetaking in the field, how to observe in light of one’s research goals, and basic data analysis in the field to sharpen one’s approach (Bernard 2011; Faubion and Marcus 2009). As an example of the benefits of using the prep-class to establish connections and set up meetings ahead of time, one student interested in Trinidad’s increasing crime rate was able to speak with both legal experts and lay Trinidadians about the issue. Since nearly every Trinidadian has an opinion

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on the matter of crime and what to do about it, our student was able to collect a good deal of data from a variety of sources. He became fascinated by Trinidadians’ responses and proposed solution to the problem of crime, which was, as he found, to “bring back the hangman” (see, for example, Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, October 20, 2010). As this student’s work aptly demonstrates, by the end of the semester-long prep-course it is clear to the students that it is incumbent upon them to determine what to observe, who to talk to, what to take note of, and what questions to ask of their interlocutors, of themselves, of us, and of the nature of their conceptual enterprise more broadly. Though this sounds like a large burden to bear for a class comprised mostly of non-majors, the guidance we offer in the prep-course continues once in the field where, though the stakes are raised being in situ, the level of support necessarily intensifies. IN THE FIELD Our expectations for the data students collect in the field remain grounded by the realities of fieldwork—limited time parameters, adjusting to a new place, locating the right people to talk to, and the standard social intimidations that accompany all ethnographic (thus social) projects. However, we do hold high expectations for being in the field as much as possible and plying ethnographic practices while there. We have fashioned several strategies to encourage students to engage as much as possible in social research and to use and hone the ethnographic skills we worked on in the prep-course. As stated above, each pair of students is expected to be out of their apartments by 10:00 AM. Through our experience running this course, in order to discourage the students’ inclination to stick with people they know while in the field, we do not allow them to work in groups larger than two (special circumstances notwithstanding). Since each student is working on his or her own project, their research partners accompany them for support and safety. The job of each research partner is to support their partners while they meet with others and for each of them to help each other work their way through a new social and geographic terrain. We stay in contact with each pair throughout the day with cellphones that we issue upon arrival. By using the cell phones, we learn how the students are doing, where they are, and who they are with. In the cases where multiple groups have met up and begin traveling in large packs, we remind them that ethnographic skills are best acquired relatively independently, which we emphasize, along with the help of our teaching assistants, throughout the trip. Given Trinidad’s alarming crime rates and Port of Spain’s downtown, which becomes eerily desolate after working hours, students must be back to our apartments by sunset (around

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6:00 PM). Students are certainly free to go back out to eat, imbibe Port of Spain’s nightlife, or just lime (a Trinidadian term for “hanging out”) on the streets with friends. However, they do so in designated, well-populated areas close to our apartments. Admittedly, one of the most challenging aspects of the course is keeping tabs on where our students are in the evenings when the excitement for Trinidad’s notorious nightlife kicks in. Through a combination of phone check-ins, help from our teaching assistant, and guidelines about where to go and how late to stay out, we attempt to keep students safe while recognizing that (a) they are adults and (b) a large part of Trinidadian culture revolves around what one observer creatively termed “raucous eudaimonia,” that is, partying. In order to offer support and guidance in the field, we try to accompany students on at least one of their trips, especially those students who are going far afield (i.e., outside the city limits of Port of Spain) or who make a request that we accompany them. For example, several students interested in Trinidadian politics managed one year to organize a meeting with the President of the People’s National Movement (PNM), Trinidad & Tobago’s oldest political party. They asked Dr. Greer to accompany them to the meeting. After the meeting, Dr. Greer was able to offer insight, specific feedback, and, in this case, praise, for the way the students conducted the interview. Additional supports include evening meetings with the entire class, which are held each night to check in on the day’s progress. At first, they are more general in nature—“how did it go today? Any successes? Any challenges?” But then, once they have had more time in the field, we ask them to be more reflective—“how can you historically and culturally contextualize what you are observing”? Students are then randomly assigned to one of three groups where they will give more formal presentations of their work to date (one group each evening for three evenings). Aside from providing accountability, it offers a venue for students to talk to their peers and ask for assistance, for example, finding specific resources, and for faculty and their peers to give feedback that is useful for all to hear. Another important practice is meeting with students individually throughout the week to check in with them and offer suggestions and guidance where it is needed. We set up shop in a cafe near our apartments where students are able to share their fieldwork experiences while we look over their field journals. This arrangement allows us to work individually with students as they make their way through the challenges of fieldwork. This is especially critical since students are graded on the actual data they gather, its analysis, and reflexivity of that analysis within the field experience. Students learn quickly that Trinidad is an exceedingly social place. Most Trinis love to talk and will carve out substantial portions of time to do so. “Liming,” or hanging out and chatting, is a Trinidadian way of life (Greer 2011). Over the many years the two of us have spent in Trinidad, we have

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heard countless theories about Trinidadian culture, history, politics, economics, crime, corruption, and myriad other topics from Trinidadians. Students who encounter a particularly talkative Trinidadian sharing his or her numerous insights and theories about the country can sometimes return to inform us that everything we told them about Trinidad is in fact wrong, because they heard differently from a more authentic source—the omniscient informant—who told them what’s really going on. Encounters like this are precisely what we want students to experience. Listening to, asking questions of, and learning to follow threads with Trinidadians and Tobagonians is where the hard skills of ethnographic data collection are practiced and perfected. However, they must learn to contextualize that voice and situate it as one among many other voices. DATA WITHIN THE MUNDANE The relative independence of our students is where the pedagogical and philosophical dilemma lies. While we make no promises of global citizenship, we do lay claim to conducting a social science methods course. As stated previously, we hold ourselves accountable for ensuring that students complete the courses (both the prep and travel portions) with three main outcomes: (1) increased knowledge of the social-political history of Trinidad and Tobago, (2) a deeper understanding of ethnographic methods and their application, and (3) greater confidence to negotiate foreign contexts independently. This is a tall order for a two-week travel course with mostly non-majors. Some questions we keep in mind as we work with them in the field are: How do we ensure that they are applying the methods when in the field if we cannot always accompany them? How do we assess, critique, and improve skill application in the face of such independence? More philosophically, what do we expect them to have gained from two weeks in Trinidad & Tobago applying, however inconsistently, the methods we have worked on? Toward answering those questions, consider the case of the student researching Trinidad’s crime rate. We are well aware that the two weeks he spent in Trinidad & Tobago would not yield a tremendous amount of analyzable data on a professional level. The issue for us is not the amount of data gathered but rather the methods practiced to acquire them. Was he able to ask meaningful questions and follow-up on them, even if with different interlocutors? Was he able to find data in a variety of sources? Was he able to analyze his data in light of the materials he read before arriving in the field? If the answer to those questions is yes, we believe we will have moved those students toward greater reflexivity and social–historical contextualization. In the first iteration of the class, we found that the way we had designed the course assignments allowed for a bit too much independence for the students, and we were challenged to ensure they were applying the methods in the

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field. A large paper (an ethnography of sorts) due several days upon returning home did little to hold them accountable when they were in situ. Though they were expected to keep a field journal, we put more stock in the ethnography, assuming, wrongly, that students would discuss their data collection methods in detail. We remedied the problem by having routine and on-going check-ins that require students to share their work with us and the rest of the class (e.g., the evening meetings). For our last trip (January 2018), we drafted a series of directed questions that students were required to respond to and posted them to an online discussion forum for us to respond in turn. Before we adopted the online-based system, we kept the longstanding ethnographic tradition of keeping field journals, which we still recommend. However, we found that even though we requested reflection on methods and analysis of data, the journals read more like diaries—long on summaries of things they did and people they talked to and short on substantive methodological and theoretical discussion. In some of the worst cases, students hastily scratched out vapid descriptions of a few places they went and perhaps some food they ate or a new drink they tried. While Geertzian (Geertz 1973) thick description may be a tall order for twenty non-majors, we knew we could do better. The directed questions, coupled with regular evening and one-on-one meetings to follow up on their fieldwork and notes, attempt to steer the students away from simply recording the mundane, and getting them to recognize there is data within the mundane (Peterson 2009). In other words, the questions and routine meetings hold them accountable for having some kind of analysis of the symbolic world around them. The goal is to help students recognize that the seemingly quotidian events unfolding before them, whether at home or in the West Indies, is an elaborate performative drama filled with signs and significations. This approach, though abstract for many students initially, relieves the pressure of having some kind of grand ethnographic encounter—walking the streets of Trinidad & Tobago and engaging in conversation is a grand ethnographic encounter if analyzed as such. Approaching the course as a series of encounters with the mundane also helps us more easily negotiate what we call “the omniscient informant syndrome.” This is a case where a student puts so much value on one informant’s claims that they take those claims as gospel, assuming them as capital T truth about Trinidadian life. WHAT SEEMS TO BE WORKING A key metric of our success is the feedback we get from students both in the field and in our course evaluations. We have found that in-person discussions with students in situ about their impressions of fieldwork, and

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the field itself, provide much richer narratives of the course’s effectiveness than the course evaluations completed upon returning. As with any course, there will be those students who take the class and its lessons more seriously than others. This is no less true of our course in Trinidad & Tobago—some students will work diligently to apply the methods training in the field to become better researchers, thinkers, and citizens of our complex world, others will resist that training and view the course as an opportunity to fulfill fantasies and desires as many tourists would, and others will fall somewhere in between. While we do not have precise measurements of where our students fall on this continuum, we do have strong evidence, through observations, course evaluations, and discussions, to suggest that most of our students engage in good faith to apprehend and apply the skills we teach. We can see the benefits of students applying these methods reflected in the course evaluations. The four primary themes that emerged from their comments include the overall experience, the work, being pushed to engage with locals in ways they would not have if they merely traveled there as tourists and learning more about themselves and others. Students speak about the overall experience they have during the travel portion of the class, typically ranking it as among their most interesting life experiences thus far. Since most of our students are drawn from small towns and rural areas, responses like this are common. Beyond the brief responses such as “[an] amazing experience” or “a fantastic experience,” students stated how the experience of the course affected them. [It] was an amazing experience and I am happy with the research and travel opportunity! It is the most life-changing experience I’ve ever had. Great experience for cultural understanding.

Students also referred to the hard work they did with their projects and how that allowed them to have opportunities for more meaningful projects. I came to work hard but I also wanted to really embrace the culture. My research project changed as time progressed, and even while I was in Trinidad and Tobago. Part of the fun of the project came from hard work we put into it. [The Professors] set this class up in a way that allowed everyone to do a project they were excited about while still holding us too high standard of work. I loved the work we were doing in Trinidad & Tobago so I didn’t hold back.

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A key component of this course is to push students to think differently about the world, to conceptualize it more creatively (Rabinow et al. 2011), and to recognize that the methods we insist on them using help them accomplish these things. We push them to conceptualize the world they have stepped into in ways that consider as many contextual contingencies as imaginable. Put another way, we push them to think beyond the frames of typical tourism that nearly always place the self as the center of observation and analysis, evidenced in the comments below. Evening class meetings and individual meetings afforded us the opportunity to hear where students are at, and then push them to do more, ask more questions, and/or seek out new informants. Course evaluations described how being pushed to go beyond their “comfort zones” added to the course and their experiences. In our experience, being pushed beyond their “comfort zone” typically means being asked to engage with others in ways they ordinarily would not. I grew so much from this. It brought me out of my comfort zone and really push my boundaries in a good way. When I got back I had this awesome feeling of independence and like I can do anything. Very good opportunity to immerse yourself into a different culture. [Professors] pushed us out of our comfort zones so we could get as much out of the course as we could. Pushes you to interact with a different culture in really beneficial ways. You’re pushed to do more than you’re comfortable with and end up loving that you’ve tried so many new things. [The professors] are always asking you to do more, learn more, be more.

Student learning can take place in a variety of ways. Students discussed how they learned about themselves as much as they did about Trinidad & Tobago and how, through that experience, they felt more “aware” and that it “really opened [their] eyes”. In other words, they believed that their experiences were more meaningful than they would have been had they traveled merely as tourists. It was really interesting to listen and learn at what everyone had to say about certain issues and beliefs. This trip really opened my eyes to the world. It may only be one different culture, but it shows just how different their culture is from America and means that everywhere you go will be diverse. Traveling has helped me to become more aware of the world.

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I learned a lot about other people on this trip. Not only Trinidadians but U.S. people too. I learned so much about myself through this class.

As with any travel class, there are challenges that present themselves, sometimes on a daily basis. When students offered critical feedback, it was most often around the issue of organization/logistics, which often times are out of the control of the trip leaders. However, what the criticism underscores is the difficulty for many students of being in a foreign environment without a daily, hour-by-hour itinerary as one might experience on an organized, preplanned tour. There are a few organizational aspects that could’ve been improved Certain things could have been organized/planned/communicated better Some kinks with organization and communication

THE CHALLENGE OF ASSESSING STUDENT WORK Once in the field, student assessment takes on a different tenor. We no longer have standard papers to read, critique, and grade. Rather, we have twenty students making their way through Trinidad & Tobago with partially remembered methods and imperfectly rendered projects. But if we maintain any hope of our students using and thus properly learning ethnographic methods, we must create measurable learning outcomes, however imprecise that science may be. As stated previously, we make every effort to accompany our students at least once as they conduct meetings and observations in the field. We also use this time, importantly, to review methods and remind them of what we went over in the prep class. Finally, we read their journals, which, as indicated above, are now directed by questions that steer them away from diary entries. Yet the question remains, how do we assess such an eclectic, exceedingly imprecise body of work? Indeed, much of that “body of work” is more of an event than an analyzable artifact, making the use of grading rubrics problematic. In other words, since our students are engaged in on-going processes that involve interactions with all manner of people and places, much of which we will not be present for, what they produce is not easily captured in written work; the written work is not all they do. As such, how do we accurately, and equitably, assess events, in all their varying contexts and contingencies, over more conventionally measurable assignments? To put the assessment problem in starker relief, imagine the recurring, very real case of the student who does deeply engaged, thoughtfully driven, fieldwork (by modified standards, of course). This is the student who

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makes an effort to meet with Trinidadians and Tobagonians at multiple opportunities. She does detailed background research, sets up meetings, reviews her data for refining her questions, makes astute observations and uses those to inform further work with informants, and importantly takes guidance and feedback well from instructors. Taken together, this reflects the work one does to practice informed, thoughtful ethnography and would therefore seem to warrant high marks in the grade book. The problem, however, emerges that her writing does not match the excellence of her fieldwork. How do we then assign a grade to this student while remaining fair to others? What events and artifacts do we assess and what carries the most weight? While we have yet to discover a simple solution that upholds the standards of fairness that we can apply in a typical classroom setting, for this program we have elected to put more weight on the practicing of fieldwork methods than writing. Since we are running a methods course, we prioritize the use and practice of ethnographic methods. This, predictably, raises its own set of problems, especially in the case of excellent writers (strongly valued in the liberal arts). However, the way we see it, even the best writing cannot salvage poorly executed fieldwork. Thus, 80 percent of the students’ grades hinge on active, engaged, and meaningful fieldwork. Though the weight may appear high to some instructors and thus pedagogically problematic, it must be borne in mind that two weeks is insufficient time to conduct quality field research and write a strong ethnography. However, it seems two weeks is enough time to demonstrate a strong understanding and application of methods, hence the heavy weighting of fieldwork over writing. If pedagogically our approach is not ideal, students do seem to be responding well to the arrangement. In addition to the usual comments about how “cool” Trinidad and Tobago was, more substantive comments indicate that many of them truly apprehended what ethnographic methods are and how to use them. Most students are surprised that social science would be so, in one student’s terms, “sciencey.” The rigorous focus on planning the project, writing a prospectus, collecting, organizing, and analyzing data, and presenting their work is not what most students have in mind when they imagine a trip to the Caribbean. What, precisely, they have in mind is unclear, but a rather rigorous methods course rarely makes the list. It is common for students to report their surprise that a travel course would hold such high expectations, but that, in turn, they were glad we did. DISCUSSION Experience, in and of itself, does not alter one’s way of thinking but rather it is the meaning one makes of the experience that does so. Every encounter

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with an/other subject or object has a transformative effect on individuals in a Hegelian (Hegel 1977) dialectical sense. Subjects, Hegel contends, are in a continual state of transformation as each encounter with other subjects and even objects shifts, however slightly, not just perception but their very ontology. The question before us as instructors of a short-term travel course is the kind of alteration we wish to affect in our students. The question we face is whether that change fundamentally alters the way they think about a world of cultural others. In other words, students going to the West Indies as tourists, with all the expectations of pleasure and fun that typically accompany such trips, are unlikely to refocus their orientation to other contexts, lifeways, and how they see others. However, if they go as observers and listeners of complex social–cultural processes, they are certainly more likely to have had dialectical experiences that do alter the way they think about the world. Hypothetically, could a student who was, say, racist, return from a country comprised of people 40 percent of African heritage, 40 percent of East Indian heritage, and 20 percent either a mix of those or from somewhere else altogether, and be less racist? Or not racist at all? This dilemma returns us to our primary pedagogical and philosophical problem—does a travel course, can a travel course, necessarily open a student to appreciating the complex lifeways of others? Will it create a global citizen? Or, at least, contribute to the formation of a sense of commitment to global others? In the case of our hypothetical racist, they could return from the West Indies having had all of their worst biases about people of color confirmed. They could return more entrenched in their misguided views than when they left. For example, if they were inclined to believe that people of color are predisposed to criminality, corruption, and immorality, they could look at Trinidad’s violent crime rate spiraling out of control and talked about daily in nearly every venue, they could hear and read about unchecked political corruption, and they could see all the street limes and wild parties, and come home more convinced in their views than when they departed. This is an extreme example, but not markedly so. We have had students ask, in distressing rehearsals of abiding essentialisms, if Trinidad’s problems could be linked to the nation’s demographic profile. Simply traveling, as a tourist might, is not necessarily an effective antidote to prejudice. However, understanding social form and practice within historical and contemporary political-economic context typically is (see Rabinow et al. 2011). Our course, as we have described throughout this chapter, must be as much content as methods training. Folding both elements into a 2-credit prep-course that many students approach as the fine print they have to endure until they get to the main event is difficult. Yet, if we want their experience to be anthropological (to yield insights about the norms and forms of others and the self) versus a traditional tourist experience (where any research is more about the

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best places to eat and sightseeing trips), they must have some understanding of the broader context of the country they will be working in for two weeks. The course therefore cannot be strictly focused on methods but must also include historical, political, and sociological–anthropological texts and class discussions. What we therefore strive to accomplish in our students’ work is that they are able, at least to some degree, to situate the data they collect within the social–historical contexts we covered both in the prep-class and the on-going discussions while in the field. In the face of such limited time horizons, we cannot reasonably expect richly detailed analyses informed by complex theoretical paradigms. But we do expect them to try to contextualize the narratives they collect and events they observe. Though this skill is one of the most difficult for many of them to apply, we have found that with repetition comes habit. In specific, the habits we attempt to instill, especially once in the field, are those revolving around inquiry and analysis rather than pleasure-based tourism. CONCLUSION In the introduction to his now classic book The Repeating Island, Antonio Benítez-Rojo calls for a rereading of the Caribbean, urging scholars of the region to look beyond the usual frames of development that have dominated interpretations of the West Indies since the advent of imperialism. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ insight that upon every first reading “the reader inevitably reads himself,” Benítez-Rojo calls upon observers “to do the kind of reading in which every text begins to reveal its own textuality” (2006: 2). Benítez-Rojo’s plea is a challenging one even for advanced scholars of the region, let alone for American undergraduates who are accustomed to reading themselves into virtually every text they encounter. As such, we are fully aware that despite the many challenging historical and social science texts we cover in the prep class, many of our students still bring their desires for fun and pleasure with them to Trinidad & Tobago. However, through both the prep and travel portions of the course, we believe that with enough focus on methods, and insistence on bearing in mind Trinidad & Tobago’s colonial history and its geo-political present, we can encourage students to allow the country to reveal its own textuality, even if only fleetingly. The goal is to get our students to see something other than themselves in the Caribbean social landscape. Speaking to imaginary tourists, Jamaica Kincaid writes in A Small Place, “You see yourself lying on the beach, enjoying the amazing sun . . . You see yourself taking a walk on that beach, you see yourself meeting new people (only they are new in a very limited way,

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for they are people just like you). You see yourself eating some delicious, locally grown food. You see yourself, you see yourself” (2000: 13). Though our time in the field is short, we attempt to get our students to see both other textualities rather than their own as well as reflexively contextualizing their own place in global modernity. We labor under no illusion that a semester-long two-credit prep-course that meets every other week for an hour-and-a-half, followed by two weeks of in situ fieldwork, will awaken all of our students to the long history of the imperial project and its lingering effects on other nations. Nor will it give them profound insight about Trinidadians and Tobagonians and their historically and contemporarily shaped lives. And for most of our students, it is unlikely that they will retain the finer points of the methods they practiced in the course and in the field. As dispiriting as that realization is, we have also seen profound change in the many students who applied the methods and challenged themselves to conduct ethnographically engaged, contextually informed field work. Students from a host of different majors have reported that the independent nature of the course pushed them to interact with others and explore Trinidad & Tobago in ways they would not have if they came as tourists. By doing this, we feel this will encourage them to explore other novel worlds in ways they would not have without our course. This is spiriting news. Whether or not this makes our students “global citizens” remains an open question. But that the ethnographic process we move them through builds the tools for confident and contextually contingent exploration of others’ lives and worlds tells us our course design is on the right path.

NOTES 1. A note on students’ course comments: Throughout this chapter, student comments, from course evaluations, will be used to reinforce themes and ideas. Individual exemplars from students that may have been confusing or awkward to the reader were edited with care to insure the speaker’s intent was not lost. 2. Trinidad has an alarming rate of violent crime, currently ranked third in the West Indies for murder rate and eleventh globally. These crimes are often centered in specific neighborhoods, and, as such, students are made aware of the areas they are allowed to visit to insure they do not wander into an unsafe area.

REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

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Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. 2006. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, 2nd ed. Durham: Duke University Press. Bernard, H. Russel. 2011. Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Lanham: Alta Mira Press. Biehl, João. 2013. Ethnography in the Way of Theory. Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4: 573–597. Blake, Marion, Lindsey Pierce, Shonda Gibson, Stephen Reysen, and Iva KatzarskaMiller. 2015. University Environment and Global Citizenship Identification. Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology 5, no. 1: 97–107. Boas, Franz. 1901. The Mind of Primitive Man. The Journal of American Folklore 14, no. 52: 1–11. Byers, Michael. 2005. The Meanings of Global Citizenship. UBC Global Citizenship Speaker Series. Cassell, Joan. 2002. Perturbing the System: “Hard Science,” “Soft Science,” and Social Science, The Anxiety and Madness of Method. Human Organization 61, no. 2: 177–185. Di Giovine, Michael A. 2009. The Heritage-Scape: UNESCO, World Heritage, and Tourism. Lanham: Lexington Books. Faubion, James D., and George E. Marcus. 2009. Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a time of Transition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gmelch, George. 2003. Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1992. Prison Notebooks, edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg. New York City: Columbia University Press. Greer, Aaron Andrew. 2011. Imagined Futures: Interpretation, Imagination, and Discipline in Hindu Trinidad. PhD Diss., University of Oregon. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. The Phenomenology of Spirit. A. V. Miller, Trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Institute of International Education, Inc. 2018. Duration of Study Abroad. https://goo​ .gl​/8wZTnP. Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kempadoo, Kamala, ed. 1999. Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Kincaid, Jamaica. 2000. In a Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Lewins, Ross. 2009. Introduction: The Quest for Global Citizenship Through Study Abroad. In Handbook of Practice and Research in Study Abroad: Higher Education and the Quest for Global Citizenship, edited by Ross Lewins. New York: Taylor and Francis. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1989. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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McClellen, Rhonda and Adrienne E. Hyle. 2012. Experiential Learning: Dissolving Classroom and Research Borders. Journal of Experiential Education 35, no. 1: 238–252. OXFAM. 2015. Education for Global Citizenship: A Guide for Schools. OXFAM: Oxford, UK. Peterson, Kristin. 2009. Phantom Epistemologies. In Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a time of Transition, edited by James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rabinow, Paul, George E. Marcus, James D. Faubion, and Tobias Reese. 2008. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press. Reysen, Stephen, Iva Katzarska-Miller, Phia S. Salter, and Caroline Hirko. 2014. Blurring Group Boundaries: The Impact of Subgroup Threats on Global Citizenship. Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolution 1, no. 2: 1–24. Sassen, Saskia. 2013. Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship. New York: Sage Publications. Trinidad & Tobago Newsday. 2010. Letter to the Editor. https​:/​/ne​​wsday​​.co​.t​​t​/201​​0​ /10/​​20​/br​​ing​-b​​ac​k​-h​​angma​​n/. Twain, Mark. 1984. The Innocents Abroad: Roughing It. New York: Library of America. Williams, Raymond. 1983a. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1983b. Culture. London: Fontana. Zemach-Bersin, Talya. 2007. Global Citizenship & Study Abroad: It’s All About U.S. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 1, no. 2: 16–28.

Chapter 3

Safe-Guarding, Social-Pricing, and Labeling Technologies of Border Construction and Discourses of Border Crossing in Study Abroad/Away Neriko Musha Doerr

FROM BORDER-CROSSING TO OTHERING Out of many differences, we notice only some. Difference is not an absolute quality between groups of people but something we notice in a sociocultural context that makes that difference meaningful and thus consequential. For example, not being able to hear is meaningful difference and may be categorized as “disability” in a society where communication occurs dominantly through auditory means; it would not be so in a society where everyone uses sign language. We as individuals are part of the process of constructing such sociocultural contexts as well as performatively acting to reiterate differences and corresponding borders (McDermott and Varenne 1995). Therefore, I suggest we need to move away from assuming that differences or borders are there to be crossed, and instead examine the process of differentiation and border-making—otherwise known as “othering.” Othering constitutes the Self relationally and hierarchically in diverse ways, through literature and academic works (Fabian 2002[1983]; Said 1978), media texts (hooks 1992), museums and performances (Fusco 1995), as well as through travels and travel writings (Pratt 2008[1992]; Lisle 2006). In travel, “Others” can reveal “a cosmological center of Self located beyond the immediate realms of the everyday” (Picard and Di Giovine 2014: 1), with some “magical” overtones of dangerous supernatural power to which Others have been linked and which allows the Western Self to renew the moral 89

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order (Picard and Di Giovine 2014). Such “representational assemblages” are transmitted and shared, interacting with the tourist’s personal imaginaries to create meanings of the destination and travel experiences (Salazar 2012: 2). Controlled othering is at the basis of tourism industry. It is controlled because there is a tension between standardization and differentiation. Standardization in tourism occurs within a shared infrastructure (e.g., airlines and hotels), a shared standard of quality in the amenity, and the interchangeability of destinations as a “paradise” or “getaway” when natural or man-made disasters render another destination unavailable. Differentiation in tourism is also necessary as tourist sites compete for tourists—“profiting from difference.” There is also differentiation from the “everyday” to make the destination a “getaway” from the mundane (Picard and Di Giovine 2014; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). In study abroad, there are different contours of such “benefits” of differentiation. Aiming at nurturing students’ “global competence” and “intercultural sensitivity” (Deadorff 2009; Lewin and Van Kirk 2009), as I argued elsewhere (2013; 2016; 2017; 2018) and as I will detail in the next section, study abroad relies on the existence of difference, which then reifies borders. There are three ways that difference becomes crucial in study abroad: study abroad is promoted as an “adventure” (Zemach-Bersin 2009; see also Bodinger de Uriarte this volume) that necessitates novelty of the destination and experience; what is considered as the best learning experience in study abroad (Laushauber 1994)—immersion—relies on the difference of the destination in terms of people and their lifestyle (Doerr 2013, 2016; Doerr and Suarez 2018); and one key component of the expected learning process—going out of one’s comfort zone—necessitates the destination to be a different, thus disorienting, place for the students. This chapter builds on this understanding, but shifts the focus to various practices during and after studying abroad, and examines how they work to construct the very difference/borders with which the study-abroad project aims to engage. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork and narrative analyses on study-abroad trips, I examine three cases that show such construction of borders. The first case examines collective rituals done by American study-abroad students in Sierra Leone who were concerned with cleanliness and sanitary safety. These rituals created a border between the “we-t​he-vu​ lnera​ble-t​o-ger​ms-an​d-thu​s-in-​need-​of-pr​otect​ion” and “they-who-live-withthese-germs,” but also pushed them to cross that border by “safe-guarding” them from perceived germs and diseases. The second case investigates study-abroad students in Peru who experienced and also perpetuated the border drawn by wealth differences, with some implications to nationality initiated by what I call social-pricing—pricing based on the perceptions of the consumers’ social status. The last case analyzes the act of labeling certain

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experiences as “immersion experiences” by one Colombian American studyabroad student in Spain, supplemented by discussion of existing literature, as a border-making practice. By showing two types of borders—between study-abroad students and people in the destination and between wealthy and non-wealthy individuals that cut across the first border—I argue that bordermaking is a scale-making practice that asserts which scales constitute relevant and meaningful units of analyses. This chapter is part of my wider research on learning practices among study-abroad students and how they construct imaginaries of space, time, and subjectivities during study abroad (2012, 2013). In what follows, I will review the existing literature on study abroad, explain the methods I used, and describe and analyze the three cases mentioned above. Border-Crossing or Border-Construction? The Need of Borders in Study Abroad The main focus of existing research on study abroad centers on its main goal: to nurture students’ “global knowledge” (Hovland et al. 2009), “global competence” (Lambert 1994), and “cross-cultural adaptability” (HRDQ-U 2019). Some researchers discuss how to measure such outcomes accurately: through performance-based assessment, self-assessment, or statistics (Carlson et al. 1990; Deardorff 2009; Laubscher 1994; Lewin and Van Kirk 2009; Plater et al. 2009). Others suggest activities that foster these desired outcomes: well-planned pre-departure experiences (Brustein 2009); ethnographic projects (Ogden 2006; Roberts 1994); reflective writing (Chen 2002); and service work, internships, and co-op programs (Bringle and Hatcher 2011; Lewin and Van Kirk 2009; Plater et al. 2009). Hardly examined is a core assumption of study-abroad goals: the pre-existence of “cultural difference.” I have argued elsewhere (2013; 2016; 2017; 2018) that the educational project of study abroad as it stands constructs the very difference it aims to bridge, as I review below. There are three ways by which study abroad relies on the existence of difference/borders. The first is the view of study abroad as an “adventure.” Advertisements (Zemach-Bersin 2009) and guidebooks (Doerr 2012) for studying abroad tend to stoke students’ fascination with “difference” (Oxford 2005: 96), oftentimes referring to the experience as “an adventure abroad” (Loflin 2007: x). The notion of adventure relies mainly on the existence of stark difference between study-abroad students’ home and host societies or at least providing opportunities for new and different experiences: if these societies are seen to be similar to each other, visiting the host society does not constitute an “adventure” (Doerr 2012; also, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblet 1998).

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The second is the discourse of immersion. Immersion is described as to live: in a ‘living laboratory’ that forces them to become actively involved in the learning process on every level—intellectual, psychological, and emotional. This holistic dimension is what makes education abroad uniquely suited to promoting an appreciation for cultural differences. (Laubscher 1994: xiv)

Here, because learning activities are not clearly outlined, noticing difference is inherently connected to “learning” experience: for example, students report learning how French people dress by identifying their difference from how Americans dress (Doerr 2017). I will provide some critique of this discourse later in the chapter. The third is the view that learning in study abroad comes from a disorienting experience offering cognitive dissonance. Researchers say being in an unfamiliar environment, especially if tools of observation and analysis as well as reflective opportunities are provided, allows students to critically examine their surroundings and their own place in them (Brockington and Wiedenhoeft 2009). This type of experience—that of cognitive dissonance— allows students to learn to navigate unknown environments and confront their personal limitations, leading to self-confidence, increased adaptability, risktaking, empathy with others, knowledge of another “culture” as well as their own, and ability to shift their perspectives (Brockington and Wiedenhoeft 2009; Cushner 2009). Suggesting that students learn through crossing the border of their comfort zone, which is often assumed to overlap with the nation-state borders (Wolf 1994), is another way study abroad highlights and constructs the border. This structure of study abroad constitutes an important environment which pushes students to notice particular difference, thus creating “borders” (McDermott and Varenne 1995). This chapter builds on the above research and further argues how practices in study abroad highlight and construct these differences, thus borders, between the students’ home and host societies as well as along the class lines, complicating such border construction. Richard Wilk (1995) argues that “globalization” produces not so much homogenization through spreading similar things throughout the world but rather creates shared frameworks of differentiation, a “global structure of common difference” where differences are perceived and judged with the same criteria. In the field of tourism, Michael Di Giovine (2009: 159) argues that tourism packages “unity in diversity” across time and space to create ritualized encounters with differences. Such encounters would foster the sentiment of communitas, the state of chaos and unity that represents the opposite of normative structure of the society and yet imbues vitality to it (Turner

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1974: 273). In this chapter, I argue that study-abroad practices produce differences through the act of othering. However, while these differences are constructed along the lines of nation-state borders where the concept of “culture” often overlaps (Wolf 1994), practices I examine in this chapter also highlight class difference thus construct class borders. Discussions on borders tend to focus on those of national security initiated by the state and yet carried out increasingly by dispersed agents, including citizens. Johnson and Jones (2014) argue that the end of Cold War created the discourse of globalization—the breaking down of barriers—while the border work became harsher through increased patrol and new surveillance systems. The kinds of border work had changed recently as well: border work was strengthened at the physical border itself but also decentered expanding to daily life, in the form of checking of immigration documents and raids in search of undocumented immigrants. The agents of border work also expanded to multiple local actors—every citizen reporting suspicious acts encouraged after 9/11—and local police officers carrying out immigration enforcement that used to be solely the realm of the federal government. These new “imagined” borders shape our view of the world and our place in it as well as our relation to other people. What we see today is a form of sovereignty that is contingent and mediated at multiple scales through multiple actors, not the state acting on behalf of people for their security (see also Jones 2012). However, the kinds of borders I examine in this chapter are cultural borders constructed in daily life without necessarily implicating, though still intertwined with, security issues and those which operate at various scales, including class borders. FIELDWORK ON STUDY ABROAD All three cases introduced in this chapter are based on my ethnographic fieldwork on study-abroad experience by students in Cape College1 faculty-led study abroad trips to Sierra Leone in 2012 (the first case), to Peru in 2016 (the second case), and narratives of a student who studied abroad in Spain in 2013 at a local university in a program designed for American study-abroad students (the third case). Cape College is a public liberal arts college in the northeastern United States with an enrollment of about 6,000 students. The details of each program will be introduced later. Most research on study abroad derives from the sending side’s concerns and presents little supporting evidence, Amit (2010) argues. Ethnographic work on study-abroad students’ experience could fill this gap though it differs from conventional ethnographic fieldwork (Murphy-Lejeune 2002) as it is multi-sited. Such sites include the study-abroad students’ home country and

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host country, as well as various countries students may travel to during their study-abroad stay. This chapter uses a case study method that focuses in-depth on students’ specific subject positions and the contexts in which they are situated. Talburt and Stewart (1999) critique study-abroad research as generalizing students’ experiences abroad, ignoring how the students’ race and gender affect their experience. The case study method responds to this critique, seeking instead qualitative analyses that capture connections between various factors from socio-structural to locally specific, nuanced and situated processes of learning, holistic understanding of individuals’ experiences, and relations of power between the researcher and the researched that quantitative studies can overlook. This chapter in particular focuses on the class position of students, with some discussions on their subject positions in terms of race. The tables provided in this chapter keep the analyses open-ended, allowing the readers to further examine connections between the students’ subject positions and their actions and statements. Ethnographic data are always a result of unique interactions between researchers and the researched, situated in layers of relations of power (Clifford 1988). I had taught as adjunct faculty at Cape College during these research periods, but none of the students involved in these trips had taken my classes. Although these institutionally established power relations, our interaction was unlike professor–student relations in the classroom, because not only was I not giving them grades but I also positioned myself as someone who was learning from them as I carried out ethnographic research of the trip. For example, all students called me by my first name without my active invitation, which is otherwise uncommon. Below are three cases that show diverse ways borders get constructed through practices during and after study-abroad trips: safe-guarding the students from [perceived] diseases and uncleanliness through collective rituals, social-pricing things in the destination and differentiating people accordingly, and labeling certain acts as “immersion.” SAFE-GUARDING: COLLECTIVE RITUALS IN SIERRA LEONE This section analyzes collective rituals that occurred during our two-week trip from May 19 to June 2, 2012 aimed at providing support in terms of resources and knowledge in maternity health care in Sierra Leone. A 4-credit course designed and taught by two nursing professors, this trip worked with a Non-Profit Organization (NPO) in Sierra Leone. We spent our first week in Freetown and the second in Bo. We visited hospitals, a nursing school,

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markets, beaches, and an orphanage. Members of the NPO we worked with and hotel staff and drivers—all Sierra Leoneans—were with us every day. All eight students and two professors participated in my research, which was carried out in three stages: before, during, and after the trip. In all stages, I interviewed all participants and carried out participant observation throughout the trip. Below, I describe two collective rituals—that of disease prevention and that of cleansing—and analyze how they were both rituals of safe-guarding. The Rituals of Disease Prevention: Vaccination, Malaria Pills, and Insect Repellent Our trip was marked with health precautions that ushered the impression that we were going to a place with severe health risks. A yellow fever vaccination was required for a visa to enter Sierra Leone. Hepatitis A and B, Rabies, and Typhoid vaccinations were recommended, which most of us followed. For malaria, we brought pills to take daily while in Sierra Leone. Travel nurses also told us not to drink tap water or eat food that was washed with tap water. (During the trip, many of us did have mild travelers’ diarrhea. In addition, one student became violently ill for 24 hours from the palm wine he bought, which caused us much anxiety.) In my pre-trip interviews, I asked the students what they were worried about the most. Five out of eight students mentioned getting sick, three specifically mentioned malaria. One of the students shared with us that her mother almost died of malaria when she traveled to Uganda, creating a fear among us about malaria as deadly, although that is true for only one of five strains (Center for Disease Control and Prevention n.d.). During our stay, we also played out collective rituals of malaria prevention: taking malaria pills together after every breakfast. We consciously did it together by reminding each other to take these pills. Most of us also put on insect repellent every time we went outside because mosquito bites can cause malaria. In my post-trip interviews, some students said they put on repellent “every single second. After shower. Morning. Before going anywhere” (Brittany). Others did not bother: one did not think she would get malaria (Lisa) and another stopped after a few days, because he was tired of being sticky and “did not get bit that much anyways” (Muhammad). The Rituals of Cleansing: Hand Sanitizer Another daily collective ritual was the use of hand sanitizer. Almost everyone carried their own bottle but it was usually shared; whoever took one out offered it to others. It happened before meals at the table and after visiting

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hospitals. In the post-trip interview, I asked students when they used hand sanitizer and why. Four responded “all the time” and one simply responded “yes.” It indicated their sense that people and things were not “clean” there. Elias said he used hand sanitizer “Like every hour, every ten minutes” because “I felt . . . [there were] sanitation issues. So I felt like I needed to protect myself.” Tiffany used it “after everything. Before eating, after eating, after using bathroom, after anything.” I asked if she felt a lot of the things were not very clean, to which she replied “Yeah. Definitely.” Lisa used it “to prevent catching anything.” Allison used it “because I wasn’t sure what kind of illnesses and bacteria they might have had or could give me. Also, a lot of them didn’t seem to always have clean hands and feet.” Brittany explained, “I’m very aware of micro-organisms and they have different, more vast kinds of bacteria.” Others reported using it more moderately. Muhammad said he used it “before I would eat . . . and like if I would shake a lot of people’s hands . . . Especially in the hospitals ‘cause I don’t know what stuff they touched or if they have any illness.” Fern said, “I wasn’t really big on the hand sanitizer . . . Maybe like one or two times a day . . . after like I touch something dirty, but other than that, like if they would hug me or shake my hands, I wouldn’t use hand sanitizer. I think that’s very rude.” She felt “most people used it more than me.” Some explained the frequent use was due to our frequent visits to hospitals: When we contact people [in Sierra Leone], it was mainly in the hospital . . . and you’re gonna need that in the hospital . . .They have hand sanitizers in the doors in the hospital [in the United States also]. Over here [in the United States], I’m not in the hospital walking around touching patients . . . so I guess that’s the big difference. (Anjana)

Here, while Muhammad downplayed his use of hand sanitizer, Fern explained how frequent use of hand sanitizer in Sierra Leone is not based on the prejudice about the country being “less clean” but on the kinds of things we did—such as interacting with sick people—more than what we would do in the United States. Hand sanitizer use stood out because at the time of the research it was less common in the United States to use it frequently, especially collectively. It had to do with how we used it in lieu of washing hands with water because, in Sierra Leone, water was not only often not accessible but also perceived as “dirty,” in terms of having bacteria in it with which our stomachs are not familiar, which would thus cause travelers’ diarrhea: “[In the United States], I wash my hands before I eat and have more access to soap and water . . . Over

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there [in Sierra Leone] . . . they don’t really have soap and water . . . so hand sanitizer was the only option,” said Anjana. The professors leading the trip—more knowledgeable about health risks and more familiar with Sierra Leone—reported using hand sanitizer less frequently. Dr. Phillips used it “before meals, maybe after examining a child, patient… I did not use it as much as others around me. Maybe I did not feel the fear factor.” Dr. Binghamton “used it . . . when I consciously knew that I touched something yucky . . . I didn’t use it like every fifteen seconds.” She also explained that “it’s really been kind of documented not to work that well . . . They say if you touch something overtly disgusting, yeah, but . . . for the average everyday stuff it [does not].” She felt students “are of the generation where everything that they’ve ever touched is like Lysoled to death,” and that travel nurses put fear in them. Collective Rituals of Safe-Guarding and Othering that Made us Daring Our use of vaccination, malaria pills, insect repellent, and hand sanitizer were collective rituals of protection from various diseases: the first three preventive and the last one after the fact. Ironically, these rituals pushed us to be daring: they “safe-guarded” us to do things that we might not do otherwise, keeping us in the “bubble.” Vaccination and malaria pills eased our anxiety to venture into a country that we may not have otherwise visited. Insect repellent made us feel safe to be exposed to mosquitos that might carry malaria. The assurance that we could use hand sanitizer afterward made us feel comfortable venturing into “not quite sanitary” situations: when we visited hospitals, none of us hesitated to shake hands with patients, though the interviews show that many of the students were worried about contracting sickness from them—knowing we could use hand sanitizer afterword, we touched them nonetheless. We gave hugs to children in the orphanage, which was followed by the use of hand sanitizer by some (not all), indicating for some it was a “dirty” experience and, without hand sanitizer, they may not have hugged the children. Frank Furedi (2006) argues that we live in the “culture of fear” where the target of fear can be anything because it really is about the culture of distrust in humanity in general. This distrust pushes us to think of human relationships in terms of reducing risk—emotional and/or physical harm that derives from the developed relationships—rather than of other aspects involved in nurturing social relationships. The collective rituals of protection under discussion reduced the fear of diseases by reducing the “risk” of catching them, which then allowed us to explore more engaging relationships with Sierra Leoneans. Problematically, these rituals also othered Sierra Leone space as dirty and dangerous, and differentiated our group from the local population in Sierra

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Leone; they were collective rituals of othering the space and people of Sierra Leone. Because local people were not taking malaria pills or using insect repellent and, as far as we know, they were not using hand sanitizer—Sierra Leoneans who spent time with us did use it when they were with us at the dinner table, but they never carried a bottle like we did—our use of these things highlighted the perception that Sierra Leone is not safe (disease-wise) or clean enough for us. This created a border at the scale of nation. As a collective ritual, there was a kind of peer pressure to accept the offer to use hand sanitizer. With the round of hand sanitizer before each meal, we were participating in the ritual of differentiating ourselves from Sierra Leoneans who did not use hand sanitizer, either because they are familiar with or did not mind the local germs or had different worldviews regarding health and illness. The rituals divided us into we-th​e-vul​nerab​le-to​-germ​s-and​ -thus​-need​-prot​ectio​n vs. they-who-live-with-these-germs. Rituals and ritualistic practices not only give meaning to the space but also establish relationships between people (de Certeau 1984; Suzuki 2008). Specifically because it was done collectively, it became a matter of creating borders, carving out a bubble. This kind of bubble exists in various types of tourism. For example, in “slum tourism” and other forms of “poverty tourism” that are motivated by understanding and creating empathy for those in poverty, the bubble comes in the form of observer’s blind spot: the observer not being able to observe him/ herself in the act of observing, which creates specific imaginaries that hide the relationship between the observer (those who can afford to travel to observe poverty) and the observed (those in poverty) that structure the formers’ perceptions and works to privilege “observer-dependent construction of reality” (Meschkank 2011: 61). In such “dark tourism” as well as “heritage tourism,” however, certain subversive performances, such as the narrative performance of travel guides that shift and bridge these two groups (Bunten 2008; Suzuki 2016), for example, can work to “pop the bubble,” challenging the tourists’ stereotypes about the destination. These border-marking rituals derive not only from medical findings but also from culturally informed perceptions. Dirtiness and getting sick were seen as connected in biomedicine that is “objective” and “scientific” truth. However, both are also connected to cultural beliefs. What is considered “dirty” is cultural; Mary Douglas (1980[1966]) once analyzed it as something out of place. Soil in the field is not “dirty” but soil in the kitchen floor is, for example. Beliefs in what causes disease is cultural: it could be a curse, the effects of a body losing its necessary balance, or germs. Although the first two may seem more cultural than the last from the biomedical perspective, the first two can also be explained scientifically—the first, as the psychosomatic effects for those who believe in the efficacy of a curse and the second,

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as the holistic approach to medicine—and the last can also be seen as cultural. The notion of bacteria causing disease can lead to a folk belief because we do need some bacteria to help build our immune system: when contact with bacteria is avoided 100 percent, especially for small children, they are more likely to become sick later (WebMD n.d.). The exaggeration of disease-preventing practices—such as using hand sanitizer every ten minutes—though based on medical findings on the risks of diseases, is based on cultural beliefs rather than medical necessity, as the nursing professors suggested. Researchers have discussed that studying abroad in Third World destinations risks perpetuating colonial relations (Woolf 2007), especially if it is not accompanied by discussions of structural causes of imbalances of wealth around the world (Nenga 2011). As we worked with the NPO, we talked about the lack of infrastructure for sanitation as a result of a decade-long civil war, from which Sierra Leone was still recovering. Even with such discussions, these rituals perpetuated the view that the Third World, not the specific post-civil-war conditions, is not sanitary enough for the First World travelers, who need protective rituals to experience it. These collective rituals simultaneously created borders between illness and health and between “clean” and “unclean” and pushed us to cross them. SOCIAL-PRICING: CLASS BORDERS IN PERU In Peru, study-abroad students experienced divided consumer experience depending on their disposable cash. Whereas the border was drawn between study-abroad students and people in the destination in the above case in Sierra Leone, the border in this Peru experience was drawn across students and the people in Peru. “Those with money” included the local wealthy population and foreign visitors with a strong currency exchange rate, including wealthy American college students studying abroad. “Those without money” were the local population with modest financial resources, as well as less-wealthy American study-abroad students. Some divisions were institutional, and others by the willingness and ability to spend money. In this section, we discuss both by focusing on two cases: differentiated train fees and differently priced night clubs. During a Cape College study-abroad trip for business students to Peru from May 16 to 29, 2016, led by a business professor, we experienced this socialpricing in person as two groups emerged during the trip. At first, it appeared the division was based on personality preferences, if not cliquishness, as the division was not officially sanctioned in any way. (Although some students who roomed together ended up in different “groups”—one student told me her roommate acted like a different person to her, since she was very friendly

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when they were in the room together but very cold when everyone else is there—I ended up in the group my roommate belonged because I went along with the flow around me). However, it soon became apparent that it also reflected divergent willingness to pay more money for food and other activities. Through our own divided practices, we noticed the ways things were priced differently for different costumers in Peru. I call this “socialpricing” because it is based on expectations of the customers as to how much disposable income they have and are willing to spend on a particular item or activities; it is based not only on their economic background but also on their priorities informed by their tastes, lifestyles, and value systems that reflect their social status. It is also based on the perception on the part of the seller what the customer deserves or is entitled to in terms of their heritage and belonging, that is, as “Peruvians.” Although it was a credit-bearing course led by a Cape College professor, like the Sierra Leone program, an external study-abroad provider designed the entire trip, and we were accompanied by guide(s) from the provider at all times, along with one local guide while we were in the Cuzco area. We spent ten days in Lima visiting small businesses and government organizations, as well as museums and archaeological ruins. We then spent four days doing excursions (we had a half-a-day of lecture during this excursion period) in Cuzco, Ollantaytambo, and Machu Picchu. Similar to my research in Sierra Leone, I interviewed students and the professor before, during, and after the trip. One student initially did not wish to participate in my research (i.e., doing interviews and consenting to recording her comments) but later decided to be interviewed and for her comments to be used in my research. For the post-trip interviews, I interviewed five students; these were not all of the students, as I will explain later. I also observed pre-trip meetings as well as participated in all aspects of the trip. Trains An example of the institutional social-pricing is the transportation to the archaeological site of the Inca Empire, Machu Picchu, from the nearby city of Cuzco. There were four ways to get from Cuzco to Machu Picchu served by two train companies—PeruRail and Inca Rail (The Man in Seat 61 n.d.)2— that had social-pricing: one option was only for Peruvian nationals (including those with a Foreigner’s Card with permanent residence) and its price is drastically different—10 soles (US$1.50) one way compared to US$77.00, the cheapest option open to all for a slightly shorter distance. Here, it is the explicit social/legal status and implicit economic status that differentiated the customers.

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The first of four options was the Peruvian-only train offered by PeruRail. Since April 2009, this was the only option leaving right from the city of Cuzco (Avenida Sol station); it went to Aguas Calientes near Machu Picchu. Subsidized by the Peruvian government for the cost, a round trip from Cuzco to Machu Picchu was 20 soles (US$3.00), as mentioned above. Passengers were allowed to bring large loads, including livestock, on the train (Machu Picchu n.d.). The second choice left from Poroy, 13km (8 miles) from Cuzco. PeruRail offered three kinds of trains with differing prices: “The Hiram Bingham,” the super-deluxe option that included gourmet meals and drinks, entertainment on board, bus connections, entrance to the Machu Picchu citadel, and a guided tour ($475 one way); “The Vistadome,” the mid-range option with panoramic windows that included snacks and non-alcoholic drinks ($90 one way); and “The Expedition” (formerly the “Backpacker”), the budget option with panoramic windows and a buffet car ($77 one way). The third choice departed from Urubamba, 53 km (33 miles) from Cuzco. The fourth choice was to take shuttle trains from Ollantaytambo, 89km/56miles from Cuzco, by PeruRail (some Vistadome for $54 one way and others Expedition for $35 one way for the second choice explained above, though fares vary by date and time) or Inca Rail (fares from around $70 one way, with three classes—Machu Picchu [economy], Executive, and First Class). Our group went with the fourth choice, driving in a van from Cuzco to Ollantaytambo and taking Vistadome from there to Aguas Calientes near Machu Picchu. On the way, we had a meal and a fashion show of alpaca clothing on board. Coming back, we had another meal and a performance of Saqra, a dance of tricksters from the highlands of the Cuzco Region. Our study-abroad provider in Peru chose the train, and the price was included in the study-abroad package. Accordingly, it was not obvious how much we had paid for the travel though we were aware that there is a much cheaper local train (the first choice) that is only for the Peruvian nationals. The tour guide had told us that it is a fun, groovy ride as sometimes you ride with llamas and other livestock. Some of us wished we could ride it, and others did not. But it was clear to us that the Peruvian government recognized the difference in wealth between the local population and the visitors, subsidizing local-only trains and also securing income from tourism by prohibiting non-Peruvians from taking advantage of the drastically less expensive choice to visit Machu Picchu, one of Peru’s main tourist attractions. This is similar to the differentiation between a “local price” and “tourist price” at markets in many developing countries that seeks to equalize not only the disposable wealth gap between those who can afford to travel for leisure and those who cannot but also exchange rates that may be unfavorable to the developing

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countries (Bruner 1989). On the other hand, this may have to do with the issue of national patrimony: to whom these historical sites belong (hence no need to pay beyond minimum cost) and who should pay for access to see it as outside visitors. Night Clubs and Two Groups After a couple of days into the trip, the group divided into two—named Group A and Group B here—with some students moving between the two toward the end of the trip. Group A had Marie (a “Hispanic” senior), Siena (an “African American” junior), Kelly (an “Indian-American” senior), Vera (an “Italian American” junior), and Nina (a “white” senior). Group B had Carla (a “Hispanic” junior), Diane (a “white” sophomore), Ariana (an “African American” senior), and Sam (a “white” sophomore) (see table 3.1). Because I roomed with Carla, I often did things with Carla, and thus also with Group B, as mentioned. Students in both groups commented explicitly on this division in their interviews. “We were separate . . . Two groups.” (Kelly: Group A); “Split” (Vera: Group A); “There was kind of division. Split into two different groups.” (Sam: Group B); “Cliquey. Separated 5-5.” (Diane: Group B); “Separation in the group . . . made things uncomfortable . . . Felt like cliques. Separation.” (Ariana: Group B) Out of three similar two-week study-abroad trips (to Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Peru) and five one-week alternative break trips (to Massachusetts, Arkansas, New Orleans, and New Mexico twice), I had participated in all Table 3.1  Background of Participants in the Peru Trip Name

Major

Year

Marie Siena

International business International business

senior junior

Kelly Vera

Diane Carla Ariana

Business administration Contemporary art contract business and administration management finance marketing finance psychology

Sam

International business

sophomore

Nina

Self-identification

Group A A

senior junior

“Hispanic” “African American” “Indian American” “American”

senior

“white”

A

sophomore junior

“white” “Hispanic” “African American” “White”

B B B

A A

B

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activities of the trip for research purposes; having this type of clear division, with open conflict that involved switching roommates from the assigned ones, was rare. Also, I always roomed on my own in other trips, because I was a professor or a chaperone. However, I had to room with a student for this trip because it was organized by an outside provider who treated me as one of the trip participants. It made me somewhat part of Group B via my connection to my roommate, Carla, as we ate and went out together, although I kept a neutral position in interactions with everyone. My tie to Group B resulted in some tension between Group A members and myself, to my surprise. For example, as mentioned, three out of five Group A members did not respond to my request for the post-trip interview which involved meeting up somewhere during the summer. I have done eight similar fieldwork trips previously, but this was the first time that I did not even get a response for my request for post-trip interviews, pointing to the level of tension that even involved myself, although unintended. The reasons for division were several. Some said it had to do with different personalities (Kelly; Vera; Ariana; Sam). Diane specifically elaborated: “Difference in personalities. [Group A was] more outgoing . . . I was more quiet and go eat and do something more quiet . . . Harder to talk to them.” Some said it was different interests and preferences in activities: “People wanted to do specific things.” (Kelly); her group “wanted to explore” but others didn’t (Vera). “Different interest, value, what we liked to do. One group was more adventurous, they wanted to do—drinking and partying, casinos, be out late and do all the stuff. Other group wasn’t really into that” (Ariana). “Same group of girls gone out.” (Diane). Group A “went out a lot . . . Casinos, club in Lima, sushi, Indian food” (Kelly). Food preference also mattered: Vera argued that Diane’s food preferences divided people during meal time. Carla also talked about accommodating Diane’s needs: “They were like . . . ‘We are eating sushi and that’s it.’ We tried to accommodate Diane.” Others were more specific. For example, Vera said it was due to Group B doing things with Carla’s Peruvian family separately from the group (her family took Group B for lunch once). The division emerged initially in two ways, as suggested in the above quotes. It seemed that the division had a lot to do with preference and personality differences and reflected the available funds for students to spend as well. First, as dinner fell as “free time,” Group A tended to go to expensive restaurants, Group B did not. Some students in Group B mentioned that they cannot afford to eat out every night, so I suggested deli food at a supermarket and to eat it at the table there or in the hotel room to save money, a practice I usually do when traveling on a budget. Following my suggestion, Group B did so several nights. Group B also catered to Diane

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who would eat only pasta and rice, which meant not going to the restaurant Group A chose. Second, Group A went out almost every night in Lima, while Group B did only once. Group A went out to casinos and clubs at the mall in Miraflores, an upscale town. The mall looked like ones in the United States, and things there were expensive. A website called “A gringo’s guide to night life in Lima, Peru” (Nomadic Hustle n.d.) lists Miraflores as one of three best neighborhoods for good nightlife: “This is the neighborhood for travelers in Lima, Peru. It’s safe, filled with modern amenities like cafes and coworking spaces, and features great nightlife, too.” The website also writes “You could easily spend US$200–300 on a big night out in Miraflores.” Group B went out one night when Carla’s cousin, who lives in Lima, took us to a club in a town where locals hang out, according to her, and things are less expensive than in Miraflores, which is for American tourists and rich Peruvians. Although the main distinction was class-based, with different levels of willingness to spend our funds—and that the group division cut across race—there were nevertheless some racial overtones as well. As the title of the aforementioned web article shows (Nomadic Hustle n.d.), the expensive activities are labeled “gringo” things. And the low-cost night life Group B enjoyed was to go to locals’ hang out, showing “Peruvian” aspect of this class, although Group B also included “White” and “African American” students besides “Hispanic” Carla. In Cuzco, during the second week, the group dynamics changed as an internal split occurred in Group A. For the first time in this trip, some Group A and Group B members went out together to a club. The club was full of locals, and Nina (Group A) wanted to go elsewhere, where there were “no sweaty locals.” She said she preferred clubs with Americans, like those in Miraflores. The term “sweaty locals” struck me as epitomizing the split between these groups: Group A mingled with American visitors and wealthy locals, with some disdain for not-so-wealthy locals (with whom Group B mingled through Carla’s family). Our group dynamics and resultant experiences throughout the trip reflected a border defined by wealth difference, with some implications to one’s nationality. The border, hence, was created at the scale of class, while intersecting with the scale of the national. On the one hand, some were institutionally created borders, like our train to Machu Picchu that was 120 times more expensive than the Peruvian-only one, in which the assumption of difference between visitors and Peruvians was wealth disparity (though Peruvians also can take expensive trains), as well as the social position we held in relation to Inca heritage. On the other hand, our separate experience in eating and going out derived from our willingness (i.e., priority) or ability to spend a lot of money. The border thus was made via social-pricing.

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LABELING: DECIDING WHAT IS AND WHAT IS NOT “IMMERSION” IN SPAIN The discourse of immersion in study-abroad literature encourages students to “live like a local” and “become part of the culture by staying with local families and giving back to local communities . . . [to] attend classes and participate in activities with local students . . . taught by local staff” (Hovey and Weinberg 2009: 37). Researchers hierarchize experiences as some providing more immersion than others: homestay over residence in a dormitory with American students (Chieffo and Griffiths 2009), for example, and direct enrollment rather than faculty-led programs where students stay with American faculty and peers the entire time (Deardorff 2009), like the Sierra Leone and Peru trips described above. Experience itself matters more than setting: even if the student lives with a host family, using a computer or watching TV in one’s room is considered not immersive. The worst experience is embodied by students who “travel in large groups, and are taught in American-only classrooms. They live and go to bars with other Americans . . . These students (at best) simply get the American college experience in a different time zone” (Hovey and Weinberg 2009: 36). “True immersion” is about doing something different from what they can experience at home; simply crossing geographic borders is not enough if students still live like Americans in the host society (for analyses of this discourse, see Doerr 2016). The question, then, is what constitutes the “American college experience,” as not all American college students go to bars and drink in the same way, for example; to assume so is to impose a particular stereotype. In the same vein, how do we know what “local ways” are? That is, because there are no clearcut guidelines as to what constitutes these assumed differences, deciding what is or is not immersion (i.e., what are “local ways” and what are American ways) actively constructs the border between the home and host societies. Researchers participate in this process—suggesting what constitutes immersion and what are home and host societies’ ways of living—as the above literature shows. Students also become part of this border-construction process when they discuss what is and what is not immersion. Richard Suarez, a former study-abroad student, and I have examined this process elsewhere (2013; 2018) in collaborative work analyzing his labeling what was and what was not immersion during his trip to Spain. This chapter builds on its analyses and re-interprets Suarez’s views of immersion in terms of constructing borders in two ways: between study-abroad students and the people in the host society and between the wealthy (i.e., study-abroad students and wealthy local people) and the less-wealthy local people. This is a very small sample—one student—to make a general argument. However, in a field of study predominated by surveys of a large number of students, this

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case study offers a unique angle for its in-depth, collaborative nature of the analyses that allows for nuanced understanding of various aspects of a studyabroad student experience situated in specific contexts (for this collaborative process, see Doerr and Suarez 2013). In order to connect this individual case to the wider discussion, I draw on existing literature that investigates the same topics. Suarez’s Experience Suarez, a double major in psychology and marketing, finished his junior year before traveling to Spain in 2013 for three months: the first (May 28–June 23) in Madrid with the family of his uncle, who is originally from Colombia (Suarez migrated from Colombia to the United States at the age of one); the second (June 24–July 30) in a study-abroad program designed for American students in Bilbao; and the third spent traveling around on his own (July 31–August 22). I interviewed Suarez in person before his departure, via Skype during his stay in Spain, and in person after his return to the United States. I had already visited the university where he studied in Bilbao for four days (July 13–16) in 2011 for another research project, interviewing its administrators and teachers, observing classes, and visiting a dorm and a host family. In my interviews during and after Suarez’s trip, as well as discussions while collaborating to write the article from which this section draws (Doerr and Suarez 2018), he reported that his first month was not immersive, but his second and third months were. Below, I will summarize how Suarez interpreted each of his three months in Spain in our discussions during collaboration with some supplementary literature to show how labeling an act as “immersion” creates borders. Staying with an Uncle: Not Immersion Staying with his uncle, his wife, and their six-year-old son in a Latin American community a twenty-minute drive from Madrid, Suarez spent time looking around Madrid on his own or staying home watching TV with his young cousin. Suarez considered this month not immersion because he had to do many “touristic” things on his own while his uncle worked; because he “wasted” a lot of time watching TV with his cousin, which felt like babysitting; because he felt it was just staying with “family”; and because his uncle identified himself as Colombian, not Spanish. Though the first reason matches the discourse of immersion that devalues “touristic” activities, the second and third reasons contradict how immersion is usually described: “eat what the locals eat, sleep like locals sleep, and interact with the locals on a daily basis, from the time you wake up to the

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time you pass out in utter exhaustion” (Williamson 2004: 235). Nonetheless, doing mundane things (i.e., things the locals do in their daily lives; second reason) and being treated as family by locals (third reason) did not constitute “immersion” to Suarez. Suarez’s observation suggests that immersion implicitly means something other than “living like a local”: it means doing exciting things as an outsider. This overlaps with other students’ observations that, for example, spending too much time doing homework, household chores, and watching TV—how “locals” tend to live—is not a good host family experience (Kumagai 2017; Kinginger 2008). Also, there is an added aspect to this, in that the mundane has to present some newness to the students—Suarez at one point mentioned that his uncle’s lifestyle was that of a Colombian, which resembled his own lifestyle in the United States as a Colombian American. The other mundane experiences mentioned above by students—homework, chores, and TV—were the kind of mundane activities that they are familiar with. The kind of mundane that actually differed from the students’ familiar lifestyle could be labeled immersion by some students—an American studyabroad student labeled her sipping cups of coffee for a long time at a café in Paris and wearing long pants and flats, something she said was very different from clothes she wears back home—was immersion (Doerr 2015, 2017). That is, immersion is not just “how locals live” but “how locals live that is different from the students’ home life”: mundane and authentic (see McConnell 2000: 51) that are different and exotic (Salazar and Graburn 2014; Picard and Di Giovine 2014), the key ingredients of attractive travel. Suarez’s fourth point implies that calling an act “immersion” involves one’s assessment, informed by the self-identification of the person involved, that the person is a legitimate member of the society. Questions of acceptability as a “host family” to let students “immerse themselves” was a concern for potential host families as well: for example, in a different context, where I had done fieldwork interviewing host families, indigenous Maori families expressed that the small numbers of Maori host families made them feel marginalized because it indicated that they are (seen as) not “good enough” as host families, and a single mother articulated that she wanted to host study-abroad students but felt her family is not “good enough” to “represent” Aotearoa/New Zealand (Doerr 2009, 2013; Doerr and Suarez 2018). The third and fourth points here suggest that calling an act “immersion” is a performative act of border-making between the student and the people in the study-abroad destination. The label “immersion” indicates that the student is not related to the people with whom s/he is interacting: because Suarez felt he was living with his “family,” he did not label this stay with his uncle as “immersion.” That is, if s/he is “one of them” (as a family), staying with them is not labeled “immersion.” Labeling some acts “immersion” also suggests that the student considers the people he/she is interacting are

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legitimate members of the host society, as when Suarez knew his uncle did not consider himself a Spaniard or part of Spanish society, but also when host families themselves may feel they are “legitimate” representatives of the society. Study-Abroad Program in Bilbao: Immersion The month spent attending a study-abroad program in Bilbao was more of an immersion experience, Suarez said, because he had a good time partying with fellow American students as well as local people he met at bars and fiestas, and traveling every weekend with his new friends. On the one hand, Suarez’s labeling these activities as immersion contradicts the discourse of immersion that discourages students from spending time with fellow compatriots. On the other hand, this labeling resonates with the discourse that equates immersion as “adventure,” something enjoyable—“The most exciting and interesting study-abroad experiences are created when we are interacting directly with the native citizens of a foreign country” (Oxford 2005: 114)—and making “the most of every weekend and the free time you are given” (Loflin 2007: 130). This is consistent with others reporting how students did not feel they are doing good “immersion” when the host family did not provide them with “fun” or “interesting” experiences, as those whose host family left them alone watching TV most of the time (Kinsinger 2008; also, see Mendelson 2004). In contrast, taking lessons in stereotypically “traditional” activities of the destination, though many locals themselves may not do them, are seen by students as immersion (Kumagai 2017). Note also that, in Suarez’s comment, having a good time was related to activities that tend to cost money—going out and traveling; not many local students can afford to do such activities constantly, compared to less costly ones like spending time with the host family or watching TV at home. In Suarez’s formulation, immersion is about having a good time and making the most of one’s time there. It is not really about “living like a local”— after all, not all locals party and go out or travel intensively or take lessons in “traditional” crafts. To call these activities immersion, thus “living like a local,” suggests a particular type of “local” suggested in the imaginary of the destination (Salazar 2014) not only in terms of ethnicity but also in terms of economic conditions, thus creating a border drawn between wealthy and notso-wealthy locals, with study-abroad students (and some international travelers) joining the former. This border resonates with social-pricing in Peru. Just like ethnic group boundaries are maintained not because of the group’s isolation but because of interaction across the group boundaries (Barth 1969), imaginaries of the study-abroad students and “the local” are constructed relationally to each other, constituting borders between them.

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A Month of Traveling: Immersion Suarez spent his last month in Spain traveling. He “couch-surfed” (i.e., found a place to stay through a website that lists openings submitted by people who provide travelers with inexpensive lodging in their homes) in Malaga, using it as a base to make day trips. His host also took him to places and introduced him to her friends, who were mainly expatriates (she herself came from Germany five years prior), allowing him to meet new people. Suarez considered this immersion firstly, because he was on his own doing things as opposed to things organized by a travel agency or school, which to him was too touristy. Although buying tickets on his own and looking up travel times, he suggested, were things he felt locals would do, he did not think traveling around much was what locals did. Second, Suarez considered this immersion, because he met many people. This relates, to a degree, to the discourse of immersion that encourages making local friends (Loflin 2007), though most of the friends he made were not locals. This implies that expanding one’s horizons by meeting people, whether local or not, made it immersion for Suarez. A similar view was reported by a student who found making friends with other international students to be meaningful, even if they were not local (Doerr 2015; Kumagai 2017). In light of the first month—he met his uncle and his family for the first time, but meeting them and interacting with them was not considered immersion by Suarez—“meeting people” here meant meeting people who are strangers. What is suggested about this last month is the mirror image of the first month—labeling an act immersion suggests that the people that he met are strangers. This is often a retrospective othering practice because labeling was done later when looking back on the experience. Here, reflexive reflective discussions and writing about the study-abroad experience created a border between Suarez and the people he met. Labeling an Act Immersion as Border-Making Practice The above discussion suggests that labeling an act “immersion” constructs borders in two ways. First, the contrast in Suarez’s labeling of his first month with his uncle’s family “not immersion” and his last month traveling “immersion” indicates that labeling an act “immersion” is a border-making practice between the students and those among whom the students immerse themselves. If students are one of them, as in family, interaction between them is not considered as immersion. Second, the contrast of Suarez’s labeling his first month as non-immersive and second months as immersive—where immersion is having a good time doing many things that are out of the ordinary—created a border between those who can afford to do so (study-abroad students and wealthy locals) and those who cannot (not-so-wealthy locals

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who can only afford to do mundane things like watching TV). The first overlaps with the scale of the national and the second, class. I have argued elsewhere (2013; 2016; 2018) that the notion of immersion is based on and perpetuates the nation-state ideology in which each nation is viewed as internally homogeneous and distinct from each other. This link between the notion of immersion and nation-state ideology becomes apparent when assumed that “living like a local” in the host society is intrinsically different from students’ home life. It also becomes apparent when the discourse of immersion discourages spending time with compatriot students, suggesting that students from the home country are all the same. This chapter further adds to the understanding of the notion of immersion: the practice of labeling certain acts asimmersion is an act of border-making. DISCUSSION Study abroad is often praised as a border-crossing experience that pushes students out of their comfort zone, creating cognitive dissonance and opportunities to learn something new (Brockington and Wiedenhoeft 2009). Encounters with the cultural Other are often said to be an important component of this experience. However, the process is more complex than students pushing themselves out of their comfort zone, as the border between the comfort zone and the brave-new-world cannot be readily assumed. In these examples, such a border is actually created not only by discourses in study abroad but also by various actions of students before, during, and after their studying abroad, such as using hand sanitizer, preferring certain (costly) activities, and labeling some acts as “immersion.” Also, the border can be drawn not only between the student’s home and host countries but also in terms of wealth differences that cut across the former border: the wealthy (among those in the host society and among study-abroad students) vs. the not-so-wealthy (among those in the host society and among study-abroad students). Regarding tourism, Salazar and Graburn (2014) argue that various constructed imaginaries of a place lure visitors who seek to be there themselves and experience and document those imaginaries. With such constructed imaginaries, constructed borders emerge. However, such imaginaries can be fragmented and subverted with diverse individuals involved in the process. Arguing that study abroad follows a similar process, I further add an examination of how individuals not only experienced and documented but also actively created, engaged in, and acted out such borders. In the Sierra Leone case, we created the border through various collective rituals—the ritual of disease prevention involving vaccinations, malaria pills,

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insect repellent, and cleansing with hand sanitizer. These rituals highlighted the border between the study-abroad students from the United States (we-t​ he-vu​lnera​ble-t​o-ger​ms-an​d-thu​s-in-​need-​of-pr​otect​ion) and people in the Sierra Leone (they-who-live-with-these-germs) by marking Sierra Leone people and space problematically as “dirty” and disease-causing. At the same time, these rituals helped us be daring enough to cross the border because these rituals “safe-guarded” us from perceived diseases. In Peru, the border was constructed by differential price, separating wealthy study-abroad students and wealthy locals from less-wealthy study-abroad students and less-wealthy locals (although the gap between the last two may still exist), though at times (as in train fees), less-wealthy study-abroad students were forced to join the former. Although differences in train prices were set by the Peruvian government based on nationality, the night club prices were set by club owners and the design of the city, focusing on those who have more expendable money, which reflects the club owners’ perception of the link between nationality and other social status and wealth. The case of Suarez in Spain showed that labeling certain acts as immersion constructed two kinds of borders. The first is between the students and people among whom they are “immersed”: the label only applied to the people whom the student felt as “strangers,” those whose mundane lives differed from the student’s, as the key attraction of travel in general is to “get away” from their own, more familiar mundane lives (Picard and Di Giovine 2014; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). The second is between wealthy locals (who can afford costly activities, including travel) and not wealthy locals, because the label only applied when students copied the wealthy locals. Although study abroad is often viewed as a border-crossing experience, because of that very focus borders are ironically constructed in the process of studying abroad. This is a scale-making practice that pushes us to notice borders at particular scales, and not others, as meaningful (see McDermott and Varenne 1995). Scale-making is a process of making claims about particular scales (e.g., local, regional or global) as relevant “units of culture and political economy through which we make sense of events and social processes” (Tsing 2000: 347). It is not a neutral practice, as scale is “a relational, power-laden and contested construction that actors strategically engage with, in order to legitimize or challenge existing power relations” (Leitner et al. 2008: 159). Scales are fluid and constructed through the practices of everyday actors and organizations that make particular scalar configurations solidify in consciousness and practice. Scalar representations can have material effects as they enable certain ways of seeing, thinking, and acting (MacKinnon 2010; Moore 2008). The border-making practices discussed in this chapter are scale-making practices that solidify difference at the scale of nation as well as class. The

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borders were specific to the destination as well as the design of the program. Though we interacted with nurses, nursing students, and patients in Sierra Leone, our nursing students did not develop comradery with nurses or nursing students there. Instead the focus was on national difference marked by presence/absence and tolerance to disease-causing elements. This contrasts with the cases of Peru and Spain, both of which did not involve any sanitary precautions. As to the design of the trip, the Sierra Leone trip was not conducive to differentiating the group in terms of disposable income: we ate all meals together and the difference in dispensable cash during the trip did not matter because all meals were included in the price for the trip. In contrast, the Peru trip was conducive to making apparent the difference in disposable cash among the group members because the trip involved much free time that gave us choices of places to eat and many night-life opportunities. Thus, the Peru trip highlighted the class difference among students that cut across their ethnic identification, and connected wealthy study-abroad students to the wealthy people in the host society (and less-wealthy study-abroad students to the less-wealthy local people). That is, although students’ ethnic or class background did not affect their experience too much in Sierra Leone, their class status made student experience different in Peru, mainly due to the design of the program. Suarez’s interpretations of his experiences in Spain emphasized more general social distance among people. The relative freedom of his program, compared to the faculty-led trips, created individualized opportunities for consumer practices, which then highlighted class difference manifested as accessibility to costly activities. As to his own perception of these costs, Suarez marked the period of study abroad as a special time for which he had saved up over the years. Suarez said he did not concern himself too much about the cost of activities in the way he would at home. This contrasts with the class division among study-abroad students in Peru. CONCLUSION Although study abroad as an educational project aims to cross “cultural borders,” this chapter examined how it constructs and perpetuates various borders through practices during and after the study-abroad trip. Shaped by the situations in the destination and design of the program, various borders were created. As an endeavor that relies on the existence of difference, study abroad shares many aspects with tourism. However, its specifics differ. As an educational project that focuses on the existence or assumption of borders, we need to discuss this aspect more rigorously and involve study-abroad students in that discussion, not necessarily to stop border-construction but to understand how it works and how it is part of the process. Thus, if these borders

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involve problematic stereotypes and prejudices—as in the case of using hand sanitizers after visiting an orphanage or calling local people “sweaty locals”— students can be involved proactively in altering such constructions. It is also important to offer different angles in understanding taken-for granted assumptions in study abroad and beyond. For example, highlighting the value of seeing similarity without trivializing differences—perceiving diverse variations—may be more valuable than focusing on negotiating difference. Rather than stressing difference through discourses of adventure, immersion, and cognitive dissonance, we can talk about common struggles, such as nurses dealing with similar problems; some patients’ reluctance to visit doctors, but for different reasons, for example. That is, we can avoid constructing borders and instead see something else in the interactions among people. And rather than being concerned about whether an experience is “immersion,” we can encourage students to examine experiences they shared with the locals, not as “living like a local” but as two individuals with varied backgrounds spending time together, which is shaped by both of them in a particular local context. It is about time study abroad can be reframed as finding shared humanity in varied contours of life instead of encountering cultural Others. Instead of aiming for students to jump into the pool of otherness—immersion—we can aim for students making meaningful experiences together with the locals, as well as with their fellow compatriot students. NOTES 1. All institutional and personal names are aliases. 2. All train prices mentioned here can be found on this website. Some pricing varies depending on the day and time.

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The Man in Seat 61. n.d. “Trains to Peru.” Accessed June 13, 2019. https://www​ .seat61​.com​/Peru​.htm Tsing, Anna. 2000. “The Global Situation.” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3: 327–360. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. WebMD. n.d. “Is Dirt Good for Kids?” Accessed July 16, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.web​​md​ .co​​m​/par​​entin​​g​/fea​​tures​​/kids​​-and-​​​dirt-​​germs​#1 Williamson, Wendy. 2004. Study Abroad 101. Charleston: Agapy Publishing. Woolf, Michael. 2007. “Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Myths in Education Abroad.” Journal of Studies in International Education 11, no. 3/4: 496–509. Zemach-Bersin, T. 2009. “Selling the World: Study Abroad Marketing and the Privatization of Global Citizenship.” In The Handbook of Practice and Research in Study Abroad, edited by Ross Lewin, 303–320. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 4

The Imperative of Access in Short-Term Study Abroad Provider Agencies, Liminality, and the Mediation of Cultural Difference Gareth Barkin

Study abroad is often framed as a rite of passage for American undergraduates, who are represented as returning with a newly globalized worldview born of deep, intercultural engagements. This framing depends on, among other things, students’ time abroad incorporating a period of disconnection from the social frameworks and hierarchies of home, during which they earnestly negotiate the ambiguities and challenges of cultural difference. Providers of increasingly popular short-term study-abroad trips are tasked with balancing students’ desire for “authentic,” transformative experiences, on the one hand, and providing them a sense of security, connection, and comfort, on the other (Squillace and Cassell 2019; Starr-Glass 2020; Van Tine 2011). This chapter examines the role of provider agencies in mobilizing the imperative of access to international education as a tool in the neoliberalization of study abroad. Based on ethnographic research of short-term programs in Indonesia and Thailand as well as interviews with provider agencies, I explore their risk management strategies and efforts to mitigate the discomfort and ambiguity associated with the cultural encounter. Drawing on contemporary applications of Victor Turner’s work on liminality in the context of study abroad, I analyze evidence indicating that many provider agencies, in an effort to increase program marketability, pathologize disconnection and seek to mediate or avoid challenging engagements with cultural difference.

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THE IMPERATIVE OF ACCESS IN SHORT-TERM STUDY ABROAD Students on my short-term study-abroad trips to Southeast Asia demonstrate what strike me as contradictory impulses toward framing their time abroad: often, they discuss the trip as a sort of ritual pilgrimage and a search for transformation through engagements with cultural difference—as a voyage and a period of separation. At other times, however, they discuss the trip as an on-going struggle for wellness, comfort, and connectedness. The latter includes not just biomedical concerns related to the new environment but also the psychological security of remaining continuously in touch with parents and friends back home; integrated into the life they have, from the other perspective, left behind. Even as they procure SIM cards and ask homestay parents for Wi-Fi passwords, many of my students have expressed a desire or expectation that they will disconnect from the conceptual “Western world,” and hope for a transformative experience of identity development that might be characterized by anthropologists as a rite of passage (Turner 1969; Van Gennep 2011 [1960]). Often building on work pioneered by anthropologists studying travel and tourism (Di Giovine 2011), the connection between studying abroad and Victor Turner’s conception of ritual pilgrimage has long been an interest of academics (see Hoffa and DePaul 2010), largely trading on the notion of time spent overseas as a liminal period in the lives of students (Turner 1979; Van Tine 2011). This tension between the desire for study abroad to serve a ritual-transitional role, chiefly through mind-expanding negotiation of sociocultural difference, and the temptations of remaining safe, connected, and insulated from the various discomforts and ambiguities integral to that negotiation, is not a new one: for scholars focused on cultural tourism, and particularly authenticity-seeking backpackers and “gap year” travelers, this is well-worn territory (e.g., Fussell 1982; O’Reilly 2006; Snee 2013). However, the role of educational institutions in promoting one or the other side of this equation, directly or by proxy, appears to have changed in recent years, as provider agencies increasingly play a central part in constituting short-term studyabroad experiences (Barkin 2018). Importantly, this comes at a time when short-term programs have rapidly become the avenue by which a significant majority of American undergraduates study abroad (Institute of International Education and Farrugia 2018). This chapter investigates several ways that a concern with access and accommodation becomes alloyed, largely by provider agencies, with comfort and the mediation of difference, and how these concerns may promote studyabroad practices that minimize risk, ambiguity, and engagement with diverse worldviews. Based on an on-going research project focused on understanding

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how administrative and neoliberal exigencies are shaping the rapidly growing short-term study abroad industry, my discussion here focuses on the ways concepts such as access and accommodation are constituted and mobilized by American study abroad providers, particularly in developing-world spaces. It explores neoliberalization practices in higher education, drawing on the work of Chris Shore (2017) and Pierre Bourdieu (2001), through examples drawn from ethnographic engagements and interviews with study-abroad practitioners. In this effort, I draw on the concept of the ideograph (McGee 1980) to explore the role(s) of access and accommodation talk in the neoliberalization of study abroad. As part of this exploration, I ask how (increasingly normative) short-term programs facilitated by institutional providers—through their focus on a particular vision of health, comfort, and connectedness—have the potential to mitigate the experiential, intercultural benefits associated with international education (Interis et al. 2018; see e.g., Lutterman-Aguilar and Gingerich 2002). This chapter also questions whether providers’ focus on particular constructions of “access” challenges the impact of study abroad in two ways: first, in undermining its capacity to create a liminal space for participants, and second, through the mediation of participants’ engagement with those areas of cultural difference that are associated with the development of intercultural competence and the reduction of ethnocentrism (La Brack and Bathurst 2012). As Ayeh (2018) has recently detailed, communications technology has already changed the degree and nature of disconnection once compelled by international travel significantly (or, as Frey [2017] has argued, essentially eliminated it). Nevertheless, the act of traveling far from home, to unfamiliar cultural spaces, can still serve as a premise on which to embrace a period of liminal disengagement from sociocultural frameworks of home and an openness to non-judgmental engagements with alterity (Duffy 2018; Graburn 2004). Short-term programs have become the dominant form of study abroad for American university students in the past fifteen years (Institute of International Education and Farrugia 2018), but as a practice distinguished from the longer term programs that historically dominated overseas education, they have received relatively little scrutiny, despite their greater variability of curriculum and practice (Landon et al. 2017). The rapid increase in popularity and the institutional pressures behind short-term programs have created a lucrative opportunity for provider agencies, many of which are for-profit corporations and aggressive advocates of the practice (Barkin 2018). This in turn has led to more explicitly touristic engagements on shortterm abroad programs, evidencing new leakages between expectations and outcomes associated with tourism and international education (Barkin 2015; Lemmons 2015; Ramirez 2013). I previously wrote about the role of these

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providers in shaping curricula and authoring the sorts of encounters students have while abroad (2018). Here, I focus on a distinct area of this shift toward a student-as-consumer model of study abroad as service: the pathologization of ambiguity, difference, and some forms of discomfort through the imperative of access. BACKGROUND AND METHODS This chapter is part of an ethnographic project focused originally on shortterm, faculty-led study abroad (hereafter STFLSA) that I began in 2015, when I spent five months in Southeast Asia directing a year-long, multi-sited international education program. In a recent article based on this research (2018), I argued the prevailing institutional focus on increasing study-abroad participation numbers, rather than on the pedagogical goals and outcomes of international education (and how best to achieve them), has often pushed STFLSA toward for-profit provision agencies, and that these commercial providers often rely on tourist-oriented simulacra to constitute their programs. As an Indonesia specialist focused on mass media industries’ production of national culture, and as an advocate of study abroad in the region, I had noticed the increasing popularity of short-term programs drawing credit from American universities. The first trip I conducted, in 2007, was through a college that encouraged faculty to work with providers, most of which were specialized, for-profit travel agencies catering to higher and secondary education, mission trips, and other forms of group travel, which they squeezed into uncomfortably similar molds. All of these—from my observation—borrowed heavily from what Craik labels “touring culture” (1997), depending the aestheticized difference of non-threatening, constructed “others” who are encountered largely in “tourist bubbles” (Judd 1999) produced to allow, curate, and monetize such engagements. I started the project focusing on ethnographic research among program staff in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Ubud, Indonesia, in 2015, as they remain among the most popular destinations for short-term programs in Southeast Asia and because of my experience conducting STFLSA in these areas. I worked with contacts in agencies catering to study-abroad programs, who provide services ranging from field treks to volunteer opportunities to “cultural crash courses,” to identify ten short-term study-abroad trips that would take place during my time in the region, and conducted interviews with faculty directing six of these programs, as well as two more by phone thereafter. Of these eight, three originated at liberal arts colleges, while five were from larger research universities; they were equally distributed between Ubud and Chiang Mai. One program, with which I had spent time

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in Thailand, I also met with later in Singapore. In addition to semi-structured faculty interviews, with the six programs I visited in person, I was able to spend varying amounts of time—generally five to eight hours each —accompanying and observing the programs themselves and conducting informal interviews with students and agency staff. I also conducted eight separate, formal interviews with local contractors and tourism companies that provided support for American and international providers and engaged in dozens of informal conversations with their employees and managers throughout the process. Though I was fortunate to have the opportunity to chat with students on these programs, my focus was on those who had developed, constituted, and who led the programs. It was through these experiences that I became aware of the central role that specialized agencies commonly play, and so on my return to the United States, I refocused my research to explore their role in shaping STFLSA as well as longer term programs. I have done this through an on-going series of interviews with representatives from provider agencies, both non-profit and for-profit. I initially conducted in-depth phone interviews with nine provider agencies, and since then have interviewed twelve more representatives, six in person, during campus visits. All are afforded anonymity here, and I have made an effort to avoid identifying information about their employers as well. These fifteen semi-structured interviews with study-abroad provider agency representatives are the primary data source for this chapter, though I also draw on the ethnographic engagements described above, as well as my own experience in international education. Previously (2018), I argued for a reflexive approach to the “discourse of going,” and that studying abroad should not, in and of itself, be the core goal for institutions seeking to internationalize their campuses or increase students’ intercultural competence. I encouraged a pivot toward critical, experiential pedagogy focused on outcomes and the interventions necessary to promote them (see also Landon et al. 2017; Ogden 2007). In this chapter, I explore providers’ focus on accessibility, their framing of access as it relates to study abroad, and how it translates into real-world practice and policy. I argue that neoliberal exigencies lead providers to focus not only on the management of risk but also on a broad accessibility to their programs that mediates or circumvents certain engagements with cultural difference, which are arguably central to achieving learning outcomes often considered to be international education’s greatest strength (Bennett 2010). Beyond this, I make the case provider agencies’ focus on access, as a part of a health and safety discourse, is at odds with the important goal of making space for a period of liminal disconnection for American university students. This focus encourages what I describe as a recurrent reintegration: on-going efforts to mitigate the intensity of engagement abroad through practices that aim to

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avoid the disconnection, discomfort, and confusion commonly associated with liminality (Beech 2010). As mentioned above, I come to this investigation as a frequent practitioner of short- and long-term study abroad since 2007 and author of essays on its effective practice and integration into the broader curriculum of liberal arts education (2015; 2016). As a long-term leader of my university’s International Education Committee, I have also been at the center of reviewing and collaborating on other faculty members’ abroad programs, which has included discussions with provider agencies on how they might improve short-term programs. This chapter draws on that experience, as well as the interviews and ethnographic research discussed above. LIMINALITY VERSUS COLONIALITY Before discussing the ethnographic data collected for this project, it is important to articulate the central tension I will be exploring and some of the theoretical concerns that surround it. The primary juxtaposition here is the intersection of two relatively modest literatures, both of which build on foundations in popular social theory. These are (1) explorations of study abroad as a transformative rite of passage for students, which necessarily frame time spent abroad through the lens of liminality (Starr-Glass 2016, 2020; Ybarra 1997) and (2) scholarship that approaches international education abroad through a postcolonial lens, focusing on power disparities, maintenance of alterity, and uncritical approaches to pedagogical engagement (Doerr 2012, 2017; Ramirez 2013; Zemach-Bersin 2007). The former revolves around Van Gennep’s (2011 [1960]) conception of the period between ritual stages, when an individual is passing from one social status to another, and was developed more comprehensively by Victor Turner (1969, 1987), who explored the idea of liminality in more broadly applicable ways, including through travel and pilgrimage (1979), which became foundational to the early anthropology of tourism, and the articulation of tourism as ritual (Graburn 1979, 1983; Nash et al. 1981). The latter category draws on ideas popularized by Edward Said (1978), examining the representational and discursive legacies of the colonial project as they continue to permeate popular culture, tourism, and the academy (e.g., Boehmer 1993; d’Hauteserre 2004; Spivak 2005). Study abroad is not central to either of these literatures, but scholars addressing it have modestly drawn on both, if not within the same studies. The view of U.S. study abroad as a rite of passage is connected with studies of educational travel more broadly, dating back to the American Grand Tour of the nineteenth century, which popularized the notion that travel was an important part of elite education while largely reinforcing the authority of the Eurocentric canon

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(Tillman 2008). The incorporation of internationalization rhetoric into the promotion of study abroad, along with the reification of intercultural competence in the 1990s (Bennett and Hammer 1998; Hammer 2012), helped to cement as common sense the notion that studying abroad yields a fundamentally different, more enlightened perspective on cultural difference, along with the social capital associated with the certification of that worldliness (Bourdieu 2011 [1986]). Van Tine, who studied the experience of liminality on short-term study abroad trips, largely through ethnographic work with student participants, notes her data “suggests that in general these participants perceive the study abroad program as a chance to experience a liminal space” (2011, p. 47). She goes on to detail students’ decisions to participate in a Thailand program she studied were “very much rooted in the perception that this was an opportunity to experience a space apart – albeit within the comforts of a guided tour approach” (2011, p. 47) and provides voluminous interview data to support this claim. Describing a similar service learning experience abroad, Tonkin and Quiroga (2004) articulate the value of the liminal space and leaving one’s “comfort zone” in achieving outcomes many students find the most valuable: The journey forced many to question aspects of their home culture, such as consumerism, individualism and the linear understanding of progress and success. While it is a moment of cultural criticism, at the same time the liminal experience usually serves to reestablish and consolidate a sense of identity as one’s culture is not only questioned but also partially reaffirmed. (2004, p. 140)

They observed the experience of liminality and separation from home yielded a powerful “turning point” in the lives of many students, compelling them to rethink entrenched concepts of race, gender, status, and equality more broadly. For some, it prompted shifts in career choices (2004, p. 143). In cases like this, the experience of study abroad promotes connections that subvert students’ taxonomies of identity as they navigate culturally varying spaces wherein status hierarchies are often difficult to intuit. STFLSA can further challenge students’ awareness of social hierarchies by complicating the power–distance between them and their home institution faculty members (Barkin 2015), whose authority and social position may be complicated by the horizontal comradery of the common journey and the humanization of shared living experiences (Hofstede et al. 1991). On STFLSA programs, where a group of students are often living and/or traveling together in close quarters for a short but intensive period of study in unfamiliar spaces, the experience may take on elements of a group ritual passage or pilgrimage. Victor Turner argued such experiences depend on a period of liminality followed by reintegration into society, often in a new role or refigured status (1969). In such liminal periods, when one is “betwixt

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and between” broadly accepted social roles within known frameworks, social norms that previously scaffolded daily life become ambiguous, suspended, or even inverted. For Turner, this was what allowed for creative and playful refigurations of identity—a space for individuation and reflexivity that dissipated with reintegration into more earnest and fixed identity categories (see Rosaldo et al. 2018 for a compelling discussion of Turner’s legacy to the anthropology of creativity). Van Gennep’s and Turner’s influential ideas were mobilized across a range of disciplines, including humanistic psychology (Parsons 2002), and in anthropology became central to studies of pilgrimage, travel, and tourism (e.g., Graburn 1983; Turner 1979; Frey 2004). Any changes in social status linked to studying abroad, while generally informal, may depend on the presumption of this liminal separation in which the student gained new and qualitatively different insights from engaging with cultural difference in raw and unmediated ways (Beech 2010). This presumptive depth of experience, along with the associated certification of the university, distinguishes the cultural capital earned studying abroad from that associated with tourism or culturally focused travel. In my own experience taking students abroad,1 the perceived hardship associated with the experience has often become a point of pride for returning students. This may involve some measure of the myopic “discomfort as authentication” trope that others in this book appropriately interrogate (e.g. Bodinger de Uriarte, Doerr, Serio) but students’ evaluative commentaries often focus on the pedagogical interventions we mobilize to promote some disconnection during their time abroad, largely through collaborative work with Indonesian students and guided integration into local social contexts (Barkin 2016). This “hardship” is constructed less around absent luxuries than in psychological terms—the loss of cultural safety nets or affirmations of antecedent value systems and having to engage in the often-difficult work of negotiating cultural ambiguity. Such contrasts illustrate the central nature of liminality as an agent of study abroad’s (potential) impact, reflecting its mobilization in late twentieth-century humanistic psychology, where “individuation” and the process of self-realization were posited to take place within the liminal space (Parsons 2002). As Shorter (2015 [1987]) noted, this serves to “‘[make] whole one’s meaning, purpose, and sense of relatedness” (p. 79). These articulations mirror some of the personal development narratives my recent STFLSA students have related in assessment surveys, as well as the sentiments students in Van Tine’s study (2011) articulated when discussing their motivations for studying abroad. The countervailing discourse, which revolves around themes of health and safety, I characterize here as one of coloniality and colonial bodies

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(Anderson 2013). Rather than STFLSA in general, here I am focused on the developing world, where many dormant narratives related to tropical and exotic maladies can be activated by risk-averse administrators, studyabroad offices, and even government representations through the Centers for Disease Control (Etheridge 1992). While premised on the unassailable priority of keeping U.S. students safe and healthy while abroad, the ways this discourse permeates STFLSA as an industry alloys such concerns with broader cultural framings of the body in colonial spaces (Anderson 2013). This may range from the desire to avoid discomfort and regional/cultural difference that may impact health (e.g. climate, sanitation, diet) to the protection of the body through biomedical prophylaxis, the use of which may itself take on ritual qualities (Bodinger de Uriarte and Jacobson 2018; Doerr in this book). This apposition—between the desire to be insulated from the infectious dangers of postcolonial (or otherwise alien) spaces, broadly conceived, and the yearning for a transformative experience that seems to demand a withdrawal from the sources of that insulation—can be a central tension in shortterm programs. Importantly, though risk averseness is an acknowledged and overt goal among every provider agency I spoke with, the focus on individuation through study abroad is amorphous and variable, finding its way into institutionalized rhetoric largely through the totemic repetition of such terms as “transformative” and “life changing” (e.g. Brown 2009; Woolf 2011). Nevertheless, this would-be outcome remains firmly embedded in studyabroad media and rhetoric, particularly that of for-profit providers, where the semiotics of personal transformation can be an important selling point of their product: although students may wish to remain safe and healthy abroad, they do not seek out abroad experiences because they want to be safe and healthy (Heywood et al. 2012). While the transformative power of study abroad may remain vague and imagistic in provider media, the discourse of health and safety is comparatively concrete and comes to students from a variety of directions (Anderson 2003). In my experience conducting abroad programs, it is also palpably influential. The act of traversing the Global South is, for many, an active project of bodily safeguarding and environmental insulation through heavy use of pharmaceuticals, insecticides, (preemptive) antibiotics, and other biomedical talismans that effectively pathologize postcolonial spaces, what Anderson (2003) termed “the third-world body.” This framing of developing-world spaces as toxic and threatening to American bodies may have its roots in colonial discourses of hygiene, related cultural distinction, and broader Orientalisms (Anderson 2006), but it is perpetuated in important ways through institutional risk avoidance

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among universities and their partner organizations. As study abroad becomes increasingly commodified and subject to the influence of for-profit agencies, its foci and the talk surrounding them have shifted. Whereas safety and liability concerns have always been an integral part of studying abroad, my interviews with STFLSA providers in the expanding for-profit world demonstrate that they are now increasingly key selling points of programs, and more importantly for this discussion, they have expanded demonstrably in scope. MANAGING AND SELLING DIFFERENCE As noted above, my work to understand the role of for-profit study-abroad provision agencies was rooted in field observations in Southeast Asia, where I noticed a rise in U.S. student groups engaging with the cultural tourism economy. As with the general influence and popularity of these agencies, their focus on safety, liability, and comfort came as a surprise to me and emerged inductively from my earliest interviews with provider representatives. Although my focus here is predominantly on for-profit agencies, many non-profit representatives provided helpful insights into accessibility, health, and safety trends, as they tended to be (with notable exceptions) prone to critical reflection on the marketing and institutional pressures they were compelled to contend with. For example, in discussing the rise of short-term programs with “Jennifer”2 from non-profit provider (NPP) #1, she laid out her theory that, contrary to IIE’s statistics, shorter term study abroad trips had not surged in popularity over the past ten to fifteen years, at least not to the degree reported (e.g., Institute of International Education 2016). Instead, she argued (from her own observations) that the perceived spike was largely a reporting issue that resulted from institutional efforts to rein in existing faculty-led programs, which had been common but informally managed for decades. She argued this was predominantly a way to control the risk and resulting liability these informal programs brought to their respective universities. Secondarily, this reining in of abroad programs fed into the internationalization wave that hit many American universities in the early years of the twenty-first century (Kreber 2009), when international engagement became more overtly competitive in the realm of institutional rankings and branding. Jennifer’s evidence was limited to her and her colleagues’ longitudinal experience in the field, but she also noted that she had recently observed an increasing number of universities institutionalizing a requirement that faculty always work with an outside provider, whether they felt they needed that support or not, explicitly due to liability concerns.

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PATTERNS IN STUDY-ABROAD PROVISION: HEALTH, SAFETY, AND THE IMPERATIVE OF ACCESS Below I lay out patterns observed in my ethnographic and interview data that relate to issues of health, safety, and accessibility. I draw predominantly from interviews with provider agencies, but also conversations with faculty and incountry staff, as well as my broader ethnographic project in Southeast Asia. Liability insurance was an unexpected selling point in my discussions with for-profit providers. Although I never asked about it, the representatives I spoke with all raised the issue in one way or another, and it became a clear theme across those conversations. Representatives often brought up their liability packages (some referring to them as “products”) as a centerpiece of their service. FPP #1, the largest for-profit provider I spoke with, which purportedly works with between 500 and 600 U.S. colleges and universities each year, boasted that they carried more liability insurance than any of their competitors (US$15 million per incident). Heather, at FPP #2, which I discuss in greater detail below, emphasized not only their liability insurance but also their on-staff medical and psychological professionals who had the ability to provide for students experiencing emotional or psychological distress during their short-term programs, which she claimed reduced the likelihood of those participants being sent home. Heather told me this served two functions: it meant students would have “a better experience,” and secondarily, “we get fewer refund requests.” The focus on emotional well-being mirrors recent trends in the Forum on Education Abroad conference, which have shifted not only toward health and safety concerns in recent years but particularly toward mental health (Forum on Education Abroad 2018). With each for-profit agency I spoke with, health, safety, and wellness concerns were brought up as competitive selling points. By contrast, these services rarely came up in my conversations with NPPs, except when I made a point of asking. In those cases, I found they carried similar liability insurance to the for-profits but tended to frame it as a requisite obligation of the service they provide. More than assurances about insurance, expatriation, and emergency preparedness, FPPs often framed their approach to health and safety under a broader umbrella of efforts they make to ensure a “good experience for all students” (a phrase that came up in a number of interviews) including those students who might otherwise find study abroad too challenging to enroll. This was most pointedly emphasized by FPP #2, the only corporate provider I spoke with that also conducted longer term programs, and which employed a large, permanent staff abroad. Their representative Heather added a new dimension to the accessibility conversation in focusing on their provision of mental health professionals catering to students who experience anxiety,

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discomfort, or homesickness abroad. Reflecting a pattern that others have observed across study-abroad provision for American students (Bathke and Kim 2016), these mental health services were part of an array of accessibilityrelated practices that included program directors trained in handling reluctant students, programming specifically designed to accommodate them (see “The Cultural Safety Net” section below), and on-going communication with parents. Heather stated several times that “all students should be able to go abroad,” and that the “ease of entry” offered by these services and policies helped to ensure that would be possible. Providers’ framing of homesickness and anxiety connected to travel as symptoms demanding professional treatment recalled the medicalization processes often described by sociologists (Aho 2008; Conrad 2007; Conrad and Slodden 2013), in which previously nonmedical concerns come to be discussed and defined as illnesses, disorders, or medical problems. Conrad and Slodden describe this process as it has played out in recent decades with social anxiety disorder and more recently with bereavement, noting “the expansion of depression to include bereavement is an effort to expand the DSM to include normal grief as a psychiatric disorder,” by ignoring context (2013, p. 71). It also bears mentioning that the authors attributes the recent rise in medicalization of mental health conditions to market exigencies including the economic interests of psychiatric professionals as well as the pharmaceutical industry (Conrad and Slodden 2013). Nevertheless, NPP agencies were not far behind the FPPs in the provision of mental health services but tended to frame them as emergency services, not part of any broader package of interventions intended to provide greater access to students who might otherwise have difficulties in culturally unfamiliar environments or who would be reluctant to study abroad without them. When I brought up that theme with NPP #2, their representative Martina seemed puzzled, and instead offered that they work with faculty to be upfront with students about the rigors and challenges of their programs, in an effort to ensure those who enroll are appropriately prepared to meet them. She expressed more concern with the integrity and rigor of the programs themselves than in broadening their accessibility. Another pattern in my interviews with for-profit agencies (as well as reviews of their promotional literature and web media) was strong focus on students’ parents. This included direct appeals and reassurances regarding safety and risk, as well as ways to connect. Several FPPs brought up ongoing communication with parents as a priority in their program design and boasted of providing students with a range of means to do so. Lisa from FPP #4 told me they often received calls from parents and that their policy was to “reassure them that their kids won’t be out of communication for much longer than the flight itself, if that.” Mark from FPP #3 echoed the sentiments

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of many providers in noting that his agency’s attention to parents served two objectives: the first was that, he claimed, parents often retained a good deal of decision-making authority when it came to students’ ability to study abroad. While it was not likely that they would stoke interest among their children, they were seen as a common barrier, particularly with short-term programs in which students are almost universally responsible for all financial costs, over-and-above conventional tuition, and which were rarely ameliorated by financial aid (Barkin 2018). Therefore, his agency focused on parents’ concerns as a way of reducing the chance they would balk at their child’s choice to study on an FPP #3 program. While students tended to focus on the content and destinations of the programs, he observed that parents were more commonly focused on health, safety, and other risk factors, which they preemptively addressed. Second, he observed that parents worrying while their child was abroad had historically led to a lot of work for his organization’s staff, and sometimes for universities they worked with, who would field anxious calls and emails, particularly when they had not heard from their child for an extended period of time. “Connecting students and parents is a win-win for us,” Mark related, “because it makes the students feel comfortable, hopefully, if they’re far from home for the first time, but it also relieves the parents’ anxiety . . . so we don’t run into that nearly as often as we did before.” This institutional focus reflects broader efforts in higher education to manage the surge in parental involvement in postsecondary education over recent decades (Pizzolato and Hicklen 2011). Odenweller’s recent work on this topic is exemplative of the perspective many NPPs expressed toward the shift—she explored a variety of “negative effects” that result from what she labels helicopter parenting, including a “conformity orientation” among Millennial students, ineffective coping skills, dependency on others, and “overburdened college campuses” (2014, p. 407) . What distinguished the conversations with FPPs on this topic from those I have had with staff in nonprofit sectors of international and higher education was the lack of critical concern for promoting student independence. FPPs instead tended to discuss parents as co-customers, along with their children, whose expectations and needs they were competing to meet. Distribution of mobile phones upon arrival at study-abroad sites was a common topic in my first round of interviews from 2015, and often framed as a tool not only for maintaining safety but in-group communication as well. This was the case with NPPs as well as FPPs, and all interviewed agencies required or provided mobile phones or SIM cards on some short-term programs. But while NPPs framed the cell phone as a helpful tool for keeping track of students, generally offering them inexpensive “dumb phones” that could be used for little more than in-country calls and SMS, most FPPs in

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my initial interviews approached the mobile phone as another vector of the accessibility discourse, emphasizing their import in maintaining relationships with friends and family at home. These providers offered students on some programs (particularly those outside Europe) either smartphones with data allowances or data-ready SIM cards for students wishing to use their own phones,3 but a connected smartphone was required on most programs. More recent interviews with the same providers, conducted in 2017–2018, indicated shifts in mobile phone policies connected to the rise of international plans offered by most U.S. carriers and resulting desire among students to use their own phones and plans. Although it varied not just by provider but also by individual program and destination region, the most common policy at that time was simply to require students have a functioning smart phone and be reachable through it, to participate in the program. Shifts in technology and the economics of mobile providers have therefore obscured this topic as a vector of differentiation among FPPs, but its history illustrates the for-profit world’s prioritization on student comfort and connectivity. Still at the forefront, FPP #2 now advertises that they explicitly ensure students remain connected to Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat (in addition to email and the web), ostensibly as part of their effort to provide students with “health and safety knowledge” and their overall promotion of “safety & well-being away from home.” The requirement of smartphones on STFLSA represents an interesting example of the eroding barrier between safety/risk management, mental health maintenance/accessibility, and immersion mitigation. Though on the decline, international data access has been one common barrier to ambient social connectivity while abroad (Duffy 2018), especially in shorter trips during which students have fewer opportunities to explore local alternatives. This sort of disruption, which educators interested in high-impact abroad experiences tend to favor for their promotion of local engagements, exploration, and reflection (La Brack and Bathurst 2012), has been effectively targeted and largely effaced by commercial providers, who have little incentive to challenge paying customers. This customer-centric framing of disconnection illustrates the porousness of expectations between tourism agencies and study-abroad providers, as well as their “clients,” and in so doing shifts conceptions of what studying abroad can or should endeavor to deliver. This is demonstrated by the growth of short-term programs themselves, which have increasingly blurred this imagined boundary (Michelson and Valencia 2016), but their increasing popularity can also be seen as a symptom of these shifting expectations. Non-profit agencies, many of which had histories of distributing “dumb phones” for in-group communication only, rarely expressed interest in helping students maintain ambient connectivity to their parents or social

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networks. Nevertheless, the interest in avoiding worried calls and emails from parents seemed nearly universal, and as of 2020, their connectivity policies were largely indistinguishable from those seen in FPPs. As evidenced by my interviews and a growing literature, wide-ranging efforts to provide increased safety, comfort, connectivity, and “wellness” (broadly construed), often pioneered by commercial agencies with roots in the world of travel agencies and tour providers, have become increasingly normative not just in short-term but also conventional study abroad (Bathke and Kim 2016), particularly at center-based programs4 catering predominantly to American undergraduates. While working to increase access for students of different backgrounds and capacities to educational opportunities that increase intercultural competence and understanding (via studying abroad, away, or otherwise) is a moral imperative few would question, some changes in practice carried out in the name of accessibility (to study abroad in particular) reflect an increasingly porous boundary between access and comfort. Beyond the connectivity and wellness-related practices discussed above, this approach is also evident in the mediation or avoidance of contentious areas of cultural difference. PATTERNS IN STUDY-ABROAD PROVISION: THE CULTURAL SAFETY NET Maintaining a far-ranging safety net, including strong connections to family, friends, and social networks from home, may be one avenue toward rendering international education less threatening and more accessible to a broad range of potential participants. This imperative reflects a rising movement to increase access to higher education generally, as well as generational and technological shifts that allow for new, compelling modes of communication that have altered the landscape of normative connectivity across many other social fields (e.g., Lai and Hong 2015; Pizzolato and Hicklen 2011). Much of the data collected for this study that I found most interesting, however, revolved around the blurring of boundaries between articulations of access and of comfort, particularly as that comfort depended on the maintenance of U.S. college students’ antecedent cultural frameworks. Throughout my interviews, and increasingly since I began this project in 2015, both for-profit and NPP agencies related to me the ways their programming had been either changed or was specifically developed to accommodate American students’ apparently increasing resistance to encounters with certain vectors of cultural difference, particularly in less-developed countries (see Squillace and Cassell 2019 for an alternative analysis of this shift). What follows are three brief vignettes, drawn from my interviews and

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ethnographic work, which provide a sense of how these decisions are made in context and which illustrate a range of ways that providers chisel away at discomfort and ambiguity in the cultural encounters they mediate. The first vignette is drawn from several interviews with representatives of two center-based program providers that operate largely in Europe, and cater to American students interested in both quarter and semester-long study abroad, as well as short-term and “faculty led”5 programs. Center-based programs are distinguished from other provider types, in that they do not (a) facilitate enrollment at local universities—the approach most commonly associated with studying abroad —nor are they (b) field-based, focused on ethnographic, “immersive,” or itinerant (rather than traditional classroom) pedagogy. Instead, these operators have their own study-abroad center(s) that operate as miniature, short-term universities for a continuous flow of undergraduate students from the United States, often drawing on nearby universities to recruit faculty for their courses and programs (Hendrickson 2016). Because these providers work continuously teaching students from the United States and tend to employ local university instructors (rather than guides who are comfortable in the customer-centric field of tourism), several representatives told me they frequently send their faculty on trainings focused largely on recreating the American college classroom. “A lot of what they learn is about having a more interactive classroom, and how to handle student opinions and discussion,” one employee told me on condition of complete anonymity, “but the part [returning local instructors] always talk about are the social issues, the hot-button social issues in the U.S. aren’t necessarily familiar to them. They have to be trained about identity politics and what’s a sensitive topic and what isn’t, and how to discuss it – or, you know, just avoid it.” These trainings parallel the interpretive mediation that Katriel (writing on tour guides at Israeli settlement museums) termed “the poetics of indirection,” replacing direct confrontation of difficult or controversial topics with a lighthearted but engaging dance around them (2013, p. 7). More broadly, as Di Giovine argued in the context of world heritage tourism, the act of guiding tourists trades not just on linguistic fluency but also “a guide who shares similar life experiences, interests or personality traits with his clients might be better suited than one who ‘speaks’ in another set of cultural metaphors, expressions, or concerns” (2008, p. 289). In this case, perceived insensitivity in the negotiation of “hot-button social issues” in the classroom mirrors the unsuccessful tour, while agency framing of the instructor’s skill set has expanded to include those cultural awarenesses that were previously beyond their purview. For students, overcoming the need for such culturally bespoke performance can be considered central to many educational goals associated with studying abroad, including increased intercultural competence (La Brack and Bathurst 2012).

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When I followed up about this avoidance, the provider representative elaborated that “most of [the local faculty] will just try to avoid these kinds of sensitive topics, whether it’s gender or immigration or whatever, especially if the class doesn’t force them, because the pressure from [the provider institution] is to avoid negative reports . . . and not just how they teach, but the syllabi too and what they cover.” Although subject matter varied, similar trainings were common practice across a variety of providers, commercial and non-profit. These were more institutionalized among center-based providers I spoke with, but the practice was widespread, and two of the provider agencies I interviewed had reportedly sent some instructors to the United States to study the dynamics of American college classrooms first-hand. Most of my interviewees at provider agencies left me with the sense that they felt accommodating American students involved a good deal of mediation and risk averseness, but there were also a handful that gave specific examples of curricular changes that had been motivated by concern over student comfort and cultural expectations. Among these is my second vignette, which came from a provider agency that regularly conducted a prison tour as part of a criminology course taught to study-abroad students. The focus on comparative criminology was a popular topic, and the agency incorporated prison tours and sit-down conversations with convicts to illustrate criminal rehabilitation practices in the host country through firsthand accounts. According to interviews with two provider employees, this practice was canceled in the wake of complaints from an American student who took issue with the idea that speaking (as a class) with a convicted criminal who had once engaged in violent crimes was integrated into the course. The student reportedly considered it triggering of personal traumas they had endured and criticized program staff for including the prison visit as part of the course. The program’s staff, I was told, discussed making the field trip optional (it had been a core part of the course, and one of its few experiential interventions to take advantage of the local setting) but decided that would create logistical problems. They instead removed the prison visit from the course entirely and chose to focus instead on “making sure the course felt safe and comfortable for everyone, which is our first priority.” This example helps demonstrate, among other things, how the prioritization of safety and comfort in the affective sense can intersect and conflict—in provider decision-making—with experiential engagement within culturally unfamiliar spaces. A final vignette comes from a provider focused predominantly on developing-world programs, including in North Africa, and which made an effort to incorporate best practices for fostering intercultural competence, including research projects, homestays, and collaboration with locals (Bennett 2012). One of their programming representatives, Laura, described to me the recent

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difficulties they had struggled with in accommodating some American students who took offense to what they perceived (and which Laura herself characterized) as local prejudices and skin-color-related discrimination. One student in particular, who described herself as a person of color, created waves in the organization through a series of emails they sent detailing what they described as incidences of racism they had encountered during their participation in a North Africa program. The student faulted the cultural setting of the program itself and also program staff (many of whom were themselves from the host country) for perpetuating what was perceived as negative, retrograde framings of race and ethnicity. Their criticisms did not focus on a single, major incident, but instead the student described ongoing microaggressions, including more open commentary and joking about skin color, as well as a perceived attitude of skin-color-based hierarchy on the program. Laura described the conflicting priorities discussed by the program leadership as they tried to negotiate between their prioritization of hiring local staff and “immersing students in local culture” with their sympathy for the plight of this student and acknowledgment that race, skin color, and ethnicity are constructed and discussed very differently in the program’s North African setting than in the United States, particularly on U.S. college campuses. Their effort to address the student’s (and others’) concerns was on-going at the time of my interview but included major revisions to cultural trainings for local staff, a more hands-on role for American administrators and staff with a stronger background in American college culture, and some local staff contracts not being renewed. These three vignettes reflect patterns I observed throughout my interviews with providers, particularly when discussion moved from accommodation into cultural and programmatic areas. In all of these cases, provider representatives struggled to negotiate the intersections of pedagogical goals, particularly those related to intercultural competence, and concern over students’ comfort and wellness. Several made the point that their pedagogical goals were unlikely to be met were students to feel significant discomfort or hostility directed toward them (as with the last case). At least two representatives, however, lamented their agencies’ concern over accommodating U.S. undergraduates’ cultural expectations, arguing that the risk-averse focus allowed students to avoid those encounters with cultural difference that would likely yield the most insight. Particularly in short-term study abroad, mediation of the cultural encounter is essentially unavoidable, but approached mindfully and with an awareness of current best practices in intercultural learning (e.g., Barkin 2016; Bennett 2012), this can be an asset. Shorter programs are more dependent on such intentional mediation, as local, cultural encounters must largely be facilitated through instructor interventions. However, it goes without saying

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that study-abroad participants need not be ethnocentric philistines to find some elements of local culture in the places where they are studying (or in their home countries) to be shocking or objectionable, including, potentially, beliefs and practices surrounding gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, caste, and many other social cleavages. At the same time, the benefit of intercultural development and communication is generally framed as demanding a degree of engagement in local, cultural contexts and awareness of social spaces that are not, for example, the mediated simulacra of tourist bubbles, built to cater to visitors’ existing cultural frameworks (Judd 1999). Indeed, a central premise of interactionist anthropology and its contemporary legacies revolves around the need to engage with cultural difference first-hand in order to gain insight not only into its semiotic diversity, but eventually the arbitrariness of one’s own cultural worldview (Geertz 1973). ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION Victor Turner abstracted the idea of the liminal stage in ritual to broader life arenas, but his focus remained on moments or periods of time in which social reversals, inversions of hierarchy, and antistructure opened new doors to self-awareness, personal growth, and, if successful, transformation (1987). As Tonkin and Quiroga (2004) argued in a similar context, Turner’s concept “represents a journey from a zone of comfort to a zone where reversals and inversions can be part of the growing process of students” (p. 139). Drawing on Chisholm (2000), they argue this boundary crossing may trigger “delight, wonder, joy, surprise, but also apprehension, disgust, disappointment, or confusion” and that “reconciling these contradictions is a slow and sometimes painful experience” (p. 140). Of these experiences and emotions, this research provides evidence for the argument that increasingly professionalized study-abroad provision agencies seek to maintain the delight, wonder, and joy of encountering cultural difference while dispensing with the rest. Of course, this yields something different all together, and below I lay out my analysis of how it differs from what Turner and others have articulated, but particularly how this shift has been made possible, given its pedagogically questionable priorities. In this chapter, I have provided data that illustrate some of the ways in which an increasing emphasis on access and comfort for American students has influenced the character and focus of study-abroad experiences, including the role of liminality, and the shifting mediation of the cultural encounter. My argument here is that this shift, apparently fueled by for-profit providers but embraced by the field as a whole, builds on the power of “access” as a term and an imperative, the use of which obscures a neoliberalization process

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that might otherwise attract more critical scrutiny in the field of international education. There are a variety of ways that this idea, which I describe in this context as the imperative of access, has been approached by scholars in related cases. Anthropologist Cris Shore, writing on neoliberalization processes at public universities (2017), focused on the corporate-inflected rhetoric that has come to the fore in reorienting the mission of higher education, particularly through the mobilization of terms such as accountable, efficient, effective, and economical. In a recent discussion about this research, Shore articulated the ways market forces infiltrate the field of higher education through shifting its vocabulary toward a corporate frame: “It’s very hard to disagree with, or challenge the idea that ‘accountability’ is a bad thing. It’s one of those weasel words; no reasonable, self-respecting, rational person could possibly be opposed to accountability or transparency, or quality. It’d be like saying, ‘I’m against community’ or ‘I think the family is a bad thing’” (Trembath 2018). Nearly forty years earlier, McGee (1980) coined the term “ideograph” to describe words and phrases that act in a discursively similar fashion: abstractions “representing collective commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal” (p. 15). As McGee described them, an ideograph and the talk surrounding it “guides behavior and belief into channels easily recognized by a community as acceptable and laudable” (McGee 1980, p. 15). Some of his examples include “liberty,” “equality,” and “freedom of speech,” but succeeding generations of scholars have added to this list, accounting for socio-political shifts, such as the emergence of “family values” as an ideograph in the 1980s (Cloud 1998) or corporate-political use of the terms “9/11”and “patriotic” that surfaced in the wake of September 11, 2001 (Amernic and Craig 2004). In the health and safety talk among study abroad providers, the terms “accessibility” and “accommodation” have taken on ideographic roles. They are, as Cloud (1998) noted, “persuasive because they are abstract, easily recognized, and evoke near-universal and rapid identification,” and, most importantly, are recognized as laudable within contemporary American educational culture. And understandably so: as Davis (2016) has pointed out, conceptions of the normal and juxtapositions between abled and disabled are themselves products of particular historical moments, and vary culturally in unexpected ways (Iwakuma et al. 2016). Making deep, intercultural engagements more accessible to a greater variety of people from different backgrounds is laudable not only in the judgment of scholars, such as myself and across a broad spectrum of academics and practitioners, but, as Shore might point out, just about any reasonable person. So the critique here is not that study-abroad providers should be less accommodating or that studying abroad should not be accessible but rather that the

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power of these terms creates an imperative that redirects focus toward study abroad’s “ease of entry,” rather than its ostensible goals and outcomes, including the sometimes uncomfortable process of developing intercultural awareness and understanding (La Brack and Bathurst 2012). The imperative of access also obscures the rise of a neoliberal, customer-oriented pedagogy that heavily mediates the cultural encounter in ways that may run counter to central learning outcomes commonly associated with studying abroad, including the role of liminality and disconnection (Starr-Glass 2016; Van Tine 2011; Ybarra 1997). Beyond the interviews that are at the center of this research, in my own ethnography of FPP-directed programs in Southeast Asia, I found providers compete to deliver “culture” without cultural difference—an aestheticized vision of local people and settings that fit comfortably within students’ existing frameworks, or even reinforce them (as with “service learning” that reinscribes global power relations, for example (Bodinger de Uriarte and Jacobson 2018; Caton and Santos 2009)). Recently (2018) I discussed these agencies’ focus on touristic “cultural activities,” including performative volunteering, service learning, itinerancy, destination-centric programming, and tour-guide pedagogy. Another dimension of this neoliberalization process is the elevation of focus on risk management to include ostensible health and safety policies that delimit program scope in pedagogically substantive ways, as well as services and policies explicitly focused on comfort and connection, which may distance students from the cultural settings in which they are spending time. Between the “discourse of going” and this access imperative, the influence of which are felt far beyond the world of for-profit providers, students’ experience of difference, and the potential unpleasantness of having worldviews challenged or culturally charged assumptions undermined, is not just deprioritized, but pathologized. The discourse of going concerns the focus of the programs themselves, and rendering culture consumable through an educationally inflected form of touring. This chapter has investigated the other side of that same coin: how providers act to prevent the local environment and the disorientation of overseas travel, as well as the more challenging dimensions of cultural alterity, from rendering that tour uncomfortable. Described in these terms, this seems a tenuous goal—it comes into relatively unambiguous conflict with commonly cited best practices for study abroad (short-term or otherwise) (see, e.g. Lewin 2010), and the notion that productive, highimpact, intercultural education must challenge entrenched worldviews and hierarchies is sufficiently deep-rooted that contesting it overtly would be to drop the façade of outcomes-oriented pedagogy all together. This necessitates mobilizing ideographic terms like access and accommodation, which lend a powerful and appealing veneer to the agenda of minimizing ambiguity and challenge.

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Bourdieu and Wacquant, in discussing the “strange Newspeak” of inequality-obscuring terms like globalization and multiculturalism, apparently imposed on the world by the United States and its universities, invoke the idea of neoliberal commonplaces: “commonplaces in the Aristotelian sense of notions or theses with which one argues but over which there is no argument” (2001, p. 2, emphasis in original; cf. Asad 2009). In this formulation, the power of “access” as a commonplace is drawn from “the prestige of the place from whence they emanate” (p. 2), which is, in both cases, the American higher education system. Under the banner of access and accommodation, “foreignness” can be problematized commercially as a threat to the consumability of abroad experiences. Disconnection from the social networks and the hierarchies of home, long associated with the liminal period from which time spent abroad drew much of its impact and capacity to challenge (Amit 2010), is no longer considered a generative core of the practice around which pedagogical interventions must be constituted, but instead a barrier to access. And access in this context is not only a commonplace but an imperative. The broader conclusion here may be that the neoliberalization of higher education depends, at present, on the exploitation of those fissures in pedagogical discourse through which corporate interests may latch on to unchallengeable commonplaces or ideoographs: access, inclusion, “study abroad” itself. To the extent corporate interests can operate in the shadow of these powerful imperatives, the conversation rarely seems to turn toward them and their interests. The more commonplace the goal and the talk surrounding it, the more cover it provides these interests, allowing them to avoid the scrutiny that permeates other areas of higher education, particularly where it concerns cultural difference (Banks 2015). The data and vignettes discussed above do not present a clear call to action, nor do I present them to advocate or condemn particular choices related to study-abroad design or administration. What I do intend to present is a relatively straightforward attribution of motives: the agencies discussed above were largely focused on pleasing student/parent “customers” and avoiding bad reviews or incidents that would adversely affect their relationship with partner universities. With few exceptions (but some variation in tolerance, particularly between for-profit and NPPs), they were not focused on pedagogical goals or long-term outcomes, at least not when those conflicted with the customer-service ethic. At the same time, I find this subject position entirely relatable, particularly when it comes to some of the complex intersections discussed above. Perhaps staff deserved to be sacked in the North Africa case, particularly if they were themselves behaving in discriminatory ways toward students. Maybe training instructors on the intricacies of navigating the American college classroom is beneficial to all involved, particularly when the training concerns a more interactive, collaborative pedagogy. The

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nuances of such decision-making, which turn on a multitude of factors, are beyond the scope of this chapter, and I would not presume to second-guess my collaborators in this study. What this data can demonstrate is that that decisions and policy responses to these circumstances were coming largely from the customercentric logic of neoliberal institutions, and that is the distinction I seek to draw here. Pedagogical interventions of one sort or another are an essential part of study abroad, particularly short-term programs; in no way am I arguing for “authenticity through hardship” or an unreflexive, anachronistic “immersion” model, where students are dropped into foreign environments and where benefits are imagined to accrue from their unassisted struggle to orient themselves (Bennett 2010; Doerr 2012). These are difficult decisions particularly when one’s primary focus is pedagogical effectiveness abroad and where student (or parent) complaints must be measured against an array of competing considerations. But the ability to weigh student–parent perspectives as part of a broader assessment of learning goals allows for decision-making that keeps students’ long-term pedagogical interests at heart, even where those interests demand a measure of “apprehension, disgust, disappointment, or confusion” (Chisholm 2000, p. 79). Finally, if disconnection and a willingness to endure liminal ambiguity and discomfort are central to the negotiation of cultural difference, particularly where that difference challenges closely held beliefs, another way this data could be understood is that provider agencies have found a way to outsource this difficult work to their own staff. These staff members are charged with negotiating the volatile territory between those threats (bodily, affective, and cultural) presented to U.S. students by local people and spaces, filtering out potentially objectionable characteristics to render them palatable. For those students coming of age in the neoliberal university, engaging with such realworld challenges has become not just optional—a professionalized and often silenced chore no longer expected of participants—but increasingly removed from the study-abroad imaginary.

NOTES 1. I have developed and led nine study abroad programs in the years 2007–2020, two semester-long and the other seven STFLSA programs in Southeast Asia. 2. All names have been changed to afford anonymity to interviewees and other participants in the study. The names of agencies and STFLSA providers have likewise been anonymized, where numbered NPPs and FPPs indicate non-profit and for-profit providers, respectively.

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3. At the time of this writing, international data and calling rates are declining among many U.S. carriers, so this service may soon become redundant, but during the past fifteen years, during which short-term abroad programs have risen dramatically in popularity (Institute of International Education and Farrugia 2018), it is worth noting that these rates have been (and in some areas of Southeast Asia remain) prohibitively high for many students, creating a significant barrier to the maintenance of ambient, online social connections. 4. Center-based or “island programs,” as they are sometimes labeled, are programs that maintain their own teaching facilities and instructional staff abroad, and whose classes are populated entirely by students studying abroad. They contrast with traditional university-based programs, in which students enroll in conventional (or sometimes customized) courses at an established university abroad, and with field-based programs, which also feature classes populated entirely by study-abroad students but which are experiential and often ethnographic programs rather than classroom-based. Center-based programs were developed largely to serve students from U.S. universities (Hoffa and DePaul 2010). 5. As I have discussed elsewhere (Barkin 2018), the degree of faculty leadership in what are labeled “faculty-led” programs varies wildly, with some providers allowing or even requiring faculty to cede their pedagogical authority to staff and guides hired by the agency. The term “faculty led” as it is generally used by providers indicates that course credit will come from the faculty member’s host institution (as opposed the more tedious transfer of credit from the provider and its partner institution) but not that the faculty member will necessarily exercise more than a ceremonial degree of leadership in program design or pedagogy.

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Squillace, Joseph, and Adam Cassell. 2019. “International Short-Term Immersion Study Tours: Gen Z, Curriculum, and Trauma-Informed Tours.” The Journal of Practice Teaching and Learning 15, no. 3: 43–56. Starr-Glass, David. 2016. “Repositioning Study Abroad as a Rite of Passage: Impact, Implications, and Implementation.” In Handbook of Research on Study Abroad Programs and Outbound Mobility, 89–114. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. ———. 2020. “Intercultural Awareness and Short-Term Study Abroad Programs: An Invitation to Liminality.” In Academic Mobility Programs and Engagement: Emerging Research and Opportunities, 31–56. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Tillman, Martin. 2008. “A History of US Study Abroad: Beginnings to 1965.” International Educator 17, no. 3: 16. Tonkin, Humphrey, and Diego Quiroga. 2004. “A Qualitative Approach to the Assessment of International Service-Learning.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 10: 131–149. Trembath, Jodie-Lee. “The Costs of Efficiency: Cris Shore Talks Neoliberalism in the Public Sector.” Accessed July 10, 2018. https​:/​/th​​efami​​liars​​trang​​e​.com​​/2018​​/06​/2​​ 5​/ep-​​16​​-cr​​is​-sh​​ore/ Turner, Victor. 1969. “Liminality and Communitas.” In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 94, 94–113. Chicago: Aldine Publishing. ———. 1979. Process, Performance, and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology. Vol. 1. Delhi, India: Concept Publishing Company. ———. 1987. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.” In Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation, 3–19. Lasalle, IL: Open Court. Van Gennep, Arnold. 2011 [1960]. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Tine, Rebecca E. 2011. Liminality and the Short Term Study Abroad Experience. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Woolf, Michael. 2011. “Study Abroad Changed My Life’ and Other Problems.” International Educator 20, no. 6: 52. Wright, Susan, and Cris Shore. 2017. Death of the Public University?: Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy. Vol. 3. New York: Berghahn Books. Ybarra, Carolyn May. 1997. “Kalamazoo College in Madrid: Study Abroad as a Rite of Passage.” Dissertation, Yale University, 1996. Zemach-Bersin, Talya. 2007. “Global Citizenship and Study Abroad: It’s all about US.” Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 1, no. 2: 16–28.

Chapter 5

Forbidden Learning The Challenge of Dispelling PostColonial Tourist Imaginaries of Cuba through Study Abroad Aaron M. Lampman and Kenneth Schweitzer

INTRODUCTION “The Cuba Music and Culture Seminar” at Washington College, a private liberal arts college in Maryland, is a blended course that incorporates pretravel online learning with classroom lecture and culminates with a two-week fieldwork-based experience in Cuba. The course is run by an ethnomusicologist specialized in Afro-Cuban ritual and an anthropologist specialized in the cultures of Latin America. By immersing students in contexts dominated by Afro-Cuban religious music and ritual as well as popular expressive forms of Cuban music and dance, the manifest goal of the course is to encourage students to understand how music is part of a complex cultural web and to discover the interrelatedness of its many parts: music, dance, visual arts, ritual, beliefs, gender, race, nationalism, and historical events. Like most study-abroad courses, a latent, but no less important goal of the course, is to stimulate transformation in student perspectives (e.g., imaginaries) about the Cuban people and culture, and the changes Cubans face due to the processes of globalization. The course is open to all students in the college and attracts majors from across the curriculum. The advertising materials, developed specifically to attract or “seduce” (see Salazar 2010) clients to take the course, contain a kaleidoscope of educational objectives, adventure narratives, and preformed tourist imaginaries featuring images of pristine beaches, old American cars, hand rolled Cuban cigars, and peers from previous trips having fun. From our very first meeting prior to the trip, however, we attempt to complicate, 149

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challenge, and deconstruct these imaginaries, engaging in focused discussions about ever-changing U.S.–Cuba relations, the impact of communism as an economic model, the outcomes of a one-party form of government, issues of race, class, and gender, and the impacts of development and tourism. Over the course of several weeks before leaving for Havana, there are extensive readings designed to teach a broad history of Cuba, changes that have occurred in the past thirty years, and the specific historical contexts of Cuban religion, ritual, and music. Students use an online platform to respond to video selections that are chosen to provoke conversations about race, religion, and nostalgia, and through online listening exercises they learn to identify a variety of forms of religious and expressive music styles so that they are prepared to understand the general form and context of Santería drumming rituals. Although the Cuba Music and Culture Seminar offers just eleven days in the field, our program can be viewed as a form of “anti-tourism,” as defined in this volume, due to pedagogical approaches that prioritize quality interactions with the host community. Once on the ground in Havana, the course deliberately avoids the “traditional tourist pathway” and offers students a “backstage” experience and an imagined “authentic” engagement (see MacCannell 1976) by placing them in homestays, avoiding guided tours, involving them in field-based participant observation, and immersing them as participants in a multitude of religious and popular performances. Throughout the field experience, our students find their comfort zones challenged, and, quite often, the tourist gaze is inverted as the students find themselves subject to the critical, and yet appreciative, eyes of Cubans who teach them the fundamentals of Afro-Cuban religious song and dance. We argue these approaches provide a more formative educational experience and a deeper understanding of culture than one would obtain from more traditional tourist settings and activities. Part of our exploration of the theme of “anti-tourism” relates to the nature of immersion as an important element of our short-term study-abroad program. Every tourist is immersed in the “Elsewhere” of a foreign geography and culture, but the level of immersion exists along what we call a continuous “immersion spectrum.” The traditional tourist experience is often perceived as a “shallow” form of immersion in which there are few physical, cultural, or intellectual challenges to existing ways of thinking. We argue that antitourism facilitates “deep immersion” in a place and a culture, raising the educational stakes for the student-tourist by laying siege to their comfort zone in ways that challenge pre-existing perspectives, essentialisms, and imaginaries. As one example of “deep immersion,” we explore the power of embodied learning of Afro-Cuban religious song and dance to more thoroughly connect the student with Cuban ritual and religious meaning. Another example

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examines the impact of disengagement from technology on student interaction with the host community, and yet a third example investigates how living outside the “tourist bubble” provides opportunities to more thoroughly engage with local economic and political realities. Another important goal of the course is to challenge pre-existing tourist imaginaries. Salazar and Graburn (2014) broadly define the “tourist imaginary” as that which is collectively imagined, or fantasized, about a place or people. These shared imaginaries, which differ based on historical and cultural experiences, are created and socially transmitted through discourse and representations in politics and the media. Imaginaries function as implicit schemas of interpretation of Otherness that shape worldviews before, during and after a tour (Strauss 2006: 329). By imposing socially constructed order on what the tourist sees and understands (Urry 1990), imaginaries influence the meaning the tourist takes away from the experience. Picard (2011: 2) argues that the tourist imaginaries for some destinations are saturated with fantastical and quasi-magical qualities (i.e., exoticism, magic, ritual, primitivism, and perceptions of disorder and underdevelopment). Western tourists, he suggests, intentionally seek such locations in order to “maintain and renew that which legitimates the moral and political order of modern life.” In other words, tourists often confirm pre-existing beliefs about the “rightfulness” of their own way of life by observing the “wrongfulness” of other ways of life through a lens constructed by powerful cultural, political, and ideological filters (Echtner and Prasad 2003). Simultaneously, Rosaldo (1989) suggests, such tourist imaginaries are accompanied by “imperialist nostalgia” or mourning for traditions that were destroyed through colonial encounters, including tourism. In this chapter, we discuss some of the fantastical tourist imaginaries of Cuba, including Cuba as “frozen in time” and Cuba as “forbidden” and explore nostalgia for an imagined Cuba that is being transformed by tourism. Our data suggest it is extremely difficult to deconstruct these widely shared and deeply rooted imaginaries. Throughout the chapter we critically examine student perceptions of the efficacy of our pedagogical approaches and identify shortcomings in the ability of these approaches to stimulate transformation in pre-existing imaginaries about Cuba. Our research is based on thematic analysis of assignments, travel journals, and post-trip reflection papers of sixty-three students who participated in The Cuba Music and Culture Seminar between 2015 and 2018. We analyzed assignments that assessed acquired knowledge of the geopolitical history of Cuba and contemporary issues affecting Cuba, such as race, gender, sexuality, and the impact of tourism. We examine essays from pre-trip and in-country ethnographic activities and travel journal entries that respond to questions about in-field experiences and events. Finally, we

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thoroughly analyzed our own course advertising materials, college marketing releases, and student blogs about the course. In order to identify and analyze student perceptions, we systematically coded these texts while searching for emergent themes (Gibbs 2008; Bernard et al. 2016). The most prominent themes shared across the texts include beliefs about Cuban people and society, iconic or embodied learning and emic understanding of ritual, imperialist nostalgia, breaching of comfort zones and responses to such breaches, feelings of discomfort and uncertainty, perceptions of immersion and “being there,” perceptions of privileged access, indications of liminality and borders, and transformation of pre-existing stereotyped or romanticized perspectives of Other. We also explored the frequency in which themes overlapped, revealing associations between concepts that emerged from student journals and reflection papers. Anonymized quotations presented throughout this chapter are directly excerpted from student papers and transcribed materials. The overall objective was to understand how our college promotes the benefits of study abroad to students, determine how students imagine Cuban society and culture, and discover whether they perceive any post-trip transformation in perspective and worldview. EDUTOURISM AND THE LOGIC OF TRANSFORMATION IN PERSPECTIVE In response to rapid increases in global interconnections over the past several decades, institutions of higher education have intensified their focus on the importance of molding students as global citizens (Davis-Salazar 2016; Caton et al. 2014). The global citizen as imagined by institutions of higher education is meant to be open to ethnic, cultural, political, and linguistic difference, aware of positionality and structural causes of inequality, and be willing and able to communicate across these boundaries (Pan et al. 2011; Palacios 2004). Colleges and universities accordingly market the power of study abroad to actively transform student perspectives through interaction with peoples, places and cultures, and crossing of borders both geographic and personal (Bellamy and Weinberg 2006). In addition to broadening intellectual and cultural horizons, educational study-abroad programs are promoted as a way to enhance the ability of students to link theory with real-word experience, and groom students to solve real-world problems in global contexts (Kolb 1984). Study-abroad programs are thus heavily promoted as an important component of the enhanced college experience that crafts effective global citizens. According to the Institute of International Education, the number of U.S. students studying abroad for credit has increased more than 300 percent since

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1990 (IIE Fast Facts 2017). At the undergraduate level, over 10 percent of U.S. students studied abroad in some form in the academic year 2015–2016, and this does not include participation in non-credit work, such as international internships and volunteerism. Simultaneously, there has been a significant shift away from the “traditional” semester abroad program toward short-term study abroad (defined as 8 weeks or less). Short-term programs now account for 63 percent of college-facilitated international experiences (IIE Fast Facts 2017). This massive shift in the way students engage with study abroad has important implications for the proposed goal of transformation in student perspectives, especially in the field of anthropology where such experiences are considered a rite of passage for serious adherents of the field. Reasons for the recent increase in short-term study-abroad programs are numerous and complex. Many—if not most—colleges and universities have highlighted the importance of global competency in their strategic plans without devoting the necessary resources to support in-depth and long-term student engagement. As one solution to these shortcomings, individual professors have been encouraged to develop short-term programs on their own, without much institutional infrastructure or support. The Cuba Music and Culture Seminar, for example, is an institutionally cost-neutral way to increase student participation in study abroad because the student pays for their own tuition and travel costs, as well as those of the instructors. In many ways, the short-term program releases the institution from the burden of supporting study abroad while still achieving strategic goals of global participation outlined in mission statements. There has also been an explosive proliferation of a private edutourism industry designed to incentivize short-term programs through commercialized collaboration with individual faculty members. Commercial edutourism companies design customized travel itineraries, plan and coordinate travel logistics, and provide insurance and safety nets for a wide variety of higher education groups traveling abroad. Many such companies market their services aggressively, making grand claims that short-term study abroad will craft global citizens and transform student perspectives. Barkin (2018: 2) argues the commercialized objective of getting more students to study abroad often overshadows critical engagement with global issues and tends to prioritize “experiences that more closely match the romanticized, image-based representations of study abroad.” Dorn et al. (2008), counter that commercial edutourism groups can be effective when they offer a network of support (i.e., cultural brokers) that directly address pre-existing colonial imaginaries rather than reinforcing stereotypes. Regardless of the model used, the short-term program can be an institutional solution for some of the challenges that students face when considering

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study abroad. For some students, the proportionally lower costs of short-term programs make study abroad affordable. For students with little experience traveling away from home, the short-term program can be less daunting for both the students and their parents, allowing them to “dip their toes in the pool” with a group of other students without committing to a full-semester experience on their own. Finally, as Barkin (2018) indicates, athletes with rigid schedules and STEM majors with inflexible and scaffolded academic requirements can take advantage of short courses in a winter or summer term. For these and other reasons, the number of students enrolling in short-term study-abroad programs continues to increase. Although there have been studies that support the effectiveness of both long-term and short-term study abroad in achieving the goal of education for global citizenship (Landon et al. 2017; Paige et al. 2009; Anderson et al. 2006; Jackson 2006; Williams 2005), it is difficult to objectively measure transformation in student perspectives. In theory, taking the student out of their comfort zone forces them to enter physical, geographic, political, and psychological liminal spaces. In these personal transition zones between the familiar and unfamiliar, change in entrenched perspectives can take place. But several authors challenge the idea that travel leads to transformation in perspective (Vande Berg et al. 2012). Lean (2012), for example, argues that while travel leads to changes in physical location and cultural surrounds, it is a much more complex undertaking to remove pre-existing schemas and constructed memories about Other people, ideas, and ways of life. Nash (1977) and Bruner (2005) suggest that rather than challenging pre-existing stereotypes, beliefs, and ideologies, tourist travel can instead solidify colonial relations by reinforcing existing ways of seeing and acting in the world. In order to address the kinds of concerns raised by Lean (2012) and Bruner (2005), so-called “best practices” in edutourism encourage the use of assignments and focused discussion about social, political, and cultural difference while in the field, and an on-going critical-reflective portfolio approach to capture the challenges the traveler has encountered to their perspective, and whether and how this leads to new perspectives (Landon et al. 2017; Donnelly-Smith 2009; Dorn et al. 2008; Deloach et al. 2002). Leaders of short-term study-abroad trips report that crossing borders, both personal and geographic, does challenge pre-existing ideas about people, governments, and places (Doerr 2012; Paige et al. 2009; Anderson et al. 2006), but there is consensus that there is a need for clear pedagogical approaches to guide uncomfortable experiences toward critical reflection (Tarrant et al. 2014; Donnelly-Smith 2009; Zemach-Bersin 2007). The Cuba Music and Culture Seminar at Washington College attempts to facilitate student reflection about pre-existing stereotypes and imaginaries through a number of pedagogical approaches discussed in detail below.

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“BEING THERE”: TRANSFORMING PERSPECTIVES THROUGH ETHNOGRAPHIC METHODS David Kolb argues that experiential learning (as opposed to rational–idealist models of learning) is powerful because it “requires the student to involve themselves fully, openly and without bias in new experiences and to reflect on and observe their experiences from many perspectives so that ultimately they can integrate their observations with theories to make decisions and solve problems (1984: 31).” According to Kuh (2008), study abroad can be a powerful form of learning that offers the opportunity for students to explore cultures and worldviews through a new lens and to examine “difficult differences” such as race, gender, inequality, and human rights through personal experience and critical thinking. As Dewey (1938) argued, experiential learning is greatly enhanced when students engage in inquiry and reflection on challenges to their pre-existing ideas about the world. We argue that anthropological method, as a focused way of learning about another culture, functions as a powerful vehicle for experiential and transformative learning (see La Brack and Bathurst 2012) when incorporated with a short-term studyabroad program. The hallmark of ethnographic methods is participant observation. This approach emphasizes the power of immersion in the daily life of local peoples for gaining better understanding of both the emic (insider’s) and etic (outsider’s) perspective and keeping field notes to sharpen observation skills. Being surrounded by the flow of language, activity, and symbols can be disorienting at first and rapidly become fatiguing, but the action of being attuned and acutely engaged in participating, observing, and taking notes can provide both broader and deeper perspective. The Cuba Music and Culture Seminar uses field-based writing assignments which require students to open their senses to go beyond observing ritual and ask students to be aware of action and symbol and attempt to be analytical about meaning. When coupled with readings about Cuban music and culture, and daily discussion meant to unpack and contextualize fieldwork experiences, this approach supports critical reflection that leads to integration of theory and experience. During our field course, participant-observation exercises are assigned at numerous public and private religious performances in Havana. Many of these are associated with Santería (also known as Lucumí), the most pervasive Afro-Cuban religion in Havana. Students report that they were more prepared to understand these ceremonies, because they learned the music styles in pre-orientation classes before traveling to the island and read extensively about the deities and rituals of Santería. We assigned a variety of systematic participant-observation exercises for each performance. At times the students were required to observe the interaction between the participants

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(a large gathering of believers who sing, dance, and perform other highly ritualized behaviors) and the music specialists, which comprise a singer and three-seated drummers each playing a double-headed hourglass shaped batá drum. At other times, they observed the musical, gestural, and verbal interaction between the drummers themselves. On one occasion, they were required to observe a possession trance by one particular orisha (deity) and make note of garment colors, jewelry design, dance styles, and other behaviors. On yet another occasion, they focused on the nature and depth of involvement of the different genders in the ritual. The goal of these assignments is to involve the student in ritual in a directed and intentional way. This pedagogical approach may detract from aesthetic enjoyment of the ritual, but it encourages participatory awareness and reflection upon the underpinnings of ritual actions, which transforms the experience into a more informed understanding of the religion. Several of our students indicate that this approach gave them more of an etic or “insider” experience of the rituals. For example, one student indicates that he was able to “step in” to a Cuban ritual, almost as if he were stepping into another culture: When I initially began reading about the Lucumí faith it was difficult to grasp and understand all of the parts. However, once I was in Cuba, I was able to observe the ceremonies and learn about the faith through personal experience and reflection. I’ll never forget stepping into the house and observing the drumming, dancing, and possession firsthand. It was like stepping into another world.

Other assignments based on qualitative methods are designed to enhance engagement with local events and people and critically examine structural features of political, economic, and cultural difference. For example, students design, conduct, and analyze semi-structured interviews with Cuban religious practitioners to learn more about personal histories of Cuban policy toward the practice of Santería song, dance, and ritual. Observations from these assignments are tracked and analyzed in daily reflective journals designed to encourage the student to make sense of what they are learning and search for larger connections between classroom-based theoretical constructs and on-the-ground experience. Unfortunately, these assignments created anxiety about academic accountability and distracted the student from the lived experience of “being there.” On the other hand, this approach required students to question what they were seeing, to be more active in their observations, and to make connections between their learning and their experience. The power of these methods to transform the experience comes through in some of the student reflections. Taking a binary stance that traditional tourism is “shallow” or “superficial” (see MacCannell 1973; Di Giovine 2013),

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and that ethnographically informed tourism is more educational, one student notes in her journal, “The tourist bus trip we took around the island reinforced how grateful I was for the extensive assignments that we did in Havana. Though I enjoyed seeing more of the island and doing tourist-themed activities rather than ethnographic ones, it definitely felt like something was lacking. I did not feel like I was gaining any cultural knowledge, and in some cases I felt like I was not doing anything even remotely related to Cuban culture.” Another student reflects on the power of “being there” for learning about ritual, saying, “For me, first-hand experience was the only way to understand the sense of community and see the rules of the rituals in action.” As discussed in the next section, this sense of obtaining an insider perspective through first-hand experience was also enhanced by the structure of the tour experience itself.

HOMESTAYS AS “DEEP IMMERSION” AND EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING Housing provides a visceral experience of the “Elsewhere” that varies quite dramatically based on setting and location. Hotels in the tourist district of Havana offer their guests an experience that in no way resembles that of the average Cuban. These hotels are extravagant and air-conditioned. There are 24-hour services of every kind, and one can access the outside world at any time through telephone and high-speed Internet. In contrast to the everyday experience of average Cubans who, according to government reports, earn $35/month and receive ration tickets for food, in tourist hotels there are almost never shortages of staples such as meat, cheese, or dairy. The Cuba Music and Culture Seminar is deliberately designed to disentangle the students from the comfort zone of the tourist district and provide them with a “behind-the-scenes” (MacCannell 1973) view of the typical workingclass experience. Students were not only placed in the homes of “average” Cuban families a few blocks outside of the “tourist bubble,” the geographic area in which tourist-based attractions and services are concentrated (see Bosley and Brothers 2008), they were also displaced from each other and placed in four to six homes over a one-block radius. Given that tourist bubbles often have social, political, and physical boundaries inhibiting tourist– resident interactions, this relative isolation in working-class neighborhoods is meant to facilitate “deep immersion” and more “authentic” interactions between the student and their Cuban hosts and encourage engagement with neighborhood residents as they come and go throughout the day. Bringing to mind the “staged authenticities” that MacCannell (1973) and Urry and Larsen (2011) engage with, a staff writer for our college alumni magazine opined

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after the trip in 2015, “Rather than staying in hotels, the students stayed and ate meals with local working-class families, which only deepened their experience of the culture.” Unlike many traditional tours to exotic locations that our students have experienced with friends and family in the past, our Cuban homestays are not spaces for leisure, and the luxuries and conveniences of home are not present. Conditions are somewhat spartan, with few of the distractions that one would typically find when touring. For students with little knowledge of Spanish, the language barrier intensifies their isolation. This immersion experience gives students the perception of a more “authentic” and “behind-the-scenes” experience and deeper learning. As one student reflected in a journal entry, I think staying in homestays made our experience much richer. The fancy hotels where most tourists stayed seemed nothing like the rest of Cuba, removed from the bustle of the streets. However, our homestays were never quiet, and we could hear stray dogs barking and vendors blowing their whistles early in the morning. While someone could stay in a hotel and never interact with Cubans beyond scripted tours, we were able to get to know our hostesses.

An added aspect of immersion is that all of our meals are served in a single homestay. Food is prepared on a two-burner stove or carried to our location from other homes by several women who live in the immediate neighborhood. In their journal entries, our students project an imaginary that eating locally made food in working-class Havana set them apart from other tourists, offering them deeper insider knowledge of the life of an average Cuban. At least one student projects “personal imaginings” (Salazar and Graburn 2014) of transcending Otherness and difference, interpreting homestays and homecooked meals to represent a more meaningful and authentic experience, “By staying in homestays, rather than hotels, I feel we really got a taste of true Cuban life. They treated us like close relations and no one felt like a stranger after leaving their homestays. We were able to enjoy Cuba like Cubans, eating what is traditionally offered and learning customs and having interactions we would not have had normally if we had stayed somewhere as guests only, and not guests and ‘friends’ (to an extent).” The women who cooked for us are home cooks, not trained in catering for large groups. This informal cooking arrangement is highly unusual, and it took us months to convince them to cook for our group. Part of their reluctance was that they are extremely limited in the foods that they can obtain. While fruit, bread, and vegetables can be bought in local corner markets, quality meats, dairy, and packaged foods are extremely difficult to find outside of the tourist bubble. There are no supermarkets, and the local groceries have a few sparse items on the shelves. Competition for the available items

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is strong and long lines are a way of life. For Cuban citizens, most staples are guaranteed by the state through a ration process. In order to provide food for our program, however, our hosts must return to stores over and over, they call friends to ask about food availability in distant neighborhoods, and they procure food well in advance storing items in their own freezer space as well as that of friends and family. We also bring limited packaged food such as peanut butter and pasta from the United States with us on the plane. Our hosts cook and serve the food on a large, second-floor balcony overlooking the street, an open space that allows for regular and sustained interaction between the hosts and our students. Over the course of numerous conversations with our hosts, the students begin to understand the limitations on the availability of many foods that they take for granted in the United States. As instructors, we tie these limitations directly to the U.S. embargo on Cuba, and take the opportunity to link these restrictions to the history of Cuba–U.S. relations. As a result of these intimate encounters, students begin to seriously question the goals and effectiveness of the U.S. embargo. One student notes, “Staying in a homestay and eating authentic cuisine increased my knowledge and understanding of the culture as well. For example, our hosts talked about the realities of how hard it was to get food for our group because they had rations. These real-world experiences taught me more than a book ever could, and completely changed my perspective on the country.” While students clearly appreciate living and eating “like a local,” and gain insight into the individual hardships posed by political and geopolitical relations, as discussed below, they also transform their experience in unanticipated ways to highlight differences between themselves and their hosts. UNPLUGGED: AUTHENTICITY AND THE DEPLOYMENT OF STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISMS The ubiquity of instant access to information and social media in the developed world creates a sharp contrast with travel in Cuba, where until very recently, there was no mobile Internet access, and even hardwired access to Internet was slow, unreliable, and expensive to use. While most study-abroad programs insist upon having all students use cell phones and be accessible at all times, this is not possible in Cuba. Disengagement from technology was not a deliberate part of the course design but, in fact, it played an unanticipated and important role in how our students understood Cuban culture and their own personal experience while traveling. Lack of access to phone and Internet created a liminal space for our students, who were displaced and newly located in both space and time perhaps for the first time in their lives. This was, for them, a radical separation from the norm. Highlighting the

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cognitive dissonance this created, one student titled her post-trip paper “Our Neighbor That’s Worlds Away.” In this student imaginary, Cubans are living in an entirely different world. A key theme that emerged in our data is the imaginary that Cubans are information deprived, and thus less knowledgeable about the state of the modern world. While it is true that international news is filtered heavily by state-owned media, Cubans obtain alternate information from tourists and friends and family living overseas. Ironically, numerous students interpreted their own short-term information deprivation as a powerful vehicle for personal transformation, reporting that being in Cuba offers them a more “authentic” reality due to the fact that they could not disengage from the immediate surroundings and could not avoid person-to-person interactions. For example, one noted, “Without access to technology, especially personal technology, there is a more rhythmic feeling to the streets. The street vendors and early morning workers even had a way of chanting their products that had similarities to the Rumba, Timba and batá singing.” Another student reported, I felt that being away from the entire world helped me build a better relationship with Cuba because I was always living in the moment and I never missed anything. It was different than living in America where everyone has their head buried in a phone or computer screen. Being away from technology forced me to take a step back from knowing about what everyone else was doing and forced me to engulf myself in what was happening in the present.

These notions of information deprivation were extended to the idea of Otherness as students deployed strategic essentialisms and “imperialist nostalgia” (Rosaldo 1989). Students examined Otherness through a modernist lens, valorizing Cubans for being a more “authentic” people due to their lack of technology. For example one student says, “Cubans attend performances to be moved by the music, not to record it on the smartphone to make the Twitter world jealous.” And our students appear to imagine that lack of technology is actually a “key” to interpreting the Cuban culture. As one student put it, “While their lack of a sense of time and urgency and their minimal connection to the outside world can be frustrating at times, I envy the Cubans’ ability to value life for what it is and constantly believe in their culture.” These preconceived and seemingly nostalgic ideas about an imagined Cuba that represents a bucolic past were likely preformed through media exposure, and despite evidence to the contrary, selectively reinforced during travel. They form an outline of a core tourist imaginary of what Cuba is to Americans.

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TOURIST IMAGINARIES AND FORBIDDEN CUBA The student narratives we collected over the past four years constitute a set of complexly patterned pre- and post-images of Cuba and Cuban people. The narratives convey these patterns through discourse, images, stereotypes, and cultural and political frameworks that inform students about the Otherness of Cuba. Like other tourists, our students wanted to go “Elsewhere,” which Bodinger de Uriarte and Jacobson (2014) describe as the elusive site of true engagement with an exotic and imagined other, to gain abstract and concrete experiences of transformation. The key difference from other kinds of tourists is that our students were seeking these experiences within the framework of an educational course centered on anthropological and ethnomusicological methods as a way to gain insider access. As one student noted about this approach, “Before the trip, I had nothing concrete to which I could tie the material I was learning and the opinions I was forming; now that I’ve been, and because I spent so much of my time there documenting as much as I could, I have a much more solid, sensory, personal anchor for those thoughts.” Thematic analysis of student assignments indicates that the pre-existing Cuba imaginary is heavily influenced by exposure to politics and media. Not surprisingly, the majority of our students began the course with little or no knowledge of the social, economic, and political realities of Cuba, an island that is only ninety miles from our geographic and political borders. Informed by Cold War political rhetoric, sensationalized events covered in the media such as the Elian Gonzalez story, unsubstantiated “sonic attacks” on diplomats, films such as Scarface, and a few paragraphs concerning the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis in high school history textbooks, students imagine a heavily surveilled, brutally policed, and economically destitute populace desperate to escape to the freedom, opportunity, and order of American society. The resulting imaginary of Cuba is overwhelmingly influenced by constructed memories of communism, dictatorship and its supposed forbidden status. As evidenced by a steady stream of comments in emails, informal conversations, and classroom interactions, students were thrilled by the prospect of traveling to a location that, for all intents and purposes, is imagined as banned by the U.S. government. Thus “being there” with access to the forbidden would be transformative—forever marking them as different from their families, friends, and peers due to experience and gained knowledge. Like Nicaragua in the post-Sandinista period (Babb 2004), Cuba turned to global tourism in order to adapt to the difficult economic realities it faced after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, for Americans in particular, the Cold War political and public narratives swirling around the Cuba–U.S. relationship create a widely shared perception that Cuba is a hostile and

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dangerous place to travel. As one student noted in his journal, “I was under the impression that Cubans hated all Americans and because they are under a dictatorship.” Another student wrote, “Before I left, some of the things my friends and family asked were ‘isn’t it illegal to travel to Cuba; don’t all Cubans hate Americans; isn’t Cuba a very dangerous place to travel?’” A third student commented on his preconceptions of communism and personal well-being, “I knew they were a communist country, and I have only ever heard negative things about dictatorships. Because I wasn’t familiar with this kind of government, I assumed that the people of Cuba would not be very happy.” The prospect of privileged access to an imagined “forbidden” location created conflicting emotions of anxiety and excitement for many of our students. Excitement was generated, in part, by anticipation of the “true authentic” of seeing behind what was imagined as the last iron curtain. As one student pointed out, “Cuba was my first time in a developing country and a socialist/communist country. My experience quickly went from curious and nervous to excitement and a gratitude for the opportunity.” Despite prolonged pre-trip conversations about how safe Cuba is, how open and friendly Cubans are to American tourists, and the fact that the Cuban state relies heavily on tourist dollars, students maintained anxiety about the imagined danger of traveling to the stronghold of a communist dictatorship. In one reflective paper submitted after the trip, a student wrote, “Not only was I afraid of being treated poorly, but I also feared that we would be watched by government officials! I was consumed by ‘what ifs’ and the negative perspectives of my family and friends.” Another student summed up his feelings by saying, “I thought about how we would be greeted. Would we be seen as American pigs?” These conflicting imaginaries play a role both in personal identity formation (student as adventurer) and in the imaginary of the place (Cuba as exotic, monolithically communist, and inaccessible). As reflected in their journals after the trip, students were emotionally relieved and intellectually challenged by what they actually experienced on the ground in Cuba. As one student response indicates, the mere fact of “being there” fundamentally transformed their image of this forbidding place, I didn’t realize how uncomfortable I would feel in this “forbidden place” until I arrived there. I felt an overwhelming sense of unfamiliarity; it was my first experience of “culture shock.” So the first two days were terrifying for me. Everything that I did felt uncomfortable. But at the end of eight days I was somehow sucked into this culture and I was grasping at concepts or new questions to ask that, at the beginning of the journey, I never would have thought to ask.

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DANCING AND SINGING: DISCOMFORT AND INVERSION As we designed The Cuba Music and Culture Seminar, we sought multiple strategies that would enhance an understanding of cultural familiarity and difference among the students. Aside from housing, the most effective activity we developed was a series of ritual song and dance lessons with Cuban religious practitioners and professional dancers from internationally recognized cultural ensembles. This approach differs dramatically from the ubiquitous tourist dance lessons which, Simoni argues, are designed to facilitate exuberant, sensual, seductive, and “festive happenings” (2016: 153) in tourist dance clubs. Our approach also contrasts with Skinner’s (2008) focus on “social dance” (i.e., popular couples dancing) and its interplay with sexuality and gender construction. Rather than having “natives” perform a welcoming dance or instructors teach an erotic or sexualized version of a popular dance, such as salsa, our students are introduced to the sacred songs and movements of orishas, the supernatural “deities” of Santería religion that were imported and syncretized over hundreds of years of west African enslavement and isolation on the island. The students learn highly prescribed ritual steps and the precise context for their ritual application. The dances they learn are difficult, physically demanding and totally devoid of any “couples” component, as the focus is on the relationship between the individual dancer and the orisha. Our goal is for students to better understand the context and meaning of the relationship between individuals and orishas in an intellectual way, but more importantly to feel these things in their bodies. The reflexive attempt to embody the orisha provides the students with a stronger understanding of the connection between music, movements, and meaning during the ceremonies they attend. This approach combats the tendency to Other Santería practitioners and rituals. Though exhausted from a long day of travel, these lessons began on the evening we arrived in Cuba. The lessons (in particular, dancing) generated a great deal of discomfort and anxiety among our students, challenging them physically, emotionally, socially, and cognitively. Most of the students came to these lessons with little prior experience as either singers or dancers. It quickly became apparent to the students that, as a group, they were substantially less familiar with dance than their Cuban counterparts. This distinction was further exaggerated among our male students who tend to have little or no training in dance. Far from the tourist district, and just a short distance from our homestays, the first round of dance classes were conducted in the permanent rehearsal space of a well-known Afro-Cuban folkloric dance troupe. The space itself

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made a quick and lasting impression on the students. From the exterior, it appeared as if the building might be condemned. An abandoned theater, the rehearsal space is one of the many once-beautiful buildings in Havana that have fallen into desperate disrepair. There is grandeur in the architecture of the building and the beautiful artisanry of the woodwork and balconies, and yet the roof has collapsed and the balconies are sagging and could fall at any moment. With exposed concrete floor and walls, and a ceiling made of patchwork of corrugated metal, puddles of rainwater dotted the floor. We arrived early, and the students grabbed their cameras and captured the room at every angle, many of these photos appearing in the final project, a multimedia journal. Much like our homestays, this rehearsal space served as a form of “backstage” (MacCannell 1973), an authenticating device for romanticized views of the tourist imaginary of Cuban reality. Many of our students report that the space gave them an “insider’s view” and enhanced the sensation that they were forever different (i.e., transformed) from their peers back home. As one student put it, “It was beautiful. It was this raw beauty that had been entirely untouched by American capitalism. It was fresh and real, unlike anything I had ever seen before . . . . So, yes, the buildings were falling apart but who else can say that they learned Afro-Cuban dancing in a crumbling amphitheater in the middle of Havana?” In Cuba, being a professional dancer or musician is a coveted career path. Those employed by one of the many internationally recognized ensembles/ troupes enjoy both prestige and financial security. Across the city, indeed across the island, their approach to teaching is standardized and designed to be accessible and familiar to “apprentice pilgrims,” the steady stream of North American and European dancers that travel to Cuba to “access knowledge, cultural capital, and social capital” (Griffith and Marion 2018: 11). Following standard practices, our instructor began each dance by introducing the students to the relevant orisha, making reference to the salient attributes of the deity that are expressed through movement. She then arranged the students in lines and coordinated their movement in groups of three from one end of the dance floor to the other. The class was supported with live music—three batá drummers, a lead singer, and a few additional singers to provide the chorus. Unlike many of the “apprentice pilgrims” identified and examined by Griffith and Marion (2018), our students are required to take these lessons (rather than seeking them out), they knew nothing of the dance forms being introduced during these classes, and they were not seeking the cultural or social capital that comes with being a Latin dance aficionado. In fact, before the students could engage the dance on its own terms, they had to first come to terms with their own anxiety and discomfort, exemplified

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by one student who noted, “As much as I enjoy to dance on my own, the dance class was completely out of my comfort zone. I struggled a lot during this class and found myself getting very overwhelmed and stressed out . . . the dance was not physically tiring for myself, but it took a lot out of me emotionally.” The dance classes went beyond simply generating physical and emotional discomfort. Having previously only traveled as tourists, most of our students predictably arrived in Cuba expecting to observe the unfamiliar and, as Urry and Larsen (2011) argue, to “gaze” upon Cubans in their cultural setting. The dance classes quickly inverted this gaze, putting them in a “liminal” cultural and intellectual space, as the students became the source of entertainment for the local community. As the students learned their moves, locals began to gather in the open doorway of the rehearsal space. They appeared curious, humored, and appreciative of what they were watching. The students quickly realized that they had become the object of the Cuban gaze, which of course increased their own discomfort. At the same time, this spectacle empowered/ transformed the students who experienced their efforts to breach cultural barriers being met with joy and affirmation from the Cubans. One student observed that the “locals seemed to enjoy watching us Americans struggle to learn.” Another noted that “the locals displayed passion that we were trying to learn instead of viewing them [the Cubans] as a show.” In this particular instance, the Cuban dance instructor was clearly aware of the spectacle that she and the students had generated. In a move that the instructor had never engaged in before and has not done since, she ended the lesson with a dance procession out to the street where the locals watched, smiled, and applauded. Initially viewed from a safe distance (locals peering through an open doorway), the students emerged into a crowded urban street, inviting everyone to observe and judge their talents. Aside from breaching cultural barriers between our students and the Cubans, the experience transformed the student’s sense of self. Whereas their initial response was one of intense discomfort, they also realized that “it didn’t matter if I was the worst dancer in the room, it’s about having fun and sharing an experience.” Another student summed up the experience with the observation, “The dance classes were some of my favorite hours spent in Cuba because I felt like I was physically feeling what it was like to live in Cuba.” In the student minds, they were no longer just American tourists who would gaze at and absorb life in Cuba. Having allowed themselves to become the spectacle, they were in some small way part of Cuba, insiders themselves. As discussed below, once the students adjusted to this newly inverted power relationship, they began to write in their journals about how these dance and song lessons significantly changed their perspective of Cuban ritual.

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“INSIDER” KNOWLEDGE AND EMBODIED LEARNING Prior to departing for Cuba, students were exposed to a substantial amount of literature and recordings designed to give them a basic understanding of Santería. These sources introduced students to unfamiliar mythologies, beliefs, symbols, and ritual practices, as well as a host of expressive elements including songs, drumming, and dance. Though students arrived in Cuba with substantive book knowledge, they lacked a genuine understanding of the interconnectedness of all these elements and, more importantly, the significance this religion holds within the daily lives of many Cubans. This type of knowledge cannot be completely gained through reading, as much of the meaning within a Santería ritual (indeed, any ritual) is encoded within the performance and within the body. In his work on ritual, Schieffelin (1985: 707) assesses the limitations “of a meaning-centered examination of ritual text.” A textual analysis of ritual and its symbols, much like the book knowledge that our students bring to Cuba, is necessarily problematic and incomplete. He argues that, “through performance, meanings are formulated in a social rather than cognitive space, and the participants are engaged with the symbols in the interactional creation of a performance reality, rather than merely being informed by them as knowers” (Schieffelin 1985: 707). To help lead our students toward a transformational experience, we employed two interdependent strategies. On one hand, we offered the students repeated opportunities to experience Santería rituals as participant observers, requiring them to observe multiple layers of the ritual and record their thoughts in field journals. On the other hand, we required them to engage in a series of song and dance lessons from professional instructors, where they learned the movements and words that practitioners and specialists use to engage the orisha. The goal of these classes within our course was not to teach the students to become proficient singers and dancers. Rather, we encouraged the students to supplement their cognitive understanding of the ritual with an embodied knowledge. Though the dance and song classes might not qualify as ritual, Catherine Bell explores the similarities between ritual performance and “ritual-like activities,” asserting that, “the ritual-like nature of performative activities appears to lie in the multifaceted sensory experience, in the framing that creates a sense of condensed totality, and in the ability to shape people’s experience and cognitive ordering of the world” (1997: 161). One student perfectly characterized the relationship between cognitive and embodied knowledge when she observed, “the dance lessons acted as the platform to transition our exposure of Afro-Cuban music from thought to action. No longer were we limited to what we had studied, but now we could put our thoughts into dance moves.”

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We argue that in the context of our study-abroad course, the deepest understanding of rituals can only come through participation/performance (see Griffith and Marion 2018; Simoni 2016; Skinner 2008; Schieffelin 1985). While the students’ participation in the actual rituals is admittedly minimal, these experiences were perceived by the students as both substantial and real. One student observed that, “dance class opened up my understanding because it allowed us outsiders to quickly integrate into the community events.” Having experienced orisha dance during lessons, the students perceived a transformation from outsider/observer to insider/participant. If we take a step back and look at the scene objectively, we see that the sense of being an insider/participant is fleeting and superficial. In truth, the students rarely sang or danced during the actual rituals. Most Cubans would quickly identify them as outsiders, though some may genuinely appreciate any attempt by our students to dance or sing. As singers the students were marginalized because they only knew a handful of the several thousand songs in the repertoire, and as dancers they simply didn’t have enough exposure/ skill. What we observed instead was students simply feeling connected to the ritual by virtue of their newly embodied knowledge. This is exemplified by a student who notes, “the dancers performed moves that I could recognize from lessons. Having listened to the music and tried out the dance routines allowed me to better appreciate the ritual performance.” Another student sums up the entire experience by emphasizing that, “taking Santería dance lessons was one of the most rewarding experiences of being in Cuba because it allowed me to understand and experience their spiritual rituals instead of merely watching.” Encouraging this deeper level of engagement is mostly a positive outcome of the dance and song classes. The potential misstep here is for students to not realize the limits of their experience and to mistake themselves as genuine insiders. Other seminal studies have explored the primacy of the performative and other non-discursive aspect of ritual. Becker and Becker (1981), Keil (1979), and especially Feld (1988) develop the idea that ritual performance uses metaphor to help illustrate abstract ideas. This is an important concept for our students, and an effective pedagogical tool to help them embody the abstract concepts of an unfamiliar belief system. Of course these scholars go beyond simply looking at performance as a metaphor. They explore “iconicity,” the idea that abstract ideas become iconic as they come to be perceived as natural or that some metaphors are so pervasive within a cultural system that they no longer are perceived as a metaphor. Rappaport (1979) argues that when metaphors become so pervasive that they are “hidden” from conscious recognition, making them unquestioned and, in a sense, unquestionable, they are particularly powerful in terms of generating meaning. Within the Santería religion, iconicity is achieved through the coherence between its mythology,

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dance, drumming, song, and visual components such as clothing, beadwork, and creation of ritual altars. To understand the importance and relevance of this religion within the lives of its adherents, which make up a large crosssection of Havana’s population, we ask students to explore the coherence of the above metaphors throughout their immersive experience. Student observations about the metaphors they observed during song and dance classes help illustrate the effectiveness of our approach. One student pointed out how it, “was particularly fascinating to see how the traditional dance reflected the nature of the orisha. The warrior orisha had moves that were more aggressive, similar to pulling back a crossbow. The moves of Yemayá were more fluid and reflective of water and love.” A different student makes a similar observation, this time noting that “the orisha Eleguá’s style of dance was far more childlike than that of the warlike Changó.” She also developed personal connection, as do many Cubans, when she noted that, “as a female, I really enjoyed the dances of Oshún, the orisha of love.” Yet another student expands his observations to include not only dance but song as well stating, “the songs and the drumming somehow mimicked the qualities of the orisha.” One of the ultimate goals of our study-abroad course was not simply to teach our students about a particular religion but to encourage students to recognize the interconnectedness of the various pieces of the ritual and the cultural whole and the importance that this particular belief system plays within the lives of ordinary Cubans. Some of the students demonstrated an appreciation for this approach. As one student summarized, the dance and song classes “presented important information in and of themselves, but also in the ways in which they fit into the course of daily life. I was interested to learn, for example, just how many people know the orisha in some way or other—from the number of people at ceremonies and performances, the number who actively sang and danced, the colored bracelets I learned to start looking for on people’s wrists, and the people walking by in the street below who called back in response to our song lessons.” The success of this approach to teaching about ritual and metaphor, however, does not translate into transformations in all preconceived student-tourist imaginaries. “FROZEN IN TIME” AND NOSTALGIC NEOCOLONIALISM Numerous authors suggest that one of the core imaginaries of what Di Giovine (2009) calls the “touristic field of production” is the notion of the

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“exotic elsewhere” (Salazar 2010) as somewhere “frozen in time.” Echtner and Prasad (2003) write about this core imaginary as the “myth of the unchanged,” and Picard and Di Giovine explore this imaginary as a seductive promise of renewal through “encounters with the enchanted worlds of a past golden age” (2014: 2). This enduring touristic narrative implies that humankind lost something intangible and essential with the advent of industrialization. The myth motivates many tourists to travel to locations that are imagined as pristine or untouched by modern development in a search for something that is more authentic. Simultaneously, the tourist is drawn to the possibility of personal transformation through escape from modern life. Almost without exception, the glossy travel brochures aimed at attracting American tourism to Cuba are adorned with nostalgic images of mid-century American cars and exotic Afro-Cuban people in colorful clothing smoking hand-rolled cigars. Americans, who have no alternate images of Cuba to consume, develop a robust conception of the island as unchanged since the revolution in 1959. The myth of the unchanged deeply inscribed our students’ experience in Cuba with specific meaning. They were thrilled to be among the first and the few Americans to see a formerly forbidden communist country that is imagined as untouched by late twentieth-century progress. These beliefs become clear in how the students intellectually and emotionally unpacked their experience of the Cuba Music and Culture Seminar. As one student notes, “I myself am lucky enough to have had the opportunity to visit Cuba, a nation where few Americans have even been permitted for decades. It was an adventure of a lifetime” This experience of traveling in Cuba set them apart from others, marking them as intrepid and knowledgeable of something unique and mysterious. This tourist imaginary of a place frozen in time, especially at a historic juncture in which Cuba–U.S. relations were opening for the first time in nearly sixty years, was a powerful motivator for participation in our program. As one student wrote, “The country is aptly described as a time warp with old features such as cars and Spanish colonial structures mixed into the semi-modern life of this developing country. All of these features make Cuba an attraction second to none.” The myth of Cuba as untouched and frozen in time was often translated into what Rosaldo (1989) describes as “imperialist nostalgia,” or a longing for some imagined “traditional culture” that was destroyed through the process of conquest and colonization. A common theme in student reflections is that a new and more open era would lead to inevitable destruction of Cuban culture due to Westernization. Despite having read extensively about the colonization of Cuba first by Spain, and later by the United States of America, an overwhelming majority of student narratives indicate a strong desire to

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maintain Cuba as it is imagined in traditional touristic production, replete with decaying mansions from the era of king sugar, mob-owned casinos, old American cars, mojitos, and dance clubs. As one student noted, “Open relations with the U.S. could lead to some of the historic charm being lost because of tourism.” Another student delved into the presupposed faults of capitalism and human nature, suggesting that “Westernization might bring a selfish aspect to Cuba that could tamper with the deep beauty and spirituality of its people.” The irony here is that as Western tourists, the students are implicated for causing the very transformations that they mourn. Perhaps they come to see themselves not as traditional tourists replete with assumed destructive attitudes and behaviors but rather “anti-tourists” due to their status at study-abroad students. The future of Cuba imagined by our students is, of course, much more complicated than expressed above, and they show optimism that economic development could lead to more political freedoms, fewer human rights abuses, and more access to information and goods. They also expressed fears that, if open relations with America led to unchecked development, corporate interests could quickly create monopolies over resources and services, leading Cuba to become overly Americanized. These latter sentiments reflect a desire to maintain the very product the tourist is consuming, a specifically constructed image of Cuba that is created, packaged, and sold by tourist companies and the media. Despite constant course conversations about these issues, there is very little concern in our students’ writings about the potential for political reform and economic development to erode current Cuban rights, such as the rights to a home, enough food staples to the feed the family, the right to high-quality health care, and the right to a free education. Very few of our students express any concerns about the potential for development to lead to inequality, cultural expropriation, or exploitation of the vulnerable, choosing instead to focus on an intangible “authentic” that could be lost if corporate franchises take over the island. Reflective journals from The Cuba Music and Culture Seminar suggest that our teaching methodologies did little to challenge the core imaginary of an island frozen in time. Despite the fact that they are exposed to Cuban music and religious ritual as a constantly evolving set of cultural practices, and despite the fact that the Cuban people with whom they interacted are well aware of current international developments, student reflections indicate the perception that they were engaging with a people and place that are somehow outside the normal flow of time. As one student portrayed his experience, “It was as if I stepped into a time capsule and traveled back to the 1950s, when the embargo between Cuba and the United States was put into place.” By the end of our program, pre-existing imaginaries of a more primitive and authentic place remain unchallenged.

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CONCLUSIONS In this chapter we examine and assess ways in which pedagogical approaches can stimulate transformation in pre-existing student-tourist imaginaries about Cuba. Citing anonymized student commentary, we identify areas of the student experience where transformation in perspectives is effective. Success in transforming imaginaries appears to correlate to activities that most lay siege to their comfort zones. We argue that “deep immersion” creates physical, cultural, and intellectual discomfort, which opens the student to new perspectives. We view deep immersion as one form of anti-tourism which fosters higher quality relationships between the tourist and the host community. While deep immersion can take many forms, our specific short-term studyabroad program focuses on avoiding the “tourist bubble,” participating in the daily activities of average Cubans, and learning the multiple layers of metaphor and meaning found in Afro-Cuban religious song, dance, and ritual. In practice, our students lived with Cubans, ate exclusively home-cooked Cuban food, enjoyed informal conversations with our hosts, had no access to television, telephone, or Internet, and were greeted every morning by the sights, sounds, and smells of a bustling, working-class Cuban neighborhood. These lived experiences resulted in most students expressing that they experienced a more “behind-the-scenes” and “authentic” side of Cuba than they would have had they lived in the tourist district or taken a guided tour. During the homestay experience, many of our students’ imaginaries were dramatically transformed. Previously perceiving Cuba as a dangerous, unwelcoming, and forbidden land full of unhappy people, students came away with the belief that Cuba is one of the least dangerous locations one can travel to, and that Cuban people are open, warm, and welcoming despite historical hostility between the governments of the United States and Cuba. They also came to deeply appreciate and empathize with the challenges that Cuban people endure to procure food, transportation, and shelter, and they further understand these issues within the context of geopolitical realities such as the 60-year embargo enforced by the United States. We further argue that anthropological method can function as a powerful vehicle for experiential and transformative learning. By engaging in participant-observation exercises at daily performance and rituals, our students deeply immersed themselves within these settings, seeking meaning and understanding by analyzing visual symbols, participant behavior, context, music, and dance. Daily class discussions of their individual and collective experiences further supported critical reflection, leading to the integration of theory and experience. Student post-trip reflections consistently indicated that they imagined themselves as participants rather than consumers of the rituals and that they appreciated gaining a more emic perspective.

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The most powerful pedagogical tool we employed was daily instruction in Santería song and dance. These approaches require the student to engage their bodies in ritual performance. As they learned new movements and the attached meanings, students supplemented their cognitive understanding of the ritual with an embodied knowledge to allow them to more completely contextualize the objectives of the rituals. In their texts, students indicate they came to more fully understand the relationships of Cubans with the orishas, articulating correctly that Eleguá was childish, Changó was warlike, Oshún was sensuous, and Yemayá was fluid-like water. They didn’t just read these ideas in a book, or see them at a ritual performance, but they also felt (embodied) them while dancing and singing. Indeed their tourist imaginaries about Santería as an exotic religion known for its portrayals in popular media as a form of dark witchcraft were dramatically transformed while in Cuba. At the conclusion of the course, students expressed an understanding that the religion and its cultural expressions (song, movement, costuming, jewelry, and other visual artifacts) are an integral part of daily life in Cuba, especially in Havana. While the Cuba Music and Culture Seminar was transformative in some ways, especially in terms of student learning about history, geopolitics, and ritual and metaphor, it is clear that not all pre-existing imaginaries are challenged, even when assignments are geared toward breaking down such perceptions. Thematic analysis of student texts identified areas where the student-tourist imaginary is so deeply engrained, and so deeply held as part of their own American identities, that our eleven-day experience in the field did little to challenge their perspectives. The mechanisms of student-engagement employed during the Cuba Music and Culture Seminar were less successful, for example, in dispelling tourist imaginaries of Cuba as pre-modern, frozen-in-time, and unchanged. Our students held fast to the imaginary that Cubans, less tethered to their mobile technology than Americans, were able to have more “authentic” experiences/ encounters and live life more fully. For them, this was evidenced by the fact that Cuban’s were always dancing and singing, were constantly greeting each other in the streets, and were passionate conversationalists. They also imagined that the Cuban people lacked a “sense of time and urgency,” an observation that reveals a superficial understanding of many aspects of Cuban life. Ultimately, reflective journal entries suggest that our students fundamentally view an authentic Cuba as one that is untouched by “modern development.” A sense of imperialist nostalgia filled almost every-one of the students with regret over how expanded access to international trade and tourism would bring harm to Cuba’s culture and people. In part, this nostalgia is tied to their identities as modern people who view themselves as removed from a mythical and bucolic past that is closer to nature and more in touch with

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the human spirit. Ironically, this nostalgia also forms as a result of the “deep immersion” we provide in the course. Through a perceived “behind-thescenes” access, the students came to view themselves as “anti-tourists” who, rather than coming just to gaze upon locals, were engaging in deeper and more personal encounters with Cubans and who were seeing and interacting with the “real” Cuba. This perspective, in turn, led them to the same conclusion as the average tourist—that the best Cuba is one that is “pristine” and “frozen in time.” We believe that in future versions of this course, we can address these imaginaries through focused discussions about what Cubans, themselves, want to see in the future.

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Landon, Adam C., Michael A. Tarrant, Donald L. Rubin, and Lee Stonder. 2017. “Beyond “Just Do It”: Fostering Higher Order Learning Outcomes in Short-Term Study Abroad.” AERA Open 3, no. 1: 1–7. Lean, Garth L. 2012. “Transformative Travel: A Mobilities Perspective.” Tourist Studies 12, no. 2: 151–172. Litvin, Stephen W. 1998. “Tourism: The World’s Peace Industry.” Journal of Travel Research 37, no. 1: 63–66. MacCannell, Dean. 1973. “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings.” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 3: 589–603. ———. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nash, Dennison. 1977. “Tourism as a form of Imperialism.” In Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, edited by Valene L. Smith, 33–47. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Paige, R. Michael, Gerald W. Fry, Elizabeth M. Stallman, Jasmina Josic Jon, and Jae-Eun Jon. 2009. “Study Abroad for Global Engagement: Results that Inform Research and Policy Agendas.” Paper presented at the Forum on Education Abroad Conference, Portland, OR. Palacios, Juan Jose. 2004. “Corporate Citizenship and Social Responsibility in a Globalized World.” Citizenship Studies 8, no. 4: 382–402. Pan, Bing, Jeremy Wasko, Kevin Smith, Stephen Litvin, Rene Mueller, Qian Li, and Jie Zang. 2011. “Cultural Education Through Study Abroad in China: A Case Study.” Paper presented at the Tourism Education Futures Initiative World Congress, Philadelphia, PA. Picard, David. 2011. Tourism, Magic and Modernity: Cultivating the Human Garden. New York: Berghahn. Picard, David, and Michael A. Di Giovine. 2014. Tourism and the Power of Otherness. Buffalo: Channel View Publications. Rappaport, Roy. 1979. Ecology, Meaning and Religion. Richmond: North Atlantic Books. Rojek, Chris, and John Urry. 1997. Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. New York: Routledge. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Representations 26, spring: 107–122. Salazar, Noel B. 2010. Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing Imaginaries in Tourism and Beyond. New York: Berghahn. Salazar, Noel B., and Nelson H. H. Graburn. 2014. Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches. New York: Berghahn. Schieffelin, Edward. L. 1985. “Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality.” American Ethnologist 12, no. 4: 707–724. Simoni, Valerio. 2016. Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba. New York: Berghahn. Skinner, Johnathan. 2008. “Women Dancing Back—And Fourth: Resistance and Self—Regulation in Belfast Salsa.” Dance Research Journal 40, no. 1: 65–76. Strauss, Claudia. 2006. “The Imaginary.” Anthropological Theory 6, no. 3: 322–344.

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Tarrant, Michael A., Donald L. Rubin, and Lee Stoner. 2014. “The Added Value of Study Abroad Fostering a Global Citizenry.” Journal of International Education 18, no. 2: 141–61. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage Publications. Urry, John, and Jonas Larson. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage Publications. Vande Berg, Michael, R. Michael Paige, and Kris Hemming Lou. 2012. “Student Learning Abroad: Paradigms and Assumptions.” In Student Learning Abroad: What Our Students Are Leaning, What They’re Not, and What We Can Do About It, edited by Michael Vande Berg, R. Michael Paige, and Kris Hemming Lou, 3–28. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Williams, Tracy Rundstrom. 2005. “Exploring the Impact of Study Abroad on Students’ Intercultural Communication Skills: Adaptability and Sensitivity.” Journal of Studies in International Education 9, no. 4: 356–71. Zemach-Bersin, Tayla. 2007. “Global Citizenship and Study Abroad: It’s All About US. Critical Literacy.” Theories and Practices 1, no. 2: 16–28.

Chapter 6

Weekending Daring Manufacturing the “Discomfort Zone” and Making the Study-Away Self John Bodinger de Uriarte

OVERVIEW The Oxford English Dictionary defines adventure1 as “[a] course of action which invites risk; a perilous or audacious undertaking the outcome of which is unknown; a daring feat or exploit” (accessed March 2, 2019). This chapter explores student desires and goals in participating in study-away programs, especially the expectation for self-transformation coupled to entering the promised “discomfort zone” of study abroad. Breaching the “comfort zone” is a trope that surfaces almost endlessly in study-abroad literature and promotional materials; as it is often invoked, it is a practice worth further investigation. As Anthony Ogden suggests, “The education abroad field will need to discover what motivates students to want to step outside of their comfort zones in spite of perceptions of risk” (2008: 39). In this direction, this chapter also explores the processes of reconciling risk and non-risk as program (and ancillary program) elements, as a practice of “managed danger.” I suggest that, while the ideal of adventure may be unscripted, the delivery of “adventure” is increasingly scripted. Indeed, this chapter is less focused on adventure tourism, per se, and more on student perceptions of adventure, risk, and discomfort as anticipated or expected elements of their study-abroad experiences. Connected to considering adventure is the discourse of “immersion” and its role in study-away programming, and the formation of “global citizenship,” promoted as developed through participating in study abroad. Each of these pivots on individual experience and self-improvement as key products and outcomes and as primary measures for program success and each can be connected to 177

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projections of “adventure” as a validation for an authentic (“anti-tourist”) abroad experience. As Robert J. Gordon asserts: “Over the last three decades, for-profit and not-for-profit agencies have developed adventure experiences as life-enhancing and identity-transforming” (2006: 6). Shortterm “adventure” programs geared toward study-abroad students capitalize on such projections and may work in tandem with program providers that offer shorter weekly course schedules to accommodate travel and outside programming opportunities. Briefly, this chapter also examines the role of photographs (of selves and others) as particular kinds of signs that circulate to confirm or validate study-away experiences, often framed as a validation of adventure consumed. I draw my observations from having taught five sections of a general course designed for post–study-abroad reflection over the last three years, a component of my university’s embrace of study-away as a requirement for all students.2 Each study-away program includes one preparatory course, one “incountry” component, and one reflection course. Students that do a semesterlong study-away program secure them with the help of the home institution’s study-abroad coordinators or outside providers—including other colleges and universities—then participate in a general reflection course after returning to our university. These involve small classes, with a mix of students from a variety of programs, and they sometimes include international students for whom their experience in the United States provides their “study abroad.” I also teach reflective courses for the short programs I lead with a colleague to Iceland, the Galápagos, and Morocco.3 This experience has increased my interest in the goal of “personal transformation” as a defining element of study away, and how such transformation is made through different engagements with managed risk and challenges to an imagined “comfort zone” (a phrase invoked far too often in study-abroad literature and practice). Such emphases shift individual transformation from being one outcome among many—an outcome many might assume as a fundamental component of studying and living elsewhere—to its primary goal. Here the rupture of the “comfort zone” is an end in itself (or the establishment or recognition of a “discomfort zone” as part of the study-away experience).4 I shaped in-class writing assignments in the general reflection courses to collect information on how students saw adventure as an element of their study-away programs; I also administered an online survey to further collect information from study-away “veterans” on how they understood “adventure” as part of their experience. Based on my observations, I suggest that comfort-zone challenges are often understood as elements of personally or individually measured adventure, an element of programs and ancillary providers quickly becoming an increasingly commodified component of study-away experiences, and one that “stage[s] more self-directed encounters with difference” (Vrasti 2012: 16).

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To participate in the theme of this book, the distinctions between tourism and study abroad are fairly fluid. Nearly every student response in my classes and survey recognizes that they were tourists for at least part of their experience, and the majority of short-term “weekend adventure” providers are experienced package tour operators. But study away validates students as “non-tourists” at the same moment that it works to manage student experience as smooth and without danger or discomfort: hallmarks of commercial tourism and reflections of alma mater and institutional liability. Understandably, alleviating discomfort while also participating in a larger discourse about breaching the comfort zone, or creating opportunities for “disorienting dilemmas,” provides for conflicted student experience. And the practice of standard tourism is seen by students as being marked by the inauthentic. Students recognize that the tourist often holds things at a distance, engages only superficially with “others,” and is unwilling to surrender the comforts of predictable food, anonymous lodgings, and uninterrupted wireless access. To be a student abroad, however, tempers this distance, providing a kind of antidote to tourism, an “anti-tourism.” To be clear, this is primarily a discursive distinction that students try to navigate in their understanding of their own experiences and the goals and aims of study away. Increasingly, liberal arts colleges and universities are incorporating studyaway experiences as essential to their mission and product. Visit many of their websites and you will find opportunities for study-abroad programs touted. In the current atmosphere of neoliberal measures for higher education, study-abroad programs are one expected commodity among many offered by colleges and universities competing for market share. These vary from shorter, two- to three-week programs run by the university’s faculty (as are the majority at my institution), to semester-long programs run by host universities and study-abroad providers.5 The number of American students studying abroad grew by 2.3 percent in academic year 2016–2017: “IIE [the Institute of International Education] estimates that about 10.9 percent of all undergraduate students . . . study abroad at some point in their undergraduate careers” (Redden 2018). Increasingly among small, liberal arts colleges and universities, study abroad has increasingly shifted from something that some students do to something all students are encouraged (or mandated) to do. Motivations and models for study abroad changed over the course of the twentieth century, reflecting Cold War and post-Berlin Wall realities as more (especially European) destinations became viable and formal political tensions eased, but they continue to maintain clear distinctions between those that visit and those that are visited, those that are subjects and those that are objects for experiential consumption. Western Europe remains the primary site for U.S. student study abroad programs, especially those that do not include a service component. The role of service as an element of higher

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education and study abroad, and its distinction between those that do service and those that are served, is a discussion I am unable to pursue further here. Many contemporary programs emphasize the study of culture and cultural difference, and the cultivation of “global citizenship.” Both reflect current understandings of globalization and its effects. Global citizenship assumes a unified world hurtling toward the future and a citizenship outside of the state. Students are able to build their credentials in contributing to this future by first defining (or making) borders, and then by crossing them (Tsing 2000; Doerr and Taïeb 2017). The assumption of globalization as both inevitable and transparent “masks the extremely different ways that people move through space and perceive the parts of the world they think of as away from home: as a playground for those in search of adventure” (Doerr and Taïeb 2017: 43). Being “away from home” or “elsewhere” is a key element of measuring the study-abroad experience, one that both flattens it by making everyplace equally accessible, while it makes and celebrates the promise of everyplace being different. An increasingly globalized world is a fundamental premise in contemporary study-abroad programs, and such a world is asserted in thinking about adventure as well—some of the borders crossed are between the everyday and the imagined extraordinary provided by going “elsewhere.” The emphasis on either asserting challenges met or the mundane overcome are often expressed through narratives that claim discomfort, hesitations, or fears conquered. In concert with the growth of neoliberalism, this places even more emphasis on the development of “the self” as the only possible measure of experience and the primary goal for study abroad. As my own institution’s website suggests, not unusually, our study-abroad program “will expose you to different cultures while teaching you valuable things about yourself” (Study Abroad at Susquehanna webpage, accessed December 11, 2018). However, the growth in study-abroad programs and their ever-extending support apparatuses comes with concomitant standardization, a baseline that may challenge the delivery of individual experience. As Barkin notes (this book), many study-abroad program providers “pathologize disconnection” from home, the familiar, and the internet, as a way to avoid challenging interactions with other cultures. Greater support networks and carefully managed intercultural interactions are growing markers of offerings provided by study-abroad programs. As study-abroad programs are connected to consumer evaluations via feedback by student-customers within university student course-review platforms, engagements that challenge comfortable worldviews may be intentionally avoided with this in mind. The increasing neoliberalization of higher education, with its reduction of regulatory oversight and its emphasis on market value as a measure of worth, supports a neoliberal master narrative that sees students as a set of savvy consumers who navigate their own way through a wealth of potential

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commodities and predictable dangers—higher education and study abroad programs being at least two of these—without surrendering significant comfort or connectivity (see Urciuoli 2018 for a useful overview). The measuring self is the locus of the neoliberal economy, with the self as both consumer and ultimate evaluator as a reflection of “making society congruent with the logic of market rationality” (Vrasti 2012: 26). Part of the adventure component of study-abroad depends on some of the globalist imaginings that Anna Tsing describes in “The Global Situation” (2000). Here, adventure or the “discomfort zone” asserts a particular kind of disruption understood as important by students: an unsettling of the mundane as a way to assert and value certain kinds of difference or “diversity work.” The “discomfort zone” depends on an imagined set of boundaries that must be breached. The boundaries surface as a component of the taken-for-granted assumptions within which students operate, and many programs are articulated to include the idea that crossing boundaries is a key element of study abroad (and that these boundaries are assumed as being “real” and an element of a globalist imagination; see Doerr, this book, for example). The emphasis on the cultivation of global citizenship as a program outcome also works within a set of predetermined and assumed distinctions between home and host, between here and there, between subjects and objects. This is also a site for some muddling of what these distinctions might be—not in a productive or critical way that questions how they come to be to begin with but more an affirmation that they must exist through the sheer virtue of difference. If the host site is not “different” enough, adventure can help to underscore difference through the introduction or assertion of risk. The decision to take a class or pursue a course of study in a foreign country is usually driven by the desire to have a travel adventure, experience exciting new cultures, and accomplish something extraordinary educationally. (Oxford 2005: 12)

In the general reflection courses mentioned above, I was particularly taken by how many of the students had participated in “adventure weekends,” three-day (or more) programs that were offered either by the main studyabroad provider as add-on options or by secondary providers that advertise in locations recognized as particularly rich in study-abroad student populations, like Florence or Barcelona. Adventure weekend programs can offer trips to paraglide in the Swiss Alps, for example, or to bungee-jump in Cape Town. This area of the student tourist market is very competitive—some of the major providers are bus2alps, Smart Trip Europe, and Weekend Student Adventures. For example, bus2alps advertises a winter trip to Interlaken as a place where “relaxing beauty and high-octane adrenaline live in perfect harmony!

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. . . Scenic mountain walks and calming Alpine Spas collide with adventure activities like Skydiving, Snowboarding, and Night Sledding.” Smart Trip Europe’s description of its three-day trip to Croatia includes “Feeling adventurous? Go off the beaten path and explore Croatia’s emerald green Cetina River on a white-water rafting adventure. If you’re still up for more adventure, cruise around on our party boat and discover exclusive coves along the coastline.” Weekend Student Adventures advertises: “Kick-ass weekend trips for the student abroad in Europe. . . . Make the BEST semester of your life even better with WSA.” The photo on this poster features a group of about thirty white college students gesturing happily in a “groupie” with the Colosseum in the background. One possible message from this photo: “Go someplace different with people very much like you and use the background of being elsewhere to verify fairly standard student tourist practices as exceptional.” Most of the promotional photos for the three sites feature groups of overwhelmingly white students. Promotional materials for WSA’s Adventure in Prague state that it “includes the infamous thermal baths, day trip to Auschwitz, caving expedition beneath the hills of Buda, the iconic Berlin Wall, panoramic views of Prague’s clock towers, and of course the most delicious and hearty meals. . . . as well as the best nightlife.” Why the thermal baths are “infamous” (and Auschwitz is not) or the caving excursion is an “expedition” merits further consideration. And, as in the WSA image described above, the photographing of such experiences is an important element of traveling-student expectations and observations or, as Noel Salazar suggests, the “meaning-making and worldshaping” practices of tourist (and traveling student) imaginaries (2012: 864). Indeed, such photographs function as a semiotics of adventure experience, a circulation of anticipated signs. One way to think about the photos that are products of the study-abroad experience is to consider how they establish or extend student social and cultural capital and to recognize that these measures exist mostly outside of the assessing machines in place for the study-abroad experience. It is stepping outside of these machines—through adventure, in some cases—that builds or confirms necessary capital, in part through a confirming or extending of tourist imaginaries, to participate in what Gordon calls “picture capitalism,” as one way “to connect [Benedict] Anderson’s print capitalism and the imagination of the nation with the way that photography worked and works to imagine adventure and being ‘elsewhere’” (2006: 21). Travel photographs—selfies and others—work to confirm individual experiences by referring to and drawing from established circulations of photographic meaning-making and evidential properties. To follow Jill Walker Retterberg, such photographs are evidence of the power of “cultural filters (norms, expectations, [and] normative discursive strategies” (2014: 22). Cultural filters shape the consumption of images and are equally as powerful

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as technological (camera- or platform-based) filters, if not more so. “The camera . . . provides the visual authentication that one has ‘been there,’ that indeed, the visual documentarian is often the hero. . . . the immortal eyewitness documenting both triumph and disaster” (Gordon 2006: 18). As an element of neoliberal framing, where everything is a potential product shaped by its own consumption, photographs confirm the consumed experience by placing it within anticipated and recognized registers of meaning. In Bonnie Uriciuoli’s terms, they serve as “qualisigns”—potentially meaningful qualities—or “semiotically complex” (Urciuoli 2011: 61) terms that extend “the brand” of the study-abroad experience while also potentially leveling its meaning. The study-abroad measuring self makes a photographic decision, often from a predetermined or pre-signaled array of outcomes: a selfie with the Eiffel Tower in the background, for example. Such photographs resemble a set of words or signs in language. We recognize our ability to make choices between different words to convey different meanings, but we may pay less attention to the fact that the language itself is somewhat fixed and standardized. Study-abroad selfies and other photographs demonstrate particular cultural competencies and reaffirm their meaning through a set of recognized signs and exchanged signals, a range of available vocabularies.6 They work as particular kinds of signifiers, open to a number of de-coupling and re-coupling relationships organized around the confirmation of difference (or alterity) as experience; “photographs are validated through their social biography” (Edwards 1991: 226). With the explosive rise in selfie exchanges through platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, the lines between validating “the authentic” and what Dean MacCannell might call “the staged authentic” (1976) blur and shift almost continuously in the context or practice of exchange or “discursive reiteration” (Urciuoli 2014: 72), where the production of selfies works as a self-authenticating ritual that depends on reiteration and the practice of an experience pointing to itself. Thus, it is also a changing element in imagining the distinction between “authentic” experience and a re-circulation of existing signs, of individual experience understood and represented as part of an on-going range of stage sets for photographs that indicate a receptive audience larger than the self. Indeed, the notion of stage and performance so important to Goffman and those that build from his theories is echoed in the tourist body as performative body (Larsen 2005), one that both acts as tourist and, through such action, co-produces tourist sites and tourist Others. As Mike Robinson and David Picard observe, “photography is a practice of identity construction (‘othering’) for both photographee and photographer” (2009: 19). Photographs taken as an element of study abroad or study-abroad experiences navigate a hazy distinction between tourist bodies and practices and student bodies and practices. As one of Ascione’s students notes (in this

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book): “it felt like the entire fieldtrip was just a big photoshoot. . . . I wanted to feel and experience things, and they were obsessed with taking pictures of themselves doing things.” In a similar vein, while co-directing a recent short study-abroad program in Morocco, I was struck by the immediacy of the experience-to-circulatedphotograph process. Students would arrive at a site and begin almost immediately to take selfies and photos of each other, often ignoring the information being provided by participating faculty or hired guides. The highest currency claim in this process was that the self-photographer or photo subject had just gained “a new profile pic.” Students often uploaded their images instantly to Instagram or a shared group chat. Getting back on the bus or gathering for a meal was followed by a flurry of AirDropping images between phones, almost immediately reliving their imaged experience as a site for group review and shared affirmation. The gap between experience and representation collapses in such practice, reconfigured as recombinant, shifting between the outwardfacing circulation of Instagram, for example, and the inward-facing dynamics of the shared group experience. The transitory nature of selfie/tourist/student photos confirms that their main value is in circulation, not in materiality. They are not “designed to last,” in Walter Benjamin’s sense (1931: 17), but to confirm experience and pass by. We are a long way from the materiality of the photograph, like that of Roland Barthes’s mother as a young girl, famously in the winter garden, its corners bent with handling, its hues faded with time (Barthes 1982). The circulations that currently shape a photograph’s consumption and ontological journey are now often measured through shared platforms, the accumulations of likes, and the currency of reposting. As Elisa Ascione suggests in this book: “selfie-taking while studying abroad becomes a validating practice confirmed through an exchange of anticipated photos.” It is in this space of exchange that a photograph’s “meta-value of memory construction” (Edwards 1991: 221) is experienced, where it “construct[s] memory in its own insistent image” (ibid). I do not want to critique the WSA program mentioned above in particular (or its juxtaposition of Auschwitz and “hearty meals” as comparable program components) but to use it as an example for thinking about adventure and risk. The risk offered as an element of adventure weekends is part of the confirmation of the study-abroad experience, one strangely affirmed by stepping out of the study-abroad program itself. If the discourse of study abroad emphasizes a risk-taking move out of the comfort zone, then standardized programs themselves may present immersive opportunities that are perhaps too comfortable, including increased emphasis on dormitory or apartment spaces shared with other study-abroad students, courses taught in English, and robust and limitless wireless access. The weekends offer a different set

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of experiences for the study-abroad student. This presents a complication— “adventure” is a discourse largely connected to the study-abroad experience writ large—at once seductive and challenging, it realizes value as an experience of risk in an environment unfamiliar. One question worth asking in this newer scenario: does “adventure” serve as an authenticator for the experience of the alter or different? As study abroad becomes a more expected component of the private liberal arts college experience, and its support apparatuses more developed and extensive, how does the student “self” confirm an individual experience at once different, risk-taking, uncomfortable, and safely managed? Judging from collected responses regarding challenges and discomforts while studying abroad, many elements of breached comfort zones are familiar and anticipated: different patterns of “politeness” in public places, different gender norms, unfamiliarity with language, navigating transit systems, negotiating public spaces in cities, encountering poverty or homelessness for the first time, being the victim of a pickpocket, unwelcome advances or confrontations, and different concepts of “personal space,” for example. But as “uncomfortable” elements like this are progressively “managed out” of study-abroad experiences, the pursuit of challenge or adventure as an add-on to the study-abroad program may step in to replace them. The discourse of adventure, and the presentation of adventure as a commodity, drives some of the ways that students evaluate their programs, and may guide some of the structure and market for ancillary providers’ “adventure weekends.” The “adventure” is separated from the overall program experience at the same time that it is being featured. While this may sound contradictory, I suggest that as some of the adventurous aspects of study abroad—food, accommodations, language, foreign course structures, or pedagogies—are designed out of programs, things like caving, paragliding, and bungee-jumping are either written in or made available. Students that go on study-abroad programs as an adventure or in pursuit of adventure frequently discover that a number of challenging components have been captured by attention paid to access, liability, and risk management. One important question here may be what constitutes adventure, and how this constitution is connected to the co-productive practices of tourist and student imaginaries, where subjects are formed or confirmed through established circulations of ideas, images, narratives, and desires. As Shari Jacobson and I discuss elsewhere (2018), managed risk helps create a predictably unpredictable world. Here student affect at once affirms “the authentic” of self-measured experience and self-challenge while also participating in careful orchestrations of “daring” where the experiencing self is the gravitational (and evaluative) center of program value. In addition, adventure as an element of study abroad is often projected as occurring

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outside the classroom—indeed, as in other movements in contemporary pedagogy, the classroom becomes potentially the last place one would look for authentic experience, challenge, and learning. While flipping classrooms, experiential learning, or service learning (for example) may present valuable new methods for imagining pedagogy, within the context of study abroad this can be compared to earlier understandings of such programs as providing challenging and potentially productive disorientation through immersion into a foreign or profoundly different set of daily cultural routines. Access to cultural alterity becomes more elusive (Doerr and Taïeb 2017) within the context of burgeoning programs and structures to welcome students while away. Free time in such programs can be cut up and sold, so that out-ofclassroom time may focus on adventure travel rather than immersion in one’s “home” site as adventure, for example. Indeed, the weekly class schedule in a number of study-abroad programs—and the weekly course schedules students create for themselves—help to create three-day weekends for extra pursuits, sometimes including almost frenetic international traveling. Such short travel experiences seem profoundly anti-immersive. In contrast, one might argue that an entire study-abroad program must be seen as an immersive experience in some sort of alterity, regardless of design. But alterity is becoming a more predictable and homogenized commodity for tourists, perhaps especially in study-abroad programs.7 This is part of the flattening of difference mentioned before and the expanding focus on liability and predictability as both consumable products and a set of safety measures for study-abroad students. As Neriko Doerr suggests, study abroad “relies on the very existence of cultural difference, which it seeks to overcome. It capitalizes on the desire for adventure while also seeking to contain it” (2012: 1). But commodified “bubbles” that offer risk as a set of individually oriented experiences or rites of passage challenge the definition of adventure cited at the beginning of this chapter. Clearly, study abroad serves as a threshold experience for an ever-growing number of college students, a passage through liminality toward the attainment of an imagined global citizenship. A projected outcome guaranteed through the experience itself, “global citizenship” surfaces in study-abroad promotional literatures almost as much as “comfort zone.” If such passage is a projected outcome, packaging it as a set of experiences ancillary to the main study-abroad program both delivers and limits its impact as it is caught up in a discourse that oscillates between risk and the recognition of liability. However, as Ogden suggests, “the unfortunate irony inherent in education abroad is that instead of dispelling myths or false perceptions of risk, we may actually be perpetuating them” (2008: 47). For their part, students may see stepping out of the program as its own measured risk, and

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perhaps its own set of authentic experiences. Yet even here, students oscillate between adventure and the parameters of safety. As one discussed her experiences, “Try every new thing. Don’t do anything stupid that I wouldn’t do in the states.” And another asserted that he was “Safely putting myself out there in uncomfortable situations.” Navigating the terrain between comfort and discomfort, safety and risk becomes a key element for students to understand, and express, their study-abroad experiences. Participating in a commodified set of risk experiences is one exercise of the neoliberal subject as “active, free, autonomous, and self-governing, seeking to ‘enterprise themselves’ and to maximize their quality of life through acts of choice” (Doerr 2012: 6) These acts of choice are expressed through the marketplace of both study abroad and adventure weekends, firmly situated in the discourse of outcome-based learning best realized by individual consumption with an eye on self-improvement and self-transformation (a profile that also fits contemporary trends in higher education). The discourse of selftransformation may drive students to measure any experience not immediately “risky” or “uncomfortable” as non-transformational. For example, one student in Barcelona for a semester traveled to Dublin over spring break to be there for St. Patrick’s Eve—in his words, “other than this, there was not much going on in Ireland.” His emphasis points away from classroom, language, and immersive work and toward those practices that seem more individually “transformational” through their “similar difference,” imagined risk, and contained discovery. Here a street party in Dublin becomes the only thing “going on” in Ireland. As another student reflected on his recent experience in Iceland, “Yes, I got drunk with other students in the program. But I got drunk in Akureyri and that makes all the difference.” In this instance, place accords the confirmation of difference, regardless of the activities pursued or companions chosen. Although the last two examples focus on alcohol consumption, I am not condemning them as sites or experiences devoid of the potential for cross-cultural value or interchange. Rather, I am examining the frame offered by students to make sense of their experiences. On the other hand, students think about acceptable parameters for discomfort. For example, the Lake Mývatn area in northern Iceland is notorious for it swarms of midges in summer. They are the fulcrum point for the entire area’s ecosystem, serving as fish food, fertilizer, and tourist suppressor. They are tiny, number in the millions, and are particularly attracted to the exposed moist areas of humans and other animals—eyes, noses, and mouths. Savvy travelers invest in nets that cover their heads and necks to minimize the discomforting annoyance of the insects, and our students in Iceland were no exception. But the nets are not foolproof, and they make eating and drinking especially challenging.

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My university’s summer program to Iceland features a landscape survey of an abandoned farm site in the Mývatn area and calls on student group work to measure and take note of the site’s physical features. Access to the site calls for a half mile hike across a boggy marshland and includes fording a small spring-fed stream. Each of these elements supported hordes of midges. For the summer 2018 program, the farm site experience presented a collective student low point (and one that haunted us through later student evaluations). Apparently, there is anticipated and acceptable discomfort as an element of study abroad, and then there is discomfort. In this instance of student evaluation, the rise of the measuring self as a component of the study-abroad experience is not divorced from other assertions of neoliberal ideology where, as Henry Giroux recently noted, “the only unit of agency and analysis that matters is the isolated individual” (2017). While we can recognize that study abroad has long valued the self-transformational component of living and studying “elsewhere,” its shift to being the primary component is notable (as compared to an increased mastery of another language, for example, or access to certain archives, faculty, or other resources). And conflicted. At the same moment that students are encouraged to look outside of classrooms and programs for “authentic” experience during their study-abroad, they are also increasingly urged to imagine such programs as contributing to the formation of both global citizenship and the development of cultural competence. These concepts remain profoundly under-defined in most study-abroad promotional literatures; indeed, as Zemach-Bersin notes, “‘global citizenship’ in study-abroad materials is often an empty signifier” (see also Streitwieser and Light 2009; Greer and Schweitzer this book). Global citizenship is often offered as something conferred directly through the experience of study abroad but experience is not the same thing as learning, and exposure to difference without some careful consideration of difference (and the privileged perspective of study abroad to begin with) does little to build global citizenship. In its simplest gloss, citizenship implies a negotiated “getting along” with others, understanding different points of view, an agonistic public sphere (Butcher and Smith 2015: 93), participating in larger structures of meaning in some sort of formative way, and recognizing the benefits and responsibilities of being a member of society. Citizenship is inextricably connected to historical processes and political contests, “a social construction strategically crafted and historically formed” (ZemachBersin 2011: 94). As Lewin notes in his critique of “global citizenship” as an assumed outcome of study abroad: Effective citizenship, whether we define that term primarily with respect to rights and responsibilities, participation in civil society, or work toward the common good, requires critical reasoning, empathy toward others, and individual action that goes beyond consumption. (xvii)

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Not only is the concept of a “global society” unwieldy, unreal, and increasingly under attack (consider the rise of international nationalist movements, for example), but it posits a kind of citizenship that does not fully enable “the political contestation of ideas and power, [such that] private virtues are projected onto human problems unmediated by political framing. Without the potential for politics to transcend or mediate differences, private experiences (by their very nature differential and varied) dominate” (Butcher and Smith 2015: 93). In this vein, adventure weekends reinforce a focus on the individual consuming self, a subject substantially contradictory to the imagined boundaries of fully responsible citizenship. As Zemach-Berslin notes, “students are told that they can purchase not only international travel itself, but also cross-cultural understanding, global citizenship, personal advancement, and adventure” (Zemach-Bersin, 305). “Adventure” thus becomes a more powerful frame for student experience and a commodity located within the space of the consuming self. As Kathryn Mathers and Laura Hubbard suggest, travel then provides “the backdrop for the encounter with the self through adventure” (Mathers and Hubbard 2009: 204, quoted in Feinberg and Edwards, 34). And the discourse of pushing oneself outside the personal comfort zone, to “do things I wouldn’t otherwise do,” is increasingly ratified through this individually consumed adventure. However, the way that students make sense of this—the distinction between adventure and risk—is more and more complicated, as mentioned above. As one of my students noted of her study-abroad experiences: “It was really important to me to go on as many ‘adventures’ as I could . . . . I spent a lot of time planning the trips I took to ensure there was as little risk as possible.” In many instances, the background of the country where said adventures takes place is less a focus. For example, one student in my class prefaced going on an excursion to Bhopal—where she went zip-lining—as visiting “a place that no one had heard of, except as an explosion a long time ago.” One in-class assignment in the reflection class asks students to write about a moment or series of moments during their study-abroad experience that made them uncomfortable. Many of them used the assignment to write about times they felt they had overcome personal challenges; the assignment called for the inclusion of a photograph from their study-abroad experience. In some cases, framing experience as overcoming personal challenges was carried to interesting lengths. For example, one student presented a photo of herself standing on a rock next to the ocean as proof that she used her studyabroad experience to overcome her fear of water. Another showed a photo of herself eating cheesecake as proof that she used her experience to overcome her dislike of cheesecake. In these examples, it is far too easy to make light, perhaps, but I would suggest that the students are responding to larger narratives encouraging them to understand their study-abroad experience through overcoming personal challenge, no matter how mundane or how framed, and

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to flatten distinctions between personal challenges, adventure, and perceived danger and risk. In this same class, I was struck by how many students connected their travels to overcoming a fear of terrorism, at once both undefined and highlighted by the attacks in Brussels in March 2017. Traveling through Amsterdam two days later, one student described the airport security as “poor,” but also saw it as an opportunity to overcome personal fear. Airport security as a site expected to be secure and risk-free (indeed, for a number of students air travel is the first experiential hurdle they need to jump) became a place to assert the daring self in the face of risk; it is not a place for challenging comfort zones in terms of procedure and process. What is remarkable is the desire to connect their travel experiences to other felt moments of danger: all of Europe is potentially Brussels, all airports are personal and risky challenges to get through. The student traveler/tourist imaginary here constructs a particular kind of post-9/11 world where international air travel is both seen and constructed as a site of heightened danger. This is not to minimize student apprehension for international travel, or the discomforts and uncertainties of the same, but to question the urge to frame such travel against a backdrop of recognized “heard about” danger, which connects to a larger discourse about adventure itself. The self here is also a performing self for the family “back home” as they make sense of their shared experience through the lens of adventure (and their phone cameras). Their instant connectivity further shapes their own approaches to and understandings of “being abroad.” In describing their out-of-program experiences, for example, one student offered the following: When traveling to other countries we only went to the must-see sights such as the Eiffel Tower, Mona Lisa, Cliffs of Moher, the Berlin Wall. We only went to these places so everyone else at home could see that we were being adventurous.

As discussed earlier, these are viewed not only as sites to verify being “adventurous” or performing “adventurousness” but also site visits verified through images that people at home “could see.” And the immediacy of such image reception “at home” is part of “the wider ‘doing’ of tourism” (Robinson and Picard 2009: 14). In this “doing,” adventure occupies a sometimes uncertain, often conflicting component of study-abroad experiences. In a pedagogical field where entering and overcoming an imagined “discomfort zone” is increasingly promoted as a key element of study-abroad programs, students are participants in a varied marketplace of experiences where the final assessment and affirmation is rendered at the level of the individual consumer. This affirmation is often confirmed through the circulation of anticipated and ratifying signs, or photographs.

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As study-abroad programs expand their management of the unexpected, opportunities for discomfort connected to the study-abroad program decrease—language, housing, and food, for example, increasingly come under program management shaped to smooth difference and challenges for students away from home. Students seek the discomfort (or the promise of comfort challenged) as an element of their promised study-abroad experience and look to deliver this through “adventure” weekends or by interpreting their own actions as besting some sort of challenge, as an element of a hero narrative, a place where the individual self is further confirmed through discomfort overcome. As Ben Feinberg and Sarah Edwards (2017) suggest, being able to tell a good story is a primary objective for tourism and study-abroad experiences. If “learning about yourself” is a key outcome, experience must be framed as learning about the self, a hyper-commodified site and set of expectations, and one that can yield some sort of heroic narrative. As study abroad becomes increasingly standardized and more populated, the opportunities for “adventures” that take one out of an ever-more-normalized immersive experience allow students to consume adventure on their own terms, terms often in direct conflict with goals of “global citizenship,” however that may be defined.

NOTES 1. Here “weekending” is a verb that indicates the discrete boundaries of adventure as elements or experiences broken off from the regular schedule of the week. Adventure or daring then fits into a time both imagined as “the weekend” (a site fraught with indications/connections to leisure and “non-work”) and as somewhat consumable—in its borders and boundaries, in its “otherness” from a Mondaythrough-Friday schedule. 2. I recognize that mandating study abroad, and including a variety of models, has a lot of moving parts. The ambitions of such a mandate may exceed its practical impact, especially as they depend on a variety of different providers and programs. “Home growing” an array of short programs also means that final outcomes depend on an array of faculty with different emphases, theoretical approaches to questions of difference, pedagogical styles and abilities, and different critical knowledges about the delivery of study abroad—especially parsed as a vehicle to appreciate difference and develop global citizenship. 3. I have directed five short study-away programs for the university—two to the Galápagos, two to Iceland, and one to Morocco. I don’t draw from these experiences directly for a few reasons—while the programs give me some considerable insights into student expectations for study-abroad experiences, they were designed with fairly tight schedules and specific research goals and projects. The “difference” of the program sites is a given; the program designs focus on the development of

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simple anthropological observational methodologies and theories as one way to “make sense” of the program’s experience. While there were some “adventurous” experiences, it was not a program emphasis and the way the programs’ free time was constructed, they did not allow much time for students to pursue such experiences on their own. 4. I want to distinguish this “discomfort zone” from “constructive disequilibrium” (Lewin 2009) as an element of study abroad: the first reflects a recurring discursive element of study-abroad promotional materials and the way that student increasingly articulate their study-abroad expectations, the second recognizes “disequilibrium” as an opportunity to examine taken-for-granted cultural notions of the everyday. 5. Students taking shorter programs outnumber those on semester-long programs by almost 2 to 1. 6. Self-portraiture is as old as the medium of photography itself, and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to engage more deeply with contemporary literatures on selfies, Instagram practices, or the use of Snapchat or any other platforms that allow for the instantaneous exchange and circulation of digital images. My concern here is to recognize the selfie’s role as participating in a discourse of experience validation, and one where stakes are often raised to include an element of adventure or danger, and how such images work as elements of imaginaries, that is, how they work to construct the sites they simultaneously represent. 7. See also edutourism and voluntourism sites discussed in this volume’s introduction.

REFERENCES Barthes, Roland. 1982 (1979). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill & Wang. Benjamin, Walter. 1980 (1931). “A Short History of Photography.” In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg, 5–26. New Haven, CT: Leete Island Books. Bodinger de Uriarte, John and Shari Jacobson. 2018. “Dirty Work: The Carnival of Service.” In The Experience of Neoliberal Education, edited by Bonnie Urciuoli, 73–105. New York: Berghahn Books. Bus2Alps Website. https://www​.bus2alps​.com​/en. Accessed January 1, 2018. Butcher, Jim and Peter Smith. 2015. Volunteer Tourism: The Lifestyle Politics of International Development. New York: Routledge. Cater, Carl. 2006. “Playing with Risk? Participant Perceptions of Risk and Management Implications in Adventure Tourism.” In Tourism Management 27, no. 3: 17–325. Doerr, Neriko Musha. 2012. “Study Abroad as ‘Adventure’: Globalist Construction of Host–Home Hierarchy and Governed Adventurer Subjects.” Critical Discourse Studies 9, no. 3: 257–268. Doerr, Neriko Musha and Hannah Davis Taïeb. 2017. “Affect and Romance in Study and Volunteer Abroad: Introducing our Project.” In The Romance of Crossing

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Borders, edited by Neriko Musha Doerr and Hannah Davis Taïeb, 3–34. New York: Berghahn Books. Edwards, Elizabeth. 1999. “Photographs as Objects of Memory.” In Material Memories, edited by Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley, 221–236. Oxford: Berg Press. Feinberg, Ben and Sarah Edwards. 2017. “Are We (Still) the World? Learning and the Weird Slot in Student Narratives of Study Abroad.” In Cosmopolitanism and Tourism: Rethinking Theory and Practice, edited by Robert Shepherd, 25–49. New York: Lexington Books. Giroux, Henry. 2017. “The Hardening of Society and the Rise of Cultures of Cruelty in Neo-Fascist America.” Counterpunch, March 17. https​:/​/ww​​w​.cou​​nterp​​unch.​​org​ /2​​017​/0​​3​/1​7/​​91227​/. Gordon, Robert J. 2006. “Introduction.” In Tarzan was an Ecotourist … and Other tales in the Anthropology of Adventure, edited by Luis A. Vivanco and Robert J. Gordon, 1–26. New York: Berghahn Books. Kohn, Tamara. 2018. “‘Backs’ to Nature: Musing on Tourist Selfies.” In Tourists and Tourism, 3rd edition, edited by Sharon Gmelch and Adam Kaul, 69–78. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Larsen, Jonas. 2005. “Performativity of Tourist Photography.” Space and Culture 8, no. 4: 416–434. Lewin, Ross. 2009. “The Quest for Global Citizenship through Study Abroad.” In The Handbook of Practice and Research in Study Abroad, xiii–xxii. New York: Routledge. Loflin, Stephen. 2007. Adventures Abroad: The Student’s Guide to Studying Overseas. New York: Kaplan. MacCannell, Dean. 1973. “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings.” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 3: 589–603. ———. 2013 [1999]. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mathers, Kathryn. 2010. Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ogden, Anthony. 2008. “The View from the Veranda: Understanding Today’s Colonial Student.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 15: 35–55. Oxford English Dictionary. oed​.com​. Accessed March 2, 2019. Oxford, Stephanie M. 2005. Study Abroad: Travel and Vacation in College. Friant, CA: Where in the World Publishing. Redden, Elizabeth. 2018. “Study Abroad Numbers Grow.” Inside Higher Ed. https​:/​/ ww​​w​.ins​​idehi​​ghere​​d​.com​​/news​​/2018​​/11​/1​​3​/stu​​dy​-ab​​road-​​numbe​​rs​-co​​ntinu​​e​-gro​​w​ -dri​​ven​-c​​ontin​​ued​-g​​r​owth​​-shor​​t​-ter​​m​-pro​​grams​. Accessed June 13, 2019. Rettberg, Jill Walker. 2014. Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Robinson, Michael and David Picard. 2009. “Moments, Magic and Memories: Photographing Tourists, Tourist Photographs and Making Worlds.” In The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists and Photography, 1–37. Routledge: New York.

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Salazar, Noel B. 2012. “Tourism Imaginaries: A Conceptual Approach.” Annals of Tourism Research 39, no. 2: 863–882. Smart Trip Europe Website. 2018. https://www​.smarttrip​.it​/en. Accessed January 1, 2018. Streitwieser, Bernhard and Greg Light. 2009. “Study Abroad and the Easy Promise of Global Citizenship: Student Conceptions of a Contested Notion.” Comparative and International Education Society Annual Meeting, Charleston, SC. Study Abroad at Susquehanna Webpage. www​.susqu​.edu​/academics​/study​-abroad. Accessed December 11, 2018. Tsing, Anna. 2000. “The Global Situation.” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3: 327–360. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2014. “The Semiotic Production of the Good Student: A Peircian Look at the Commodification of Liberal Arts Education.” Signs and Society 2, no. 1: 56–83. Urry, John and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage Publishing. Vrasti, Wanda. 2012. Volunteer Tourism in the Global South: Giving Back in Neoliberal Times. New York: Routledge. Weekend Student Adventures Website. https://www​ .wsaeurope​ .com/. Accessed December 20, 2017. Zemach-Bersin, Talya. 2009. “Selling the World: Study Abroad Marketing and the Privatization of Global Citizenship.” In The Handbook of Practice and Research in Study Abroad, edited by Ross Lewin, 303–320. New York: Routledge. ———. 2011. “Entitled to the World: The Rhetoric of U.S. Global Citizenship Education and Study Abroad.” In Postcolonial Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education, edited by Venessa de Oliveira Andreotti and Lynn Mario T. M. de Souza, 88–104. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 7

I Go to Cleanse My Head and Heart Katharine Serio

Short-term mission work is a popular method that church members utilize to take part in service projects that go beyond secular tourism. They expect to travel to poverty-ridden destinations where they will live like the locals for a brief time. While the official goal of these trips is to help the community in some manner, such as handing out medicine, many participants expect and desire a kind of inner religious transformation. In this chapter, I argue that mission work is a form of pilgrimage, drawing on pilgrimage studies to examine how a United Methodist medical mission team to Mexico fostered a sense of self reflexivity—members leave behind the monotony of daily life at home and strengthen their relationship with God while away. Following Jesus ministry to the poor, mission sites and experiences are often sacralized by their association with the perceived poverty and suffering of those being served. Mission participants expect to share in this suffering, to live the discomfort of poverty as Jesus did before them. In addition, the mission team communes over scripture and discusses their missions, past and present, each constructing narratives to illustrate how their spiritual lives have benefitted. From their brief period of suffering and intense focus on spiritual matters, mission workers often return home with a renewed connection to God. At times, however, this self-transformative experience can come at the expense of the community receiving aid whose own experiences after the trip are ignored. Participants’ stories reveal a master narrative of “mission as pilgrimage,” wherein a focus on inner growth is primary—an ultimate means to a transformative end.

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A NOTE ON STUDY ABROAD While the short-term mission work I discuss in this chapter was not part of a study-abroad program, and most of the group was closer to retirement age than university age, there are many parallels between these different forms of travel.1 In general, traveling abroad is seen as beneficial in and of itself, “that travel abroad is synonymous with (experiential) education, and more fundamentally that travel is itself—before practice and pedagogy are even considered—educative” (Barkin 2018:301). Additionally, according to anthropologist Gareth Barkin in his study on short-term study abroad, higher education administration are often not as concerned with the outcomes of travel, as they are that students just go somewhere abroad, to attain an “experiential awareness” that is learned through travel (2018: 301–302). Students and older adults alike can foster a sense of identity through international travel. Like short-term mission work, shortterm study abroad tends to focus on students’ experiences of the planned activities and less on local contexts or connections beyond those structured activities; there is little critical analysis on the kecak dance in Bali, for example, no explanation of its history or the impact of the colonial powers to prepare students for the performance (Barkin 2018: 308) just as there is no preparation or discussion of the history of Reynosa or the context of poverty within Mexico. Before embarking on a short-term mission trip, there is little focus on the local community. Instead, focus is on the students; students need to visit other cultures, to be near other cultures, in order to learn something and grow as people. This experiential learning is acquired through study abroad in a similar way that growth is achieved by short-term mission work, through concrete experiences, reflection on those experiences, and conceptualizing the ideas discovered through reflection to feel an impact in one’s life and worldview (Barkin 2018: 302). They do not need to have in-depth expertise on their destination in order to grow and change. There is an element of “hyperreality” to these trips, as in mission work, a feeling of “genuineness” from the experiences even if they are highly produced for the audience, “meaning spaces [. . . ] are produced in dialog with the exotic, neocolonial imaginary of the tourist gaze [. . . a] s tourism industries throughout the world become increasingly insular and specialized toward different interests and taste-cultures” (Barkin 2018: 309–310).2 As I will demonstrate, reflection comes out of the perceived authenticity of tourism encounters, the feeling of being part of something and expanding one’s horizons, whether it be through study abroad, voluntourism, mission work, pilgrimage, or vacation.

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PILGRIMAGE AND TOURISM Victor and Edith Turner famously said, “A tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist” (1978: 20). Tourism is very similar to pilgrimage, and the distinction between them usually comes down to the perceived beliefs and motivations of travelers; the religious believer traveling to a sacred shrine is seen as a pilgrim, while the secular traveler is often seen as merely a tourist (Badone and Roseman 2004: 2). However, motivations can be tricky to pin down; secular “tourists” may have a profound, powerful experience, bordering on the sacred; people can have “religious” experiences without being religious. Likewise, pilgrims often experience “touristy” things in between visiting the sacred sites (Badone and Roseman 2004: 2–4). The mission team I worked with in Mexico would admit that they participate in a “tourist” day, spending it in a nearby shopping district where they pick up their souvenirs and anti-wrinkle medication that is banned in the United States, but otherwise they stress the “anti-touristic” nature of their travel, some insisting they are not on vacation. As I will illustrate, their focus on deprivations and becoming closer to God sets them apart from their secular, “vacationing” counterparts. Their language and behavior, instead, aligns them with other pilgrimages around the world—without the relics and shrines. According to Saint Augustine, humans are born “guilty” and must spend their lives working for redemption—“a journey, laden with suffering and temptation, from the earthly city (civitas terrena) to the city of God (civitas Dei)” —a pilgrimage (Picard and Di Giovine [citing Markus 1989 and Walsh et al. 1958: 191] 2014: 10–11). During the Middle Ages, these types of pilgrimages were seen as transactional for the mostly Catholic devotees who would receive indulgences for their strenuous journeys—these indulgences would then lessen their punishment for sin and aid in their salvation (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 109). By the Reformation, the focus of pilgrimages shifted to religious renewal and the curing of the soul (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 128). The destination for pilgrimages was always a physical site to visit the image or relic of a saint or Virgin—material manifestations of God that could be touched in order to receive healing, protection, or salvation (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 108). By the nineteenth century, when “play” and group travel became a growing part of American culture along with the rise of the middle class, Protestant religious leaders, though “ambivalent” about tourism, developed their own forms of religious travel, like Christian vacation camps and pilgrimages to holy sites (Kaell 2014: 5–6). Religious trips, like those to the Holy Lands, have become essential to the practice of Christian faith, taking people back

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to the source of their faith, allowing them to “walk where Jesus walked” (Kaell 2014: 3). It forces them to confront who they are in their everyday lives and what it means to be Christian and, when successful, “reaffirms and strengthens . . . [their] own relationship with God” (Kaell 2014: 5). Though mediated by religious officials, pilgrimage sites allow for a diversity of perceptions, meanings, and discourses to be brought by visitors so that each may get the most out of their visit (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 10–12). The power of pilgrimage sites “derives in large part from its character almost as a religious void, a ritual space capable of accommodating diverse meanings and practices . . . a vessel into which pilgrims devoutly pour their hopes, prayers, and aspirations” (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 15). SHORT-TERM MISSIONS AS PILGRIMAGE Pilgrimage can expand beyond the traditional shrines and relics that many scholars cover (see Coleman and Elsner 1995; Dubisch and Winkleman 2005; Eade and Sallnow 1991; Kaell 2014; Turner and Turner 1978). From service learning to study abroad to mission trips, many travelers feel the need to get out of their “daily lives” for an experience that feels more real and authentic than regular “tourism.” Service-oriented projects and educational pilgrimages in the form of “gap years” or study-abroad opportunities give volunteers and young people the chance to participate not only in touristic activities but in another layer of meaningful travel, to gain knowledge and perspective of the world (Di Giovine 2013: 75). For anthropologist Hillary Kaell, the defining characteristic of pilgrimages seems to be its relation to home, freeing “the journeying pilgrim from the localized, static traditions of home” in order to have the meaningful experience (2014: 14). As stated by anthropologists Michael Winkleman and Jill Dubisch, “almost any journey may be termed a ‘pilgrimage’ these days, its meaning defined by inner feelings and motivations rather than by external institutionalized forms” (2005: xvii). Anthropologist Michael Di Giovine adds that in this “hyper-meaningful voyage” it does not matter how outside observers (guides, managers, or even researchers) define the travel but how the participants view their pilgrimage experiences (Di Giovine 2013: 87). According to anthropologist Wayne Fife, pilgrimage is something to be done; it is a practice; it is not a place that is merely seen but rather a site of action (2004: 142). Like their service-oriented and educational counterparts, people partaking in short-term mission trips through contemporary Protestant churches and organizations feel the need to get outside of their “comfort zones.” Participants often choose their destinations based upon the perceived level of suffering of the people who live there. They often travel to so-called “third-world” communities, or if they are

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unable to travel abroad to inner cities in order to confront poverty and feel the spiritual power of the people there, they adhere to Jesus proclamation, “Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” (James 2:5 NRSV). According to Victor and Edith Turner (following Saint Augustine), Christian pilgrimage is focused on “the inward movement of the heart” and of an individual arriving at a deeper level of existence that cannot be attained in normal, daily life (1978: 8). Going on pilgrimage gives participants an opportunity to focus on themselves and their spiritual needs, which is difficult to do with the demands of daily life. Mission workers can experience this “sacred time” (time devoted solely to spiritual matters) during their trip, which is impossible to experience when dealing with the secular pressures and the expectations of their lives back home. As a group, the mission team can come together, have discussions, and process the experiences of the mission with each other. They spend their down time sharing their newly constructed stories (about the events of the day, often comparing the suffering they witnessed to their own), or repeating stories from previous missions (relating to the suffering seen in the past and remembering humorous events, both during former mission trips and at the home church). Every day begins and ends with the reading of a devotional which is a short, religious anecdote usually accompanied by a passage in the Bible and a discussion of its themes. Mission participants view devotional times as vital for realizing their spiritual growth, not just, as anthropologist Edward Bruner states when discussing secular tourism, “a reaffirmation of their current status, but a statement about the future—that life can go on, that their world can expand, that they can acquire yet more knowledge and experience” (2005: 15). Along with new ideas that can manifest, participants are able to refine and expand on previous events as well as look to the future as they imagine how their lives will be enriched through this mission trip. Where mission work leads to some sort of “spiritual growth,” an inner transformation that results in a closer relationship with God, Bruner’s tourists find “self-development” through their trips (Bruner 2005: 15). Religious travel is seen as a special, spiritual “hyper-meaningful” experience “despite the meaningfulness and transformative nature of most (if not all) touristic experiences as a whole” (Di Giovine 2013: 87). Religious participants set themselves apart from secular tourists, believing that they get more meaning out of their experiences than other travelers do. During the summer 2012, I joined a United Methodist short-term mission group from their home church in south Louisiana to travel to Reynosa, Mexico, where we spent a week handing out medicine to the local community. One man on the mission team, Steve, an older member of the church

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who owns his own business, stated a few times throughout the trip that he needed to go on a mission trip, admitting that he is “an obnoxious, egotistical, selfish man” who needs “to cleanse my head and heart.” The mission team leader, Ellen, an active member of the church who works regularly at the church’s food bank and organizes many of the events for the church, had originally cancelled the mission trip for that year because her husband would not be able to join her; she only changed her mind when Steve asked her about it. He goes on mission trips every year or two, whenever he feels that he needs spiritual renewal. Donna and Rose emphasized that they joined the mission, because they both felt that had special skills to offer the team; Donna works for the Red Cross and Rose is a registered nurse. A common theme in short-term mission work is balancing the goals of spiritual growth and effective service. Both the desire of pilgrims to more actively participate in their religion and the multitude of opportunities for the exploration of identity reflect this theme. While meaning in short-term mission work is ultimately found through inner feelings and motivations, it is the physical activities that often spur on the greatest spiritual growth in pilgrimages, inconveniences like “arduous activities, deprivations, troublesome engagements and tribulations . . . provide many mechanisms for self-transformation” (Dubisch and Winkleman 2005: xxxiii). During the early years of Christian pilgrimage, many travelers have believed that the more difficult or dangerous a journey, the more spiritually rewarding it would be (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 106). Without the difficulties of travel or the deprivations of accommodation, the experience could be seen as too secular or “touristy.” Pilgrims want an intense, multi-sensory experience beyond the “sight-seeing” that mass touristic sites attract (Di Giovine 2015a: 35). Pilgrims set themselves apart from tourists, not just through their inner transformation but through the experiences that make it possible. DISCOMFORT Reynosa fieldnotes, May 2012 It was hot and humid; the smell, a mix of rotten trash and a nearby outhouse, wafted with the warm breeze into the large, creaky but tidy one room building set up as a medical clinic for the day. A few fans were placed throughout to provide some relief to the mission team. A dozen patients were allowed in at a time, watching the doctor examine those who came before them. The rest of the patients waited to be called in, some for hours, outside in the hot sun. To the volunteers, it was an endless stream of people, mostly women and children, with similar concerns: high blood pressure and diabetes, lice and malnutrition. Everyone received vitamins and a toothbrush along

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with their medicine. Ingredients that required refrigeration were assumed unproblematic. Very few patients stood out, like the man whose crushed foot would surely be amputated eventually and the woman with a missing eye, an unsettling void in her face where it should be. For contemporary Christians, mission work, especially international mission work, involves getting out of one’s “comfort zone.” According to anthropologist Omri Elisha, for evangelical Christians, this involves cross-cultural exchanges, overcoming fears and prejudices in order to witness people in unfamiliar settings (2011: 129). Elisha’s informants critique materialism, using outreach to transcend the impulses and pressures of consumer culture and to embrace the virtues of sacrifice and benevolence (Elisha 2011: 122). When people are able to give up material comforts in order to work as missionaries or in another field of ministry, their perceived Christian virtue increases (Elisha 2011: 143–144). From the experiences of Jesus and Paul and the early Christian pilgrimages, suffering and difficulty has always been essential to the “journey” of Christianity; Saint Augustine declared that this suffering comes from the leaving behind of “earthly things” (Di Giovine 2015b: 189–190). However, pilgrimage travel is a type of commodity, the entire experience—plane tickets, accommodations, meals, souvenirs, supplies paid for by participants—blurring the line between sacred and profane (Kaell 2014: 11). This struggle between leaving behind “earthly things” and in doing so, investing in a series of commodities is demonstrated by the mission group’s interaction with the larger congregation. Members of the home congregation who were unfamiliar with mission trips accused Donna of “going on vacation,” when she asked for their financial support. She was frustrated by their lack of understanding about what goes on during mission trips. Embracing sacrifice and discomfort in their travel can be a way to circumvent the perceived commoditization of religious travel, making it “less fun” and less of a vacation. The risks and sacrifices associated with mission trips are perceived as fostering much greater spiritual growth than the safety of religious services and small church groups, which can result in complacency and being stuck, spiritually (Elisha 2011: 128). In addition to these motivations and critiques, there is another element to “getting out of our comfort zone.” The mission group expected that, in Mexico, we would not experience the comforts of our life back home. We were all going to be sleeping in one large room filled with bunk beds and no air conditioning; we would have to walk to a nearby building to use the bathroom and take cold showers. We would eat the same food that the local people ate. There would need to be a higher tolerance for the sticky heat that would linger in the schools and churches where we worked, the smells floating in from the outhouses with every breeze we were lucky to receive, and the dangerous van that had no air conditioning and whose unbolted seats

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threatened to toss their passengers back and forth and up and down with every bump and turn. Of course, there was some grumbling and complaining by all, but everyone worked through her or his discomfort and focused on our tasks—providing medicine. There will always be a level of discomfort with aid work, whether it is physical, emotional, spiritual, or social and this is what helps keep the faithful away from “frivolous things” (Elisha 2011: 127–128). Everyone expected that during this relief work, the conditions would not be ideal. Some mission workers, such as the team I traveled with, even expressed disappointment when the conditions were “too good” (which would probably be just “okay” or “unimpressive” in the United States). For example, the accommodations were different than expected; we were spread across three (of about seven) air-conditioned rooms, each with two sets of bunk beds and an attached bathroom. They would probably not be considered luxury accommodations in the United States, but they were much nicer that what the team was used to. They felt that the trip needed to be set apart from the indulgences of a relaxing, restful break. This was a different type of journey than that experienced through secular tourism and it was important for participants to feel that separation and be recognized as spiritual, sacrificing travelers. Since it was not a vacation, enjoying certain amenities made some team members feel like they were on a frivolous holiday instead of the serious volunteer work they were involved in, “their discourses purposefully distinguish themselves from what they perceive as a baser form of travel, morally elevating themselves above the tourist track. ‘This is a pilgrimage, not tourism’” (Di Giovine 2016: 11). They aim to be “Christ-like,” or at least closer to Christ, and the mission-pilgrimage is their perfect opportunity to rise above materiality for a “higher order” (Di Giovine 2016: 18–19). Donna wanted to use pictures of the updated accommodations we were staying in to attract more mission workers the next year, but the other participants disagreed with her for two reasons. First, they were disappointed that we were not staying in the “normal” housing. They were disappointed that they would not be “living like the local community” and did not think it was something to advertise. It was less real, less “authentic” for the group to be staying in nicer accommodations. They were taken out of the uncomfortable experience and put back into their “comfort zone” while enjoying the warm showers and air conditioning. Instead of closing the gap between themselves and the locals as they imagined it, they were kept separated from that true experience and the more personal understanding of the discomforts of their third-world host community. Second, short-term mission work is, again, seen, as anthropologist Mary Hancock states, as a “critique of the consumerist values of secular travel, frequently by contrasting the poverty encountered in the mission field with the comfort of home” (Hancock 2014: 157). Those who would be attracted to nice accommodations are not the kinds of missionaries

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they want on the trip—people who would complain about clinic sites which were not air conditioned and tended to smell and people who might not be comfortable with the level of sickness seen in the patients we interacted with. They laughed about people on previous mission trips who insisted on doing their hair nicely every day and who wore lots of jewelry. The team thought that they had a more difficult time achieving inner growth which hinges on pushing themselves physically as well as mentally. Deprivations are expected in order to reinforce the inner transformation, releasing the pilgrim from their sins and the guilt that they may be experiencing (Winkleman and Dubisch 2005: xxxiii). Being too comfortable, staying in a “comfort zone” prevents many participants, including most of the group I traveled with, from being challenged in a way that would cause the spiritual growth they expect. Of course, many would agree with Donna; that is why the facility was built. A United Methodist congregation in Oklahoma that also has a long history with the Mexican organization, Manos de Ayuda, designed and financed the modern Americanized complex. Not every participant wants to lose the comforts of home, or perhaps, for many, it is enough to travel to a foreign country and interact with the poverty and suffering during the day and retreat back to comfort and safety at night. Still, for many, it is a vital part of the experience to live as the locals do— even if the mission workers do not really know how the locals live. As with many mission trips, there was no attempt to learn Spanish and there is little attempt to learn about the lives, the history, and the culture of the people of Reynosa before the trip or even during the trip (Howell 2009: 209). Each person has a fantasy of how the locals live and it is not comparable to their American lives “at home.” Experiencing difficulty fosters a sense of gratefulness (for what one has) among the mission members. Often, people who volunteer are looking for an “experience,” one that stands out, disrupts from the normal, everyday routine, that is selfless, and needs to be shared (Bornstein 2012: 113). Mission workers want an authentic Mexican experience or what they believe is an authentic Mexican experience. Each person goes on a short-term mission trip for their own reasons, but they are often looking for a strengthening of their relationship with God—as Donna remarked, to go on missions is to continue God’s work and she knows that it, along with her work with the Red Cross, is what God calls her to do. Steve reiterated that doing good works and giving back is a part of mission work but that we were the most impacted and affected spiritually during our time in missions. Suffering and being near this authentic, third-world experience enable this strengthening; God becomes more potent and closer in these contexts. Catholic historian Robert Orsi describes how this spiritual goal can be problematic. In his work on urban religion in the Bronx, he talks with a Franciscan nun, Sister Marty, who works with prostitutes, ministering to their

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spiritual and physical needs. She finds God’s presence stronger in these types of places, sites of devastation and decay, “Something in me comes alive when I come into this area. I feel God’s presence more strongly here than anywhere else” (Orsi 1999: 1). Like Sister Marty, mission groups who travel to thirdworld countries, seek out the worst areas “where they would re-create the ancient spirit of Christian monasticism in its purest forms of prayer, sacrifice, and service . . . for their own purposes and pleasure” (Orsi 1999: 2). There is often a search for meaning and authenticity in the suffering of others; Dean MacCannell studied the pattern of tourists engaging in “negative sightseeing” in order to find authenticity, “to see if [they] can catch a glimpse of it reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity, or purity of others” (MacCannell 1976: 40–41). Tour groups go to places like the Appalachians or inner-city areas where a local guide will focus on the strife of the area, complaining about things like failed crops, junkies, and flood damage; abandoned buildings, polluted rivers, and uncontrollable garbage heaps serve as the flip side to respectable tourist destinations with nice attractions and well-curated museums (MacCannell 1976: 40). Religious travelers, through service, hope to find their own transcendence, since God is found most potently amid suffering, but it risks turning the suffering of others into a feeling of authenticity and holiness for the nun or mission worker, utilizing suffering for their own personal gain (Orsi 1999: 2–3). Participants travel to impoverished places for a certain reason, because they need something and to feel like they are contributing in some small way to the community but, as Steve concluded, we (the mission team) gain the most out of these trips. Individuals emphasize how they benefit from mission trips more than how the local community might benefit. These mission workers can take the search for meaning and authenticity a step further by professing to want to share in the suffering for a short time and to a certain extent. The group did not necessarily want to be in danger, but they did want to be in discomfort. Finding authenticity through a form of “danger” tourism, as Florence Babb explains it, is the ultimate goal. The experience is authentic because the volunteers believe in the truth of the suffering and hardship—yet the experience was constructed for them by the negotiation between the mission organizers and the groups who visit year after year (Babb 2011: 42; McCannell 1976; Bruner 2005). The authentic Reynosa that everyone wanted does not exist—a place whose modest casitas lacked air conditioning, had barely running cold water and unreliable electricity, but were also full of warm, hospitable hosts and wonderful Mexican cooking—even in past years when they were welcomed into a family’s home and sat down at their host’s table in her large, hot dining room eating her freshly made tamales along with her husband and children. Real Mexican people did not live exactly as the group imagined.

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No one in the group had lived with Mexican families long-term or sought to learn about their experiences; they had brief glimpses into the lives of one family whose job is to host groups of foreign volunteers. As Edward Bruner states, “there is no original;” there is no “real Mexican experience” that can be captured. It is imagined and created, produced by locals and visitors (2005: 5). Anthropologists Salazar and Graburn write about the “tourism imaginary” and how this process is worked out through the dialogue between hosts, local workers, and tourists, through stories and ideas shared about the place, and through pictures taken and souvenirs bought which can be “signs and symbols of imaginaries, which could be banal stereotypes or could be highly modified and personalized by their experiences” (2014: 11–12). All of this enables travelers to prove their tourism “imaginaries” and create their version of a real Mexican mission trip (Salazar and Graburn 2014: 12). The authenticity was only threatened when the mission organizers, pushed by another mission group, made the trip more comfortable, but less believable, less authentic in the eyes of my group. Even the tamales, now made by a mere employee (versus the welcoming “friend” in the past), did not taste the same. Focusing too much on their own spiritual growth with less attention to service undermines the official purpose of the mission, especially for any local organization run by community members who do have a vested interest in the health of their community. Steve was the most enthusiastic team member on the mission trip but, in actuality, he did not participate very much during the work period. He was sick for a couple of days when it came time to hand out medicine, having had an allergic reaction to his own medicine, and he took frequent breaks, disappearing from time to time, even when he was feeling better. Steve was, nevertheless, very adamant that he was having a spiritual experience due to his proximity to the patients and, when he was feeling well enough, he would try to interact with them, greeting them and giving children candy and coloring sheets with crayons. FORMING BONDS The system we set up for the daily health clinics addressed as many people as possible in a short time. We, the volunteers, would arrive by 9:00 or 10:00 a.m., set up for an hour, eat lunch at noon, and work until 2:00 or 3:00 p.m. before packing up and leaving. Pastor Sam and Donna briefly signed people in, taking a few vitals and sending them to wait for the doctor. Rose filled prescriptions while Sarah wrote instructions down. As the only volunteer who spoke any Spanish, I translated the instructions from English to Spanish and later, handed them out to people, verifying they were the correct patient and

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telling them what they needed to do with each type of medicine. Ellen took pictures to show the church back home the work we did. There was only one doctor, a local Mexican physician who spent her days volunteering and her nights working at a local hospital; she saw almost 100 people each day at our clinics. It had been over a month since anyone had visited the community and it was unknown when another group would come again. The medicine we gave out would last a few weeks. Two years prior, the community could count on medicine and volunteers every week, sometimes they were even forced to turn mission groups away. According to Juan, the man who ran the organization, violence in the area scared off most volunteer groups and their much-needed money and resources. As Florence Babb points out, many people, even those interested in “dark tourism,” do not want to be in any real danger but want the danger to be something from the more distance past, left in the last century (Babb 2011: 57–58).3 Just as there is no research about the lives of the people in Reynosa prior to traveling; there is little attempt to get to know these people or their culture while there. Mission workers are moved to act, to do something when they hear about suffering or when they see suffering, but the Mexicans are “Othered,” and their “cultural and political particularity—their difference is collapsed into a ‘not us’ category” as Ellen Moodie states, “We wanted to show them we cared” without really interacting with them (2013: 149). We checked patients in to the clinic and handed them their medicine when they were ready to leave, but there was no time to get to know them. Similarly, there was little chitchatting with the men and women who worked for Manos de Ayuda; they had to rush about making sure we had everything we needed and never stayed around “after hours.” The relationship between the mission workers and the patients or the employees of Manos de Ayuda extended only as far as it needs to, “integrating Other people, territories and time-spaces to its specific touristic realms, scripts and narratives, tourism purposely creates these Others in the specific terms of its liturgical needs . . . the perceived effervescence of an exotic human life context are not objective qualities inherent to a given site or society, but stem from the socially framed subjective mind-set and culture of the respective tourists” (Picard and Di Giovine 2014: 3–5). Maintaining relationships with “those in need” is one of the major discourses surrounding this type of work. The volunteers imagine the bonds that will be created as they prepare for their trip; they speak about the people they will encounter and how they will help them. However, the group had very little interaction with the patients, just enough to get their medical information at the front end of the process, and to provide medicine to them at the end. None of the participants spoke Spanish fluently, most had only some very basic terms memorized. Even Ellen and Sarah, who have gone

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on the mission trips to this community for about ten years, had little Spanish knowledge and never considered it a priority when preparing for mission trips. Anthropologist Ellen Moodie, while studying short-term mission work in El Salvador, had a similar experience with the participants; even when the mission group and hosts sat down to have a meal together, they segregated themselves physically and linguistically (2013: 154). In my more recent research in coastal Belize (fall 2017 to summer 2018), I found myself observing missions briefly from the other side.4 The mission group provided eye care for the community and surrounding areas for four days. A few members of the congregation agreed to check people in daily. When I asked these congregants about the mission team, they shrugged and said they brought much-needed supplies and medical care but nothing else. While they are grateful for the material aid, they did not get to know the people providing care. In Reynosa, Juan, the leader of Manos de Ayuda, knows what he wants for his community and how he can accomplish his goals. Juan’s ultimate vision for his Mexican ministry is of a completely integrated group, with Americans and Mexicans working side by side, building construction projects and handing out medicine in the community. He is trying to combat the idea that Americans are the givers and Mexicans are the receivers. He has had problems recruiting local community members because of this idea; they do not always believe that they are supposed to do the volunteer work. Juan is looking for both sides to cultivate affective bonds of attachment so that the want to give and help each other remains strong; so that one side will not just stop giving their time, energy, and money which this community desperately needs. He is rapidly losing groups of foreign volunteers (most do not have a long history with the community) and is searching for an alternative. His relationship with Ellen keeps the connection between his organization and her church alive; he needs more connections like this so that foreign groups will brave the potential violence to bring resources. It is easier to just send money to places in need but continued, long-term support relies on volunteer work so those bringing their money, and whatever material goods are needed, feel like they are contributing and making a difference (Bornstein 2012: 124). However, according to Moodie, the separation between the groups is necessary for the success of short-term mission trips. Foreign mission teams need to feel like they are helping—that they are “giving back.” The construction work and the medical work can be done without mission teams, sometimes more efficiently, with better quality and cheaper results, Moodie says the disparities between the visitors and visited—economic, geographic, cultural, political—is not something to overcome, a gap to be filled (even if in sticky, awkward, friction-generating ways). Rather, these differences are necessary

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for the relationship. The relationship would not exist without the existence of those differences, without the inequality. Indeed, the money that brings shortterm mission trips to far-flung locations is also what differentiates participants: “Money allows proximity, even as it establishes distance.” (2013: 149–150)

Inequality is necessary, and when the locals get too close or demand too much, the relationship could fall apart. Mission members have a desire to feel and experience “being there”; again they want that authentic experience but in order to achieve that feeling of connection and contribution, there needs to be a separation between them and those being helped, “the gap is necessary” (Moodie 2013: 159–160). Bridging the gap, bringing more volunteers from the local community, is risky. If the mission team no longer feels like they are needed to actively do something, they might not return, and their money and resources would leave with them. INNER GROWTH/TRANSFORMATION The participants take their roles in this short-term mission trip very seriously. They understand that they are providing a service for people who do not have easy access to transportation or the funds to maintain their health. In her discussion of the “humanitarian gaze,” anthropologist Mary Mostafanezhad describes how humanitarian efforts began in the eighteenth century as a way for people from England and the United States to reconcile a “sense of moral responsibility toward the impoverished parts of the world and their threatened inhabitants” (2014 [citing Tester 2010]: 113). Tourism has intersected with this to create “voluntourism,” which attracts people who are searching for meaning or purpose in their lives (Mostafanezhad 2014: 113). The volunteers Mostafanezhad worked with were empowered through their service. Who else would help the starving babies or spread awareness of their situation if not them and their social media posts? (2014: 115). The mission volunteers in Mexico want to help people who are suffering and make a difference in their lives. Throughout the mission trip, volunteers remarked that they hoped that the people who came through our clinic felt our love for them, God’s love for them. This particular group understood that many of the people were Christians themselves, and we did not need to witness explicitly to them.5 While none of them had stories of any of the patients’ relationship with God, each of the mission workers felt their own renewed faith and commitment to God through their service. The pastor on this trip, Sam, recounted a time when he was in Mexico years before. His hosts had him go door-to-door with a translator. While there, he offered to pray with or for them if they wanted him to. It was not a

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chance for him to evangelize to them but to make connections with the community, while his church group was constructing a casita for a local family, and to show that God cares. We did the same thing through our medical aid; attempting to heal the sick in order to illustrate the love of God without the use of words. The leader of our mission, Ellen, said that the sign of a successful mission trip to her was not the alleviation of illness or poverty but if one person felt the love of God in their lives and turned toward Him or renewed their faith in Him. Like Mostafanezhad’s volunteers in Thailand, the impact of volunteer work on the local people is often vague and difficult, if not impossible, to measure, “‘I just feel like if I can make a difference in one kid I have been successful. That is what it is all about. Reaching out to that one person who will take what we have taught them and making a difference in their lives” (2014: 116). It is unclear what that difference will entail, just as Ellen is never told by any of the patients that they themselves were renewed by our presence. By going on mission trips, participants want to help those in need, but they also feel “called” to do so and want to feel that closeness to God when they do it. A dual goal in short-term mission work, and often the more important one for participants, is their own spiritual relationship with God. Personal motivation can be seen in both religious and nonreligious voluntourism, the desire to serve can be linked with the desire for benefits to participants like having access to travel, receiving marketable skills, developing cross-cultural skills, and achieving greater spiritual depth (Zehrer 2013: 132). Many voluntourists feel that they get more out of their experiences than they give (Mostafanezhad 2014: 116) Religious voluntourists’ need to support those who are suffering is rooted in their belief in God; Steve goes because he felt called by God to participate, to cleanse himself of his most recent sins, sins he has been accumulating since his last trip. Rose and Donna have time and/ or skills that they can use in missions. They turn inward as there is nothing to do to significantly change the lives of the patients. There is nothing to be done about malnourishment, the side effects of diabetes, or easily preventable infections except to give this month’s medicine and hope that someone comes to give them medicine for next month. Sociologists Jenny Trinitapoli and Stephen Vaisey (2009) have stated that those who received aid from mission teams had similar experiences as those who received aid from other nonreligious groups. It was mission groups who experienced long-term positive changes in their own lives as a result of their trips; reporting “increases in their level of interest in ‘poor countries,’ prayer and financial giving, though actual evidence of any increase in charitable giving was scant” (Trinitapoli and Vaisey 2009: 123–124). They feel more charitable and empathetic; it does not matter if they actually are, or not. Short-term mission trips are usually oriented toward service, and participants often focus

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on their own transformations and enlightenments over the changes the local community could experience (Trinitapoli and Vaisey 2009: 133). Steve felt renewed, as he always does, at the end of the trip; he was reinvigorated and ready to resume daily life. Sarah, after moving thirty minutes away from her hometown months previously, was ready to find a new congregation and resume regular church attendance. NARRATIVES Once the trip is over, but also during the trip itself, mission workers need to make sense of it; Edward Bruner describes this need, that “in itself experience is inchoate without an ordering narrative, for it is the story, the telling that makes sense of it all, and the story is how people interpret their journey and their lives” (Bruner 2005: 20). As psychologist Jerome Bruner argues, certain scripts can be employed in particular situations, such as the boymeets-girl narrative or the mission narrative, in order to make sense of them and find meaning in them (1991: 6–7). As individuals tell each other narratives of their trips, patterns begin to emerge and eventually form “scripts.” “Mission as pilgrimage” narratives can be seen as a kind of master narrative which provide a “pre-existing structure but they are not determinative, nor can they possibly encompass the many possible . . . responses” (Bruner 2005: 26). As Edward Schieffelin explains, each participant experiences reality in her or his own way and finds meaning individually, but meaning is “objectively (and socially) validated by the participants when they share its action and intensity no matter what each person may individually think about it” (Schieffelin 1985: 722). Individuals may come up with personal meanings for performances and events, but the larger meanings of symbols and events are created through collaboration between those involved (Schieffelin 1985: 722). By performing short-term mission work and constructing stories together, the meaning of these trips (for the mission workers) can emerge. The recipients (the medical patients) of their work (mission work) are present for the performance (providing medical care and medicine) but their absence in the discussions prevents them from shaping the narrative and the meanings with the volunteers later. Mission work narrative scripts tend to begin with the desire for change, doing a service project, and seeing and experiencing suffering with the foreign community, so that the workers may return transformed. The mission participants feel more charitable and empathetic; it does not matter if they actually are. While short-term mission trips are usually oriented toward some sort of service project versus proselytizing, participants often focus on their own transformations and enlightenments over the changes the local

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community could experience (Trinitapoli and Vaisey 2009: 133). There is little way for the mission workers to measure the change in the receiving community, so the effects on the local people often do not make it into the narratives of mission trips. According to Edward Bruner, these post-trip narratives are never ending but can be, and are, told and retold as the stories are refined and worked through and the self is constructed and reconstructed (2005: 27). This allows for repeated trips as the narratives and the self are always in need of renewal. CONCLUSION The mission team acknowledges that most of what they do has no lasting effects. During our 2012 trip, Rose kept commenting on how dirty all the patients were, especially the children. Not a critique as much as an observation, a comment on the poorer health she observed this year as opposed to the last year she attended the trip when they tended to clean themselves up a little bit more before visiting the clinic. Rose stated, some years they are better, other years they are worse, and it is up to their own government and institutions to truly change the situation long-term. In general, medical missions, which seem to bring in needed resources and expertise, rarely can do more than apply proverbial and literal Band-Aids and perhaps create more dependence on outsiders (Moodie 2013: 149). It can be frustrating to recognize that the problem is larger than one person or one mission trip (Mostafanezhad 2014: 116). But my group would argue that a Band-Aid is better than nothing; this kind of triage is necessary until the government, and the other power structures in Mexico, can address the larger structural problems6—which have resulted in the mass poverty Rose was referring to and gang violence that keeps many mission groups from Reynosa. It would never occur to them to attempt to address structural inequalities and in fact, according to Mary Mostafanezhad, this kind of humanitarian mission “discourages the volunteer tourist from examining how her or his everyday life is intertwined in the reality of struggle and poverty of the communities that he or she seeks to benefit” (2014: 117). This mission group often focuses on their own authentic, uncomfortable experiences and spiritual renewal instead of the poverty of the local community. This allows the trip—the pilgrimage—to be successful. Even though no one ever referred to the trip as a pilgrimage and, unlike most pilgrimages, there was no sacred object or holy site to be visited, it was nevertheless “an intentional journey . . . to locations where it is believed to be easier to obtain access to the divine” (Kaell 2014: 20). The mission team members wanted to give back and make a difference in the world, but perhaps what they really desired

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was to feel better about themselves through the renewal or reaffirmation of their relationship with God. This also helped them distance themselves from “tourism,” a label they were adamantly against, an identity they explicitly rejected when sharing their trip with the church. They did not crave a vacation but rather sought an opportunity for a spiritually profound, arduous journey. NOTES 1. Short-term mission work can be carried out by people of all ages, including groups of teens and young adults. Besides Sarah and I, who were in our twenties, the rest of the group I traveled with were in their fifties and sixties. 2. For an explanation of “hyperreality,” see Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. See also Eco, Umberto. 1995. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. New York: Random House. 3. For an overview of dark tourism, see Stone, Philip and Richard Sharpley. 2008. “Consuming dark tourism: A Thanatological Perspective.” In Annals of Tourism Research, 35 (2). pp. 574–595. 4. While I am not currently focused on short-term mission work, there was a team that spent a week here. I followed up by asking a few in the receiving congregation for their thoughts on short-term mission work. 5. Christian Witnessing is the sharing of one’s faith in God, spreading the love of Christ and his teachings. According to the United Methodist Church, to witness is to “live out their vows publicly. Churches need to discern locally how they are going to do that in a specific way and a specific place… Leading a Christian life by example is a form of witness, whether it’s acting with integrity in the workplace, showing compassion to neighbors, or helping others embody the love of Christ through advocacy and outreach” (Dwyer 2017). 6. Larger structural problems that Mexico struggles with include land loss and disenfranchisement, corporatization of agriculture, political corruption, violence stemming from the drug trade. However, the group I was with did not discuss these issues, besides the gang violence, and might not have been aware of them.

REFERENCES Babb, Florence. 2011. Tourism Encounters: Fashioning Latin American Nations and Histories. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Badone, Ellen, and Sharon R. Roseman. 2004. Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Barkin, Gareth. 2018. “Either Here or There: Short-Term Study Abroad and the Discourse of Going.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 49, no. 3: 296–317. Baudrillard, Jean.1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Bornstein, Erica. 2012. Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bruner, Edward. 2005. “Introduction.” In Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel, 1–29. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1991. “Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18: 1–20. Coleman, Simon, and John Elsner. 1995. Pilgrimage: Past and Present in the World Religions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Di Giovine, Michael A. 2013. “Apologia Pro Turismo: Breaking Inter- and IntraDisciplinary Boundaries in the Anthropological Study of Tourism and Pilgrimage.” Journal of Tourism Challenges and Trends 6, no. 2: 63–94. ———. 2015a. “When Popular Religion Becomes Elite Heritage: Tensions and Transformations at the Shrine of St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.” In Encounters with Popular Pasts: Cultural Heritage and Popular Culture, edited by Mike Robinson and Helaine Silverman, 31–47. New York: Springer International Publishing. ———. 2015b. “Seductions of Suffering: Stigmata, Salvation and Pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of St. Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo.” In The Seductions of Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition, edited by David Picard and Michael A. Di Giovine, 187–210. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company. ———. 2016. “A Higher Purpose: Sacred Journey as Spaces for Peace in Christianity.” In Pilgrims and Pilgrimages as Peacemakers in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, edited by Antón M. Pazos, 9–37. New York: Routledge. Dubisch, Jill, and Michael Winkleman. 2005. “Introduction: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage.” In Pilgrimage and Healing, edited by Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkleman, ix–xxxvi. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Dwyer, Julie. 2017. “What It Means to Witness: Honoring Our United Methodist Vow.” The People of the United Methodist Church. Accessed January 6, 2019. http:​/​/www​​.umc.​​org​/w​​hat​-w​​e​-bel​​ieve/​​what-​​it​-me​​ans​-t​​o​-wit​​ness-​​honor​​ing​-o​​ur​-un​​​ ited-​​metho​​dist-​​vow. Eade, John, and Michael J. Sallnow. 1991. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. London: Routledge. Eco, Umberto. 1995. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. New York: Random House. Elisha, Omri. 2011. Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches. Berkeley: University of California Press. Farrell, B. Hunter. 2013. “From Short-term Mission to Global Discipleship: A Peruvian Case Study.” Missiology: An International Review 41, no. 163: 163–178. Fife, Wayne. 2004. “Extending the Metaphor: British Missionaries as Pilgrims in New Guinea.” In Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, edited by Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman, 140–159. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hancock, Mary. 2014. “Short-Term Youth Mission Practice and the Visualization of Global Christianity.” Material Religion: The Journey of Sacred Objects, Art and Belief 10, no. 2: 154–180.

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Howell, Brian M. 2009. “Mission to Nowhere: Putting Short-Term Missions into Context.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 33, no. 4: 206–211. Kaell, Hillary. 2014. Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage. New York: New York University Press. MacCannell, Dean. 1976. “Sightseeing and Social Structure.” In The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 39–58. New York: Schocken Books. Moodie, Ellen. 2013. “Inequality and Intimacy between Sister Communities in El Salvador and the United States.” Missiology: An International Review 41, no. 2: 146–162. Mostafanezhad, Mary. 2014. “Volunteer Tourism and the Popular Humanitarian Gaze.” Geoforum 54: 111–118. Orsi, Robert A. 1999. “Introduction: Crossing the City Line.” In Gods of the City, 1–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Picard, David, and Michael A. Di Giovine. 2014. “Introduction: Through Other Worlds.” In Tourism and the Power of Otherness: Seductions of Difference, edited by David Picard. Buffalo: Channel View Publications. Salazar, Noel B., and Nelson H. H. Graburn. 2014. “Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of Tourism Imaginaries.” Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches, edited by Noel B. Salazar and Nelson H. H. Graburn, 1–28. New York: Berghahn Books, Incorporated. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1985. “Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality.” American Ethnologist 12, no. 4: 707–724. Stone, Philip, and Richard Sharpley. 2008. “Consuming Dark Tourism: A Thanatological Perspective.” Annals of Tourism Research 35, no. 2: 574–595. Trinitapoli, Jenny, and Stephen Vaisey. 2009. “The Transformative Role of Religious Experience: The Case of Short-Term Mission.” Social Forces 88, no. 1: 121–146. Turner, Victor, and Edith Turner. 1978. “Introduction: Pilgrimage as a Liminoid Phenomenon.” In Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 1–39. New York: Columbia University Press. Zehner, Edwin. 2013. “Short-Term Missions: Some Perspectives from Thailand.” Missiology: An International Review 41, no. 2: 130–145.

Chapter 8

Schooling Taste Culinary Tourism, Study Abroad, and Food Melissa Biggs

I hold the bowl of pancita—soup made from beef stomach and lining—in my lap. Preparing pancita requires hours of labor, which makes it a dish usually served for special occasions and family celebrations. We have just participated in the harvest of the host family’s corn plots; in return, the family serves all of us a meal, intended to celebrate the crop, and thank us for our work. Recipes vary according to family preferences. Sometimes the meat is chopped finely, sometimes left in larger pieces. The deep red broth in my bowl is filled with large strips of dark, roughly textured meat, and a few smaller bits that look like honeycomb. Since I am a guest, my bowl has been piled with extra meat. I squeeze in as much lime juice as I can, and add a healthy dose of serrano chiles. “Provecho,” says the host family’s son, and he and the others gulp huge spoonfuls of soup. Everyone exclaims how delicious it is, pulling the large pieces of meat out and wrapping them into tortillas. I take timid sips of broth, working my way up to eating some of the meat. I want badly to be able to eat at least half of my serving, but even the sips of broth test my ability to overcome my aversion to its aroma. “Melissa, you’re not eating anything,” one of the daughters-in-law exclaims. I respond that I’m not very hungry, then choke down a spoonful of broth and a bit of tripe. One of the other guests, perhaps sensing my discomfiture, offers to take some of the meat from my bowl. I am embarrassed: I’m an ungrateful guest, a prime example of the squeamish American who won’t eat “real” Mexican food. Food is often presented as an enjoyable and immediate form of cultural exchange and education. As Bonnekessen (2010) notes, food seems an innocent and safe way to experience cultural diversity. Travel centered on culinary experiences in particular —visits to small-scale producers, shopping at local markets, and cooking classes, for example—attracts consumers interested in a more “in-depth” travel experience (see Ascione this book, for example). 215

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Richards (2003) points out that “authenticity has always been viewed as an important aspect of tourist consumption, and seeking out ‘authentic’ local and regional foods can become a motive for visiting a particular destination.” While food is not the primary focus of every study-abroad program, it is part of study-abroad experiences. Students in home stays often eat with their host families, and some programs include opportunities for students to participate in food-related activities, such as cooking classes. For students, however, exposure to new foods and eating habits is not necessarily pleasurable. Adjusting to unfamiliar ingredients or preparations can be a difficult and distressing part of studying abroad (Brown et al. 2010), even when—as in the opening vignette—the student or traveler genuinely wants to partake. Considering the role of food in study-abroad programs includes more than whether a particular dish is palatable to the visitor. Students also navigate new conventions about when and where it is considered appropriate to eat, and how to eat. Even familiar foods or ingredients might taste different or be considered of inferior quality, as Lorraine Brown and her colleagues found when they interviewed international graduate students studying in southern England about their food habits (2010). The participants came from a variety of countries, including Taiwan, France, Grenada, and Malaysia. Students complained that produce did not seem as fresh and worried about pesticides used to grow it. They characterized their diets in their home countries as “healthier,” with fewer sweets and a wider variety of fresh products. This chapter explores culinary learning undertaken by tourists seeking to engage with local culture in ways that are unavailable to the everyday tourist and students participating in study-abroad programs in Mexico. It draws from interviews, participant observation, publicly available student blogs, and literature on homestays, commensality, and culinary tourism. Much of the current research that discusses food in a study-abroad context focuses on international students who plan to complete degrees or significant portions of their degrees outside of their home countries (Brown et al. 2010; Brown 2009). In study-abroad literature, food surfaces in research about homestays (Sheng‐Hsun Lee et al. 2017; Kinginger 2009; Schmidt-Rinehart and Knight 2004; Knight and Schmidt-Rinehart 2002; Wilkinson 1998), primarily with regard to shared meals as a site of language acquisition (Cook 2006; Iino 1996), although DuFon (2006) focuses on the socialization of taste. According to the World Tourism Organization, food accounts for approximately one-fourth of the money spent by tourists worldwide (UNWTO Report 2012). Of course, a percentage of that is spent by tourists solely fulfilling daily sustenance needs, but a growing amount is dedicated toward tourism specifically focused on food-related experiences: food festivals, market tours, walking tours of neighborhood restaurants and bars, cooking classes, and farm visits. As the market for culinary tourism grows, it has linked to

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other forms of tourism that accentuate local production, sustainability, and cultural heritage. This emphasis on the local contributes to the accumulation of cultural capital that “can be used immediately within the destination, be used on return to home, and even in future travel situations, which serves as an indication of the cultural sophistication of the tourist, e.g., be competent to appreciate and enjoy foreign food, and are sophisticated enough to be able to order it and eat it with proper manners” (Mak et al. 2012; citing Chang et al. 2010 and Cohen and Avieli 2004). Activities sought out by these tourists resemble those planned to enhance the cultural learning of study-abroad students, especially in short-term programs. Promoted as “one of Mexico’s most culturally rich and diverse regions” in 2017 by Fodor’s, the southern state of Oaxaca attracts tourists drawn to the “special magic” of its “vibrant crafts and art scene . . . outstandingly colorful and extroverted festivities . . . uniquely savory cuisine and diverse natural riches” (Lonely Planet 2018). As Brulotte and Sparkman observe, many of the international tourists who come to Oaxaca do so precisely because of its reputation as “a repository of ‘genuine’ indigenous culture, past and present” (2016: 118). The historic center of Oaxaca City and the nearby archeological site of Monte Alban were inscribed into the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1987; the caves of Yagul and the archeological site of Mitla, both easily accessible as day-trips from Oaxaca City, entered the list in 2010. After the 2010 designation of “Traditional Mexican cuisine—ancestral, ongoing community culture, the Michoacán paradigm” as UNESCO Intangible World Heritage, a nascent culinary tourism scene boomed. Many travelers now come specifically for culinary experiences; there are dozens of cooking schools, market tours, and specialty excursions from which to choose. In late spring of 2018, I spent several days in Oaxaca City, speaking with cooking school instructors, tour leaders, and tourists participating in foodrelated activities. I joined six other visitors for a cooking class in the nearby town of Teotitlán del Valle at El Sabor Zapoteco, the cooking school operated by Reyna Mendoza Ruiz. A driver with a well-outfitted van met us on a street corner near the city’s ethnobotanical garden. The other cooking class students were a retired couple from the United States, Linda and Jerry, and two Canadian couples in their late twenties to early thirties, Jane and Rob and Justin and Catherine.1 Linda and Jerry spend several weeks a year in Mexico and were staying in an apartment in Oaxaca City owned by Linda’s sister. Jane and Rob were soon to leave after a two week stay in Oaxaca; Justin and Catherine had arrived a few days before for a three-week stay. None of the group except me spoke more than rudimentary Spanish. All had learned of El Sabor Zapoteco through Internet research. Ms. Mendoza later told me that she invests nothing in publicity; students find her through Internet searches and word of mouth. The school’s website—presented only in English—is

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colorful and well-organized, studded with photographs of Teotitlán’s market, Mendoza and her family, students preparing food with traditional kitchen tools, and, of course, luscious fruits, vegetables, and finished dishes. Visitors who prefer not to cook can contract Mendoza to prepare and host a meal for their group. The cooking school meets in the Mendoza family home. The kitchen used by students is spacious and open air, traditional in style but equipped with a Vitamix blender and professional stove as well as a wood-burning brick stove, basalt grinding stones (the metate and its mano), and clay griddles (comales). Speakers play music typical of Oaxacan fiestas and parades in the background. A long table covered by a colorful woven cloth occupies one corner; we gather at the brick-and-tile work station at the other end of the kitchen. Mendoza conducts the class in English; she completed an intensive course in Canada, and followed that with a year-long course in Oaxaca City. “But I only speak kitchen English,” she laughs. She opened El Sabor Zapoteco in 2009, after working in a guest house operated by another member of her family, and teaching classes as part of other ventures. Many of her students are repeat visitors to the school, coming year after year to learn new dishes. Claudia Bell, writing about home-based cooking schools in Bali, suggests that “these cooking classes might be positioned as one of the few ways tourists can engage with authentic local domestic culture” (2015: 92). Earlier work I did in Tlaxcala, Mexico (Biggs 2015), with a chef who organizes and leads Slow Food2 tours to farming communities indicates that this positioning pertains whether the tourists are foreigners or urban Mexicans unfamiliar with life in the country. Unlike some of the classes Bell describes, which take place in home kitchens susceptible to regular domestic interruptions such as children arriving home from school, the Mexican examples discussed here present a more managed version of domesticity. In the case of the Tlaxacala tours, communities must first decide whether or not they want to welcome strangers into their homes and farm plots. Once the choice to accept visitors is made, other decisions follow. While community members understand the economic opportunity offered by receiving visitors, and might participate and share in some of the practical goals of Slow Food, they don’t necessarily subscribe to all of the implications of its philosophies. Community expressions of hospitality sometimes clash with Slow Food values. In many Mexican working class homes, whether rural or urban, Coca-Cola and other brand-name sodas are the preferred beverages for special occasion meals. Visitors complained to the chef that they had expected to be served traditional aguas de sabor (agua fresca). The chef relayed the expectation to the hosting communities. “I didn’t tell them they had to serve aguas de sabor, but I did tell them that the visitors expected

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‘traditional’ drinks. They want the visitors to have a good experience so that they will come back.” For practical reasons, the hosts of some of the first communal meals used disposable plates and silverware. This is also a mark that a host is wealthy enough to purchase disposable goods for his guests to use. But to many of the Slow Food tourists, this contradicted the Slow Food Movement’s emphasis on ecologically sound practices. Again, the chef went back to the hosting communities and communicated the expectation. “It isn’t just a traditional meal” that is offered to the visitors, he told me; “we are selling them an experience.” The promise of seeing backstage (Goffman [1959] 1990) involves a co-creation of that backstage, a tourist imaginary (Salazar 2011; Gravari-Barbas and Graburn 2012) actively constructed by the expectations of the tour goers, the facilitation of the chef, and the accommodation of the receiving communities.3 Mendoza hosts her students within her family home but in a kitchen space designed to receive students or other guests. Other domestic kitchens in which I have worked in Teotitlán are neither as spacious nor as well-equipped. Nor does Mendoza make claims to be nothing more than a home cook. The biography on the school’s website describes her as someone who “offers participants first-hand knowledge into Teotitlán del Valle’s rich culinary history,” and also lists the well-known chefs and culinary researchers with whom she has studied or collaborated, including the Mexican Ricardo Muñoz Zurita and famed U.S. chef and television personality Rick Bayless. In the months that followed the cooking class, Mendoza participated in the “Festival of Oaxaca” hosted in Muñoz’s Azul restaurants in Mexico City, and as an invited chef in the celebration “The Best of Mexico’s Culinary Traditions—Riviera Maya,” organized by the Grand Velas Riviera Maya Resort. Mendoza’s professional skills are evident as the class progresses. After a brief greeting, she presents the day’s menu to us. One of the ingredients, tunas, causes momentary confusion, until she clarifies for the non-Spanish speakers that tunas are prickly pears, not fish. She then distributes market baskets, and we follow her to the town marketplace. The baskets aren’t just for show; the market in Teotitlán has been waste-free for many years, so consumers must bring their own containers and bags or baskets. As we walk, Mendoza points out details of the town: the blooming pitahaya cactus; Picacho, the sacred mountain top that juts above the town. The market visit is an essential part of the class for first-time visitors. It serves to present not only the ingredients used to prepare the day’s meal but also other common ingredients and kitchen utensils. Mendoza calls our attention to the tiny red plums called “cerezas” and explains how to use the wooden molinillos to froth hot chocolate. We learn about local cheeses and choose pan dulce (sweet bread) for a mid-morning snack. In addition to the pedagogic value for students, Mendoza sees the market trips as one way to

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contribute to the town’s economy. While some guides for market excursions connected to cooking classes discourage students from making purchases of their own during the tour, she does not. Tourist purchases of kitchen utensils, tablets of chocolate, or dried chiles add to the vendors’ earnings. Similarly, for small groups, rather than sending the van to Oaxaca City to pick up students, she hires a local collective taxi. Purchasing goods in the market and using local forms of transport also contribute to a visitor’s sense of genuine participation in Teotilán life. Mingling with residents there to do a week’s marketing provides us with the sense that we are participating in an everyday aspect of Teotitlán’s life. At the same time, Mendoza’s presence assures us that we are selecting the highest quality ingredients and objects. Not only are we peeking at the backstage of culinary practice in Teotitlán, we are doing it with expert insider guidance. Cooking instructors I interviewed, including Mendoza, described carefully selecting the menu for each class based on seasonality and the time limitations of a three to four-hour class. Part of their work is managing the expectations of the students, many of whom are eager to prepare time-consuming dishes such as tamales or the elaborate mole negro, a sauce famous for its complex blend of flavors. Even very experienced Oaxacan cooks cannot make a mole negro in four hours. On the day I visited the cooking school, we prepared zegueza, a chicken and chile soup thickened with toasted ground corn; a nopal (cactus paddle) salad with an avocado dressing; a salsa made from the chile pasilla oaxaqueña, a variety grown only in a very small area of the state; and the tuna sorbet. The latter required little effort, as after the tunas were pureed, they were simply put into an ice cream maker. We were also served tamales, but we didn’t directly participate in the preparation of those dishes. Another factor cooking instructors consider when planning the menu is student skill levels. Most of the dishes we prepared require simple chopping skills, but we also learned to use two kitchen tools that might be unfamiliar, the metate and its mano and the molcajete (basalt mortar) and tejolote (basalt pestle). All of the cooking instructors with whom I spoke teach hands-on classes, so most food preparation occurs in the class itself. Aside from the tamales, the only food prepared ahead of time for our class was the chicken stock and chicken, and the hot chocolate that we drank with our pan dulce. When we return to the Mendoza home, we unload the baskets and sort ingredients according to the recipes. While we eat pan dulce and sip hot chocolate, Mendoza explains how the day’s work will be divided. Rather than working at stations, each of us participates in the preparation of each dish. First, we each select an apron from an assortment Mendoza offers, ranging from beautifully embroidered ones like those typically worn by women in Teotilán to less ornate chef-style aprons patterned with chiles. She begins the class by showing us how to use the molcajete to grind the ingredients

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for the salsa. However, when she offers the chance for someone else to step up and grind, no one volunteers. “Really? No one wants to try?” she laughs, and hands the molcajete off to an assistant. She later tells me it’s unusual for no one to volunteer and speculates that maybe because the class was small, people felt shy. The next recipe we prepare is the nopal salad. Perhaps because the tools and techniques are familiar to everyone, we all set to work chopping the nopales and onions, and mashing the avocado for the dressing. Mendoza follows this by showing us how to toast the corn kernels for the zegueza on the comal, gently stirring to prevent them from burning, then demonstrates the push/pull action used to crack the corn on the metate. By now, the group is joking and encouraging one another. One of the men asks whether men in Teotitlán typically use the metate, and Mendoza answers no, but that she thinks everyone who wants to should take a turn. Each of us takes a turn, with one of the men earning special notice from Mendoza for his technique. Traditionally, the metate is placed on the ground, and women kneel while they grind.4 Mendoza placed the metate we used for the corn on a counter next to the wood stove on which we had toasted the kernels. Our next step was to grind the chiles that would flavor the zegueza. The chiles, first toasted on a comal, then briefly soaked to make them pliable, require much more grinding effort than cracking the toasted corn, and we spatter the floor and ourselves with the resulting paste. A couple of the students complain that their hands burn a bit from the chile oil. While we wait for the flavors of the zegueza to meld, Reyna teaches us to fold cornhusks into small boats to hold the nopal salad. Soon after that, we move to the table. To accompany our meal, we are offered hibiscus agua fresca (a fruit or plant-based beverage), beer, and mezcal in traditional gourd cups. Over the meal, Jane and Rob share that they regularly attend cooking classes as part of their travel. Jane works with a social justice NGO in their home city of Toronto, and both of them are interested in the idea of food justice. They travel internationally at least once a year and had most recently visited Kenya, where they attended a cooking class; they also mentioned taking classes in Indonesia. They both believe that participating in the sort of culinary tourism they prefer—shopping in local markets, learning from locally based teachers—provides benefits to the communities they visit. While Justin and Catherine do not travel as frequently as Jane and Rob, they also expressed a preference for experiences that they understood as “local” and more connected to community. They selected a class at El Sabor Zapoteco because the website and online reviews depicted an “authentic” Oaxacan experience. Linda also viewed the class as a way to engage more deeply with local culture. Though she and Jerry visit Oaxaca often, and own a beach home on the west coast of Mexico, she hoped to learn more about shopping in the market

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and how to prepare some of the ingredients with which she was unfamiliar. On a previous trip Linda and Jerry made to Oaxaca, Linda’s sister had arranged for a group to eat a meal hosted at Mendoza’s home; Linda decided then that she would like to attend one of the cooking classes. In our interview, Mendoza mentioned that she tries to provide a mix of recipes with familiar and unfamiliar ingredients and to teach a technique with which participants might not be acquainted. She prints out and distributes copies of the recipes each class prepares. I asked whether anyone thought she or he would prepare any of the recipes in their own home kitchens. Everyone responded that they would like to try to prepare the simpler recipes, such as the nopal salad or the salsa. Jane thought she knew where in Toronto she might find some of the less familiar ingredients, like the cactus paddles. Justin and Catherine also thought they would be able to find chiles and maybe the nopal in Vancouver. Linda and Jerry agreed that the salad would be a dish they could make at home. None of the participants had used the technique of toasting and rehydrating dried chiles before, and all thought that the salsa was something they could replicate, replacing the molcajete with a blender. Participants in Mendoza’s cooking class could be considered examples of what Richards (2011) terms “skilled consumers,” actively searching out and creating the sort of tourist experience they prefer to have. The two young Canadian couples especially exemplified this, as they each described planning their travels, using Internet resources and personal contacts to construct particular itineraries. Though Linda and Jerry do not fit that description quite as neatly as the other two couples, they still wanted to reach out of their immediate comfort zones and have a more personalized experience of Oaxaca. As in the home cooking schools visited by Bell, at El Sabor Zapoteco “the lessons that took place felt less like a professional exchange and more like friends cooking together, with the local person in charge” (2015: 95). Mendoza’s easy yet practiced manner invites class participants to feel “at home” in her home. The professional training she received away from home—in Oaxaca, Mexico City, and abroad—enables her to communicate instructions and information in ways that her largely foreign clientele understand and appreciate. While none of the group specifically eschewed standard tourist offerings available in Oaxaca—they shared restaurant recommendations and discussed visits to nearby archeological sites—they did express the desire to see “more” and to understand what they were seeing differently. They sought out an experience that allowed them to “step into” an unfamiliar every day in a less-touristed space and “perform tourism differently” (Edensor 2007: 213). Carrying a basket, leaning over to examine produce displayed on mats on the floor rather than in waist-level bins, learning the rhythm of the mano transformed the quotidian actions of shopping for and preparing food

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into an active engagement with people and places imagined as “other” and “elsewhere.” Sammells describes what she calls “haute traditional” cuisines, cuisines that act as a “bridge between a geographic localism and a globalizing cosmopolitanism” (2016: 142). Haute traditional cuisines arise when cuisines oscillate between “an idealized division—local/native/ancestral/feminine vs. cosmo​ polit​an/tr​ansna​tiona​l/inn​ovati​ve/ma​sculi​ne” (Sammells 2016: 143). In her analysis, nomination for and inscription onto the UNESCO List for Intangible World Heritage plays a role in processes that create haute traditional cuisines. She identifies “Mexican cuisine”—as recognized by UNESCO and promoted by Mexican federal and state tourism boards and other official entities—as an example of a haute traditional cuisine. In Mexico, there persists an idea of the rural domestic kitchen as representing the purest expression of Mexican food culture: tortillas patted out by hand and cooked on a comal, salsas made by combining ingredients in the molcajete, stews cooked in clay pots, all presided over by a woman wearing an embroidered blouse and braided hair. As Sammells points out, materials that accompanied the successful UNESCO nomination bid included extensive photographs of traditional women cooks, provided by the Michoacán state tourism board. In fact, the photos on Reyna Mendoza’s website portray similar images, featuring Reyna and her kitchen. But heritigization and tourism engender new possibilities, opening new spaces for different kinds of social interactions that “change how participants think about what constitutes the local, and what the importance of being local—and being recognized as local—is” (Sammells 2016: 155; see also Hafstein 2019). The space in which Mendoza holds her classes, equipped with a Vitamix blender and metates, and the self she presents when teaching offer examples of these reconfigurations.5 She refuses the definition of local that rests in immobility (Salazar 2014) and does not hide that she spends time away from Teotitlán. By blending her “first-hand knowledge of Teotitlán del Valle” with expertise gained through travel and working with internationally recognized chefs, Mendoza positions herself as simultaneously local and well-traveled and professionally accomplished. Unlike the tourism workers Salazar portrays, she freely discusses her travels, the time she spent in Canada learning English, and uses modern equipment as well as traditional when teaching. As new ways of “being a local” open, tourist perceptions shift as well. This is especially true in Oaxaca, where income from remittances is the primary source of income in the state. Even casual tourist encounters can result in learning that your waiter spent five years driving a taxi in Los Angeles or that the woman from whom you are buying tortillas spends three months a year with her grandchildren in Chicago. Of course, forced mobility out of economic need is not the same as the mobility of leisure but the realities of migration alter tourism imaginaries for both locals and tourists.

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According to the Institute of International Education’s 2018 Open Doors Report on U.S. study abroad, 66 percent of students who participated in study-abroad programs in 2016–2017 participated in short-term programs, either eight weeks or less during the academic year, or one summer term. The IIE lists 4, 422 short-term programs on its website. In June of 2018, I interviewed Jorge Cortés, who coordinated a seven-day study-abroad trip to Mexico City for students from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.6 The summer 2018 program included primarily political science students, some from a course on megacities, and some from a class called Engaged L.A. Twenty-eight students in total participated, mostly undergraduate students, though there were six graduate students as well. Six staff members accompanied the group. The students’ stay included a variety of academic activities: events at the Universidad Iberoamericana, talks at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and a panel discussion including journalists from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and National Public Radio. Cultural components of the trip included a visit to the archeological site at Teotihuacán, the Templo Mayor, a tour of some of the murals by Diego Rivera and others, and a performance of the Baile Folclórico Nacional. The group stayed at the Hotel Majestic, which is near the Zócalo, the main plaza of Mexico City. Though the Loyola Marymount program has been running for several years, this was Cortés’s first time to coordinate it. He received suggestions and support from the faculty on the trip and experienced administrators. One person recommended three restaurants the group should visit: El Cardenal, Café de Tacuba, and the Sanborns Azulejos7; they were recommended as much for historical significance as for culinary excellence. Because the group was large, visiting restaurants required planning ahead. At Café Tacuba, for example, he arranged for the group to be served a standard plate that included four traditional specialties, including a tamal and a chile relleno (stuffed chile). For some of the students, just the fact that they were traveling and eating abroad triggered worries about getting sick. Cortés encouraged them to try foods with which they might be unfamiliar: “Be adventurous!” He explained that about half of the students on the trip were Latinx, many Mexican Americans, but also students of Central American and South American heritage, which gave them some familiarity with the flavors of the food. Also, since the university is located in Los Angeles, “Mexican food is an easy one.” Not all of the meals were planned ahead; sometimes the group divided into three smaller groups, each led by faculty and/or staff, and found places to eat on their own. This allowed for some spontaneity; one afternoon, Cortés led a group to a restaurant serving foods typical of the state of Jalisco, where his grandparents lived; another time, the groups ate hamburgers.

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For Cortés, the culinary highlight of the trip was a meal prepared by the chefs of the restaurant Masala y Maíz, Norma Listman, and Saqib Keval. The tagline on the restaurant’s website reads “At the intersection of Mexico and India.” The chefs describe their food as a “mestizaje,” mixing, of Mexican and Indian flavors and ingredients; they both research food migration. At the time of the group’s visit, the restaurant was involved in a dispute with one of the city code compliance offices, so the meal was prepared and served by the chefs at a private home. For Cortés, the quality of the food and the chefs’ mission and presentation made the meal especially memorable. Special dietary needs and considerations can be challenging in studyabroad settings. This trip included one vegetarian, one pescatarian, and one student who said she only liked her mother’s cooking. “Some did get adventurous, some did try new things,” Cortés said. The students completed online tutorials through Loyola Marymount’s study-abroad division, which included information about allergies and other health concerns. A few students did get sick, but Cortés felt that it was “normal” for students traveling abroad. “You do have to be more nitpicky when you travel,” regardless of whether you are in Mexico City or Madrid. The group spent one afternoon in the neighborhood around Frida Kahlo’s house, where some chose to eat in the market. Cortés encouraged them to be “adventurous,” while also respecting personal taste: “Some people just don’t like spice.” Some new foods—like squash blossom quesadillas—were more appealing than others, such as tongue tacos or tacos de cabeza.8 He also noted that although there is “good Mexican food in Los Angeles, it’s different.” Students remarked “I don’t see any burritos” or commented on the lack of cheddar cheese. Even some of the students who came from Mexican American homes found “a different side of Mexican food, different flavors.” Much of what Cortés portrays echoes Cohen and Avieli’s work on “culinary dilemmas” encountered when traveling (2004). Their work considers local food as both “an attraction and an impediment” for tourists; the insights can be expanded to include study-abroad students as well. As they point out, culinary differences refer not only to actual foodstuffs but also to “culinary habits and mores”: how people eat, when and where they eat, and at what point a food is considered inedible. Even a familiar and liked ingredient can be perceived as something not to be eaten, as illustrated by a conversation I had with Sabine, a student studying toward a master’s in archeology. She works at a field site in the Yucatán but first came to Mexico to do volunteer work and improve her Spanish. As part of her program, Sabine lived with a host family. “I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but sometimes the food . . . sometimes there would be tomatoes that I thought we shouldn’t eat, that were past time when we should eat them. But they would just throw them into the pot.” Many vegetable vendors in Mexican markets sell two categories of the

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fruit: “normal,” and “salsero,” suitable for making salsa, but not for chopping up into a salad. Salsero tomatoes cost less. They are bruised and blemished, sometimes leaking a bit of juice, fruit that might not be considered saleable in other venues. In the weekly market in my neighborhood, salsero tomatoes typically cost half to one-third the price per kilo that normal tomatoes cost; many thrifty shoppers request them. To Sabine, they looked like compost. “But I never got sick, so I guess it was all right,” she concluded. Cohen and Avieli describe the tension most of us experience between “neophobia”—fear of the new—and “neophylia”—embracing of the new (2004: 759), particularly when heightened by the situation of being in a new place with possibly unfamiliar foods and eating practices. Like the tourists presented by Cohen and Avieli, study-abroad students “are frequently eager for new experiences and willing to take greater risks than in their ordinary life” (2004: 760). Over the last three years, I have observed more foreigners expressing interest in Mexico’s extensive catalog of edible insects, from the well-known chapulines (grasshoppers) and maguey worms to the lesser known escamoles (ant larvae) and chicatanas (a sort of ant eaten in Oaxaca). Television programs such as Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods and the late Anthony Bourdain’s less sensationalistic No Reservations, as well as recent mainstream media coverage of insects as food sources perhaps contribute to this curiosity.9 Sometimes, however, the difference proves to be too much. I shared breakfast in Oaxaca City with Mark, a participant in the ten-month Fulbright Binational Internship Program. We were at a small restaurant that served regional specialties, including seasonal dishes such as omelets with either chapulines or a medium-sized beetle called a chinche. I ordered an unadventurous plate of huevos a la Mexicana (eggs scrambled with onions, tomatoes, and chiles), while Mark opted for the chinche omelet. “I feel like I should try them,” he said. When the omelet arrived, it was stuffed with cheese and a very generous serving of the chinches, which had been toasted on the comal but were otherwise intact, complete with feelers and legs. He ate about a third of the omelet before admitting it “looked a lot more like bugs than I expected.” Food scholar Lucy Long’s framing of “the crux of otherness” (2004: 32) proves useful when considering risk-taking in food choice. She posits three categories or “realms”: the exotic, the edible, and the palatable. The realms are dynamic and shifting, and though individually expressed are culturally structured. While the edible and the palatable might seem to be the same thing, she clarifies that the palatable is what is considered desirable to eat as opposed to what can be eaten. In Mark’s case, the omelet proved edible, but unpalatable. We might typically think of the actual ingestion of exotic or unpalatable foods as the action that pushes a visitor out of his or her comfort zone, but the refusal or inability to do so can also cause discomfort. Sabine

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chose the discomfort of eating food she considered unpalatable rather than the discomfort of hurting her host family’s feelings. My inability to render the pancita palatable provoked shame and violated my own notions of what appropriate guest (and anthropologist) behavior should be. While students in homestays are unlikely to encounter chinche omelets, food and meals can still be a point of anxiety. This is true not only for the students but also for the families that host them, as Knight and SchmidtReinhart’s research in Spain and Mexico reveals. Host families struggle at times with special dietary needs: “A number of Mexican señoras mentioned that the number of vegetarian students seems to be increasing and that many of them do not cook this way. In addition, the purchase of some products (e.g., soy milk) can be costly” (2002: 196). Culinary dilemmas include expectations around timing and the quantity of food served at meals. Other difficulties mentioned by homestay families include students snacking between meals and eating food in areas of the home considered inappropriate, such as the bedroom. In Mexico, the main meal is usually taken in the mid-to-late afternoon, between 2:30 and 4:00 PM, with a lighter supper, cena, eaten later in the evening. Students in homestays complained at times of “not enough food” in the evening or that “dinners were scarce.”10 Typically, Mexican home cooking includes few green salads or raw vegetables, and some native vegetables, such as nopales or chayote (an edible gourd also known as mirliton squash), might not be recognized as such by students, who commented that they would like to be served more vegetables. Study-abroad imaginaries function much like tourist imaginaries, structuring student expectations and experiences (Härkönen and Dervin 2015). Like the Loyola Marymount students whose Los Angeles experiences shaped their expectations of Mexican food, a number of students expressed surprise or even dismay at the food they were served in homes or restaurants in Mexico. Some participants in a short-term program assessed by Carley and Tudor compared the Mexican food they ate while in Mexico unfavorably to Mexican food they eat in the United States: “Interestingly, food was an area where many participants came away with less favorable impressions than they had prior to their visit: ‘I do not like the food in Mexico—but I love Mexican food in the U.S.;' ‘Their Mexican food is a lot different than the Mexican food here. The margaritas are the same,’ and ‘I thought the food would be better than it was’ were frequent responses” (2006: 162, emphasis in the original). Those comments seem directly related to students’ experience of Mexican restaurants in the United States. Cohen and Avieli raise the question of “whether and to what extent the presence of ethnic restaurants in the tourists’ countries of origin prepare them to deal with the local culinary situation at the destination” (2004: 764). Though beyond the scope of this chapter, it does seem that

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prior experience with “Mexican” food in the United States at least sets some expectations for what the student will find in Mexico.11 Student expectations can also lead to disappointment of a different sort, such as the blogger who wrote “I was sad to see processed food in Oaxaca,” and another who commented that he would have liked to have been served “more cultural food” at his homestay. Both of these statements bring to mind Wilk’s 1999 essay referenced earlier in the chapter. The first blogger felt dismayed to discover that not all food in Oaxaca is made from fresh, easily pronounceable ingredients. Though it is unclear precisely what the second blogger meant by “more cultural food,” I assume he was served foods he did not think of as specifically “Mexican.” Whether—as in Wilk’s example—his hosts chose food they believed to be more familiar to him or whether the foods they served were the foods the family itself preferred is also unknown. Study-abroad students who choose a homestay often do so anticipating that living with a host family will provide them with special access into the host culture, access not available to a regular tourist. But as these two examples illustrate, a more close-up engagement with the host cultures sometimes disrupts the student’s imagined experience. People in Oaxaca eat Doritos and Lucky Charms; your host family’s favorite dinner might be pizza. Similarly, students’ reactions might challenge their perceptions of their imagined study abroad self. Härkönen and Dervin (2015) identify self-transformation as a key part of study-abroad imaginaries. Discovering a culinary limit can call into question a self-image as “adventurous,” a characteristic also encouraged by study-abroad literature and coordinators like Cortés, as evidenced in the above examples. Food and meal-taking are understudied aspects of the study-abroad experience. If mentioned at all, they are generally glossed as a positive aspect of the time abroad or as primary sites for language acquisition and practice. It might seem trivial to attend to food and eating when determining desired outcomes for students participating in study-abroad programs. However, as Wilk points out, “consumption is more than a simple matter of choice; as Bourdieu effectively argued, it is embodied through what he called hexis, the daily habitus which tells us what tastes and feels right” (n.d.: 17). I am not arguing here that students should be deemed successes or failures based on their desire or ability to eat or enjoy particular foods. Rather, I posit that including reflections about food, food preparation, and meals could serve as valuable points for student reflection and self-assessment both during and after their study-abroad period, even for those programs that do not emphasize culinary experiences. Though this might seem more obvious when the student chooses a homestay, I believe that students who choose dormitory or apartment settings would also benefit. Reflecting on my own culinary “failure,” my inability to eat the pancita served to me as an act of hospitality caused me to

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reconsider my understandings of gratitude and community in my fieldwork. For students, such reflection could lead to an enriched understanding of their study-abroad experience. “Culinary tourism creates opportunities to find, test, and push thresholds of the unfamiliar,” writes Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. “Newness arises from unpredictability, and culinary tourism, to the degree that it constitutes a break with one’s daily routine and even with the predictability of the tourism industry, affords innumerable occasions for new experiences. New experiences expand the ways we create and know ourselves because they dehabituate and estrange much that we take for granted” (2004: xii). Substitute “study abroad” for “culinary tourism” in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s formulation, and it could be the promotional text from any number of study-abroad websites or brochures. Removed from their everyday lives, study-abroad students are promised experiences that will transform them, opportunities to meet new friends, and enhanced self-knowledge. Culinary tourists seek more profound engagement with people than a typical tourist might experience, and a more intimate knowledge of place through the purchase and consumption of particular foods and dishes; many culinary tourists see investing in local food as a means to travel “sustainably” and support local economies. For students, one of the draws of study abroad can be promise of authentic connection through “giving back” by participating in service projects or volunteering with local organizations. I am curious about the transformation culinary tourists and study-abroad participants imagine and experience and how this transformation connects to imaginings of “responsible travel” and the possibility for, as Salazar states, “tourism creating positive relations in a world hitherto unconnected” (2014: 16). NOTES 1. The names of the other class participants are pseudonyms. I introduced myself in the van on the way to Teotitlán as an anthropologist and asked permission to use observations and conversations during class time as part of my research. All of the participants agreed. Before enrolling in the class, I contacted Reyna Mendoza and explained my interest in the class and asked her permission to be present as a participant observer. Information about the cooking school and her history comes from an interview conducted with her on the day of the class, May 1, 2018. 2. The Slow Food Movement emerged officially in Italy in 1989, founded by Carlo Petrini in response to the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in the Piazza di Spagna, Rome. Delegates from fifteen countries met in Paris and signed the Slow Food Manifesto. The three founding principles of Slow Food are “good, clean, and fair: good: quality, flavorsome and healthy food clean: production that does not harm the environment fair: accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay

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for producers” (Slow Food International website). Since its founding, Slow Food International has grown to over 100,000 members in 153 countries. 3. Richard Wilk describes similar disjunctures and adaptations between hosts and visitors in his essay, “‘Real Belizean Food’”: Building Local Identity in the Transnational Caribbean” (1999). 4. In February 2018, I took a one-day class on cacao at the Escuela de Gastronomía Mexicana in Mexico City, where we learned to grind cacao into chocolate in the metate. Our instructor told us that kneeling was part of the ritual aspect of Mexican cooking. While I first learned to grind corn in the kneeling position, my observations in home kitchens in various parts of Mexico is that in kitchens where a metate is in use, many women prefer to stand when grinding, and set it on a counter or table. If she uses a metate for grinding, a cook will usually have at least three: one for corn, one for chiles, and one for chocolate. 5. Brulotte and Starkman’s (2016) analysis of the dispute between two Oaxaca restaurateurs—César Gachupín Velasco, from the Chinanteco town of San Felipe Usila, and Óscar Carillo, from Oaxaca City—over the right to serve a particular preparation of soup provides an example of tensions that these possibilities can provoke. 6. I interviewed Cortés via Skype on June 25, 2018 from my home in Guadalajara. 7. All three are iconic restaurants located in Mexico City’s historical center. Lonely Planet describes El Cardenal as “possibly the finest place in town for a traditional meal” and Café de Tacuba as “[a]fantasy of colored tiles, brass lamps and oil paintings this Mexican icon has served antojitos (snacks such as tacos and sopes – corn tortillas layered with beans, cheese and other ingredients) since 1912.” Sanborns Azulejos is famous for the exterior tiles that give it its name, and for the mural by José Clemente Orozco that decorates the staircase. 8. Meat taken from the beef head, usually cut directly from a cooked, displayed head while the customer watches. 9. For example, the New York Times printed “Why Aren’t We Eating More Insects,” by Ligaya Mishan in the September 7, 2018 issue; the BBC website published “Edible Insects: our verdict on crunchy roasted crickets” on November 19, 2018. 10. Unless otherwise identified, these quotes were taken from blog posts published on the Abroad 101 Study Abroad Reviews website https​:/​/ww​​w​.stu​​dyabr​​ oad10​​1​.com​​/coun​​tries​​​/mexi​​co, written by students who participated in study away programs in different areas of Mexico, and reviewed in December of 2018. I read approximately 300 reviews. Though the site includes reviews from other Englishspeaking countries, I used only reviews completed by students from the U.S.A. and only reviews that specifically mentioned a homestay. Most of the reviews dated from 2016-2017. 11. For more about shifting tourist expectations of Mexican cuisine, see Jeffrey M. Pilcher “From ‘Montezuma’s Revenge; to ‘Mexican Truffles’: Culinary Tourism Across the Rio Grande” in Culinary Tourism, edited by Lucy Long.

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REFERENCES Bell, Claudia. 2015. “Tourists Infiltrating Authentic Domestic Space at Balinese Home Cooking Schools.” Tourist Studies 15, no. 1: 86–100. Biggs, Melissa. “A Taste for the Local: Behind the Scenes of Culinary Tourism.” Paper delivered at the 114th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Denver, Colorado, November 12–22, 2015. Bonnekessen, Barbara. 2010. “Food is Good to Teach: An Exploration of the Cultural Meanings of Food.” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 13, no. 2: 279–295. Brown, Lorraine. 2009. “The Transformative Power of the International Sojourn: An Ethnographic Study of the International Student Experience.” Annals of Tourism Research 36, no. 3: 502–521. Brown, Lorraine, and Immy Holloway. 2008. “The Adjustment Journey of International Postgraduate Students at an English University: An Ethnographic Study.” Journal of Research in International Education 7, no. 2: 232–249. Brown, Lorraine, John Edwards, and Heather Hartwell. 2010. “A Taste of the Unfamiliar: Understanding the Meanings Attached to Food by International Postgraduate Students in England.” Appetite 54, no. 1: 202–207. Brulotte, Ronda L., and Alvin Starkman. 2014. “Caldo de Piedra and Claiming PreHispanic Cuisine as Cultural Heritage.” In Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, edited by Ronda L. Brulotte and Michael A Di Giovine. New York: Routledge, 110–123. Carley, Susan, and R. Keith Tudor. 2006. “Assessing the Impact of Short-Term Study Abroad.” Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective 1, no. 2: 150–168. Cohen, Erik, and Nir Aveli. 2004. “Food in Tourism: Attraction and Impediment.” Annals of Tourism Research 31, no. 4: 755–778. DuFon, Margaret A. 2006. “The Socialization of Taste During Study Abroad in Indonesia.” In Language Learners in Study Abroad Contexts, edited by Margaret DuFon and Eton E. Churchill. Bristol, 91–119. Edensor, Tim. 2007. “Mundane Mobilities, Performances and Spaces of Tourism.” Social and Cultural Geography 8, no. 2: 199–215. Goffman, Erving. 1990 [1959]. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books. Gravari-Barbas, Maria, and Nelson Graburn. 2012. “Tourist Imaginaries.” Via online 1. https​:/​/jo​​urnal​​s​.ope​​nedit​​ion​.o​​rg​/vi​​atou​r​​ism​/1​​180 Hafstein, Valdimar. 2018. Making Intangible Heritage: El Condor Pasa and Other Stories from UNESCO. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Härkönen, Anu, and Fred Dervin. 2015. “‘Talking Just About Learning Languages and Getting to Know Cultures Is Something that’s Mentioned in Very Many applications’: Student and Staff Imaginaries About Study Abroad.” In The New Politics of Global Academic Mobility and Migration, 101–118. https​:/​/bl​​ogs​.h​​elsin​​ki​.fi​​/ derv​​in​/fi​​les​/2​​012​/0​​1​/Har​​konen​​-Derv​​in​-​Ar​​ticle​​-fina​​l​.pdf​

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Ilino, Masakazu. 2006. “Norms of Interaction in a Japanese Homestay Setting: Toward a Two-Way Flow of Linguistic and Cultural Resources.” In Language Learners in Study Abroad Contexts, edited by Margaret DuFon and Eton E. Churchill. Bristol, 151–176. Institute of International Education. 2018. “Detailed Duration of U.S. Study Abroad, 2006/07–2016/17” Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange. http://www​.iie​.org​/opendoors Kinginger, Celeste. 2008. “Language Learning in Study Abroad: Case Studies of Americans in France.” The Modern Language Journal 92: 1–124. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2002. “Foreword.” In Culinary Tourism, edited by Lucy M. Long. Lexington: UPress of Kentucky, xi–xiv. Knight, Susan M., and Barbara C. Schmidt‐Rinehart. 2002. “Enhancing the Homestay: Study Abroad from the Host Family’s Perspective.” Foreign Language Annals 35, no. 2: 190–201. Lee, Sheng‐Hsun, Q. Wu, C. Di, and C. Kinginger. 2017. “Learning to Eat Politely at the Chinese Homestay Dinner Table: Two contrasting Case Studies.” Foreign Language Annals 50, no. 1: 135–158. Lonely Planet. Oaxaca. https​:/​/ww​​w​.lon​​elypl​​anet.​​com​/m​​exico​​/oaxa​​​ca​-st​​ate Long, Lucy M. 2002. “Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness.” In Culinary Tourism, edited by Lucy M. Long. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 20–50. Mak, Athena H. N., Margaret Lumbers, and Anita Eves. 2012. “Globalisation and Food Consumption in Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 39, no. 1: 171–196. Mak, Athena H. N., Margaret Lumbers, Anita Eves, and Richard C. Y. Chang. 2012. “Factors Influencing Tourist Food Consumption.” International Journal of Hospitality Management 31, no. 3: 928–936. Minegishi Cook, Haruko. 2006. “Joint Construction of Folk Beliefs by JFL Learners and Japanese Host Families.” In Language Learners in Study Abroad Contexts, edited by Margaret DuFon and Eton E. Churchill. Bristol, 120–150. Peterson, Michele. 2017. “10 Reasons to Visit Oaxaca, Mexico.” Fodor’s Travel. https​:/​/ww​​w​.fod​​ors​.c​​om​/wo​​rld​/m​​exico​​-and-​​centr​​al​-am​​erica​​/mexi​​co​/oa​​xaca/​​exper​​ ience​​s​/new​​s​/10-​​reaso​​n​s​-to​​-visi​​t​-oax​​aca​-m​​exico​ Richards, Greg. 2003. “Gastronomy: An Essential Ingredient in Tourism Production and Consumption?” In Tourism and Gastronomy. London: Routledge, 17–34. ———. 2011. “Tourism Development Trajectories: From Culture to Creativity?” Tourism & Management Studies 6: 9–15. Salazar, Noel B. 2011. “Tourism Imaginaries: A Conceptual Approach.” Annals of Tourism Research 20, no. 20: 1–20. Accessed online through ScienceDirect June10, 2019. Sammells, Clare A. 2014. “Haute Traditional Cuisines: How UNESCO’s List of Intangible Heritage Links the Cosmopolitan to the Local.” In Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, edited by Ronda L. Brulotte and Michael A Di Giovine. New York: Routledge, 141–155.

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Schmidt‐Rinehart, Barbara C., and Susan M. Knight. 2004. “The Homestay Component of Study Abroad: Three Perspectives.” Foreign Language Annals 37, no. 2: 254–262. Wilk, Richard. 1999. “‘Real Belizean Food’”: Building Local Identity in the Transnational Caribbean.” American Anthropologist 10, no. 2: 244–255. ———. “Hate/Love for Foreign Food: Neophilia, Neophobia, and Globalization.” 1–20. Accessed through Academia​.e​du on December 15, 2018. Wilkinson, Sharon. 1998. “Study Abroad from the Participants’ Perspective: A Challenge to Common Beliefs.” Foreign Language Annals 31, no. 1: 23–40.

Chapter 9

Teaching and Learning Food and Sustainability in Italy Betwixt and Beyond Touristic Consumption Elisa Ascione

INTRODUCTION Fall 2013 was my first semester as a faculty member and coordinator of the Food and Sustainability Studies Program (FSSP), a curriculum concentration of an American study-abroad program in Perugia, Central Italy. As an Italian cultural anthropologist trained in Italy and in the United Kingdom, teaching to a Northern American student body was a new experience for me. For example, I learned how to incorporate hands-on, interactive activities in conventional lectures, in striking difference to the prevalent “sage on the stage” Italian style of teaching. Together with the acquisition of new teaching methods and dialogical interaction with students, I also started to see myself as a sort of cultural guide for my students, both in class and during fieldtrips. American undergraduate students travel abroad to study and fulfill their university credits, but also to “experience Italy” and to be exposed to Italian culture, history, and foods. I have often considered myself as not only their professor but also as a sort of native guide to the new world they were experiencing, acting as a translator between worldviews, languages, and across cultures. In my relationship with students as college learners and as Americans, I have at times considered myself as a “representative of Italianess in place” (Minca and Oakes 2006: 6), concerned with showing students what “real” Italians do, distinguishing tourist behaviors from local, more “authentic” ways of life. In reinterpreting “my” places for “outsiders” (Minca and Oakes 2006: 4), I have also discovered and learned new things about my own senses of belonging and identification processes, looking at my city and my region with renewed eyes. 235

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As I was trained for the job, I was advised to choose fieldtrips that were educational but also “fun,” that it would be better to avoid the discomforts of public transports and long waiting, that daytrips had to be educational but also “memorable.” With time, I have learned that the fieldtrips that worked the best were those that provided academic depth but that were also wellorganized tours, where students did not experience delays, discomforts, or non-cooperative local people. More than one time, as I tried to organize activities and planned fieldtrips, I said to potential partners that the events needed to have the depth of academic enquiry and the excitement of a touristic experience. For example, I did not return to farms, producers, and restaurants that were too slow, that did not anticipate the needs of my group, that failed to show cordiality or that did not make enough effort to turn my fieldtrip into a fun and well-organized event, showing warmth but also great service. I decided to delete from my syllabus the visit to a lab in a department of the Università degli Studi di Perugia because it “looked bad,” even though we had the chance to talk to Italian professors that offered expertise in their fields. The most successful fieldtrips with students are, in fact, usually those located in beautiful agriturismi and picturesque wineries, where producers are able to communicate effectively their work and their philosophies to an international audience. The choice of beautiful places and picturesque Umbrian sites are of course a tool used to attract students-as-tourists, as the seductive images that are used are typical of tourism marketing. Touristic imaginary is often present in studyabroad promotional material, sometimes in ways that tend to essentialize and exoticize hosts, for example, emphasizing natural landscapes and antiquity rather than modernity and technology (Caton and Santos 2009). As Salazar and Graburn (2014) argue, seductive images and discourses about people and places are predominant in tourist settings. The authors define imaginaries as “socially transmitted representational assemblages that interact with people’s personal imaginings and that are used as meaning-making and world-shaping devices” (1). These imaginaries legitimize travelers’ daydreams of overcoming the monotony of everyday life with more satisfying experiences and of the possibility of improving their own personality through the accumulation of symbolic capital (4). These images are also often used to “seduce” students by promising “encounters with enchanted worlds” in picturesque Italy (Picard and Di Giovine 2014: 2). In study-abroad settings, marketing materials offer “imaginative reconstructions” (Leite 2005: 290) of local cultures, feeding on the myths and fantasies associated with Italy. Images of food, life outdoors, fun moments, smiling students taking selfies in front of ancient buildings, carnivals, old Fiat 500 cars, and countless (sometimes out of context) references to “La Dolce Vita” are often juxtaposed to more academic information in

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many websites of Italian study-abroad programs. On the one hand, activities proposed to students overlap with touristic consumption: wine tastings, visits to agritourisms, cooking classes, and encounters with Italian producers are mediated and staged experiences which are also available as touristic options. On the other hand, lessons, fieldtrips, workshops, and hands-on activities become laboratories of discussion where conflicts and contradictions are also revealed and analyzed. Lectures and activities can become key opportunities for students’ critical appraisal of how their participation in the program is part of a larger tourist-informed orbit that can be productively unpacked and engaged. While the influences of touristic goals are especially evident in short-term programs, since often providers are drawn from an existing touristic market to help arrange such experience (Barkin, this volume), here I show that in longer-term semester-abroad programs, students are able to acquire a more complex sense of the host culture and society. Semester-long study-abroad students move across multiple positionalities, oscillating between engagements with local settings, touristic activities, and “post-touristic” reflections and self-awareness (Urry and Larsen 2006), partly feeding on touristic imaginaries and events while analyzing their meanings inside and outside the classroom. In particular, I will show how the study of food and sustainability exposes students to different practices and values, helping them to denaturalize their points of view, questioning their own food habits and beliefs as culturally specific and not universal. The encounter with the materiality of food, the act of eating and sharing unknown recipes, the exposure to different value systems and production techniques can facilitate renegotiation of cultural assumptions. As Lucy Long (2004) notes, because of food’s commonality to all cultures, it allows one to experience diversity within that commonality (15) encountering not only the Italian other but also the American self (Dolby 2004). The data presented in this chapter are drawn from five years of teaching and working in a FSSP; from semi-structured focus groups and interviews with five students of my Anthropology of Food class; and from many informal talks with students, professors, and study-abroad advisors in person and through social media. FEELING “LIKE A LOCAL” IN AN “AUTHENTIC” DESTINATION Each semester, the study-abroad program hosts between 70 and 100 students, 15–20 percent of whom are Italian or international students from the local

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university. The website for the institute, which will be left anonymous in this chapter, explains that size is one of their best assets: large enough to support a diverse student body and an ambitious academic program, yet small enough to provide an unparalleled level of personal attention. Perugia has a true “Italian feel” and boasts endless opportunities for language and cultural immersion. The city provides an incredible backdrop for study abroad: charming character, beautiful panoramas, and the distinguished status of being Italy’s “university city.”

During meetings with study-abroad advisors and visitors, staff and professors often stress the difference between students that prefer a smaller town from students that choose bigger cities in Italy. The first typology of students wants to mingle with the local population and prefers to stay in a smaller town in order to have a deeper immersion in the setting, becoming “like a local.” They like being greeted and recognized at coffee places and minimarkets of the small historic city center, having to speak mostly Italian with restaurant owners and shopkeepers. “The true Italian feel” implies what they define as “authentic” experience, and for students, it is related to the condition of being at the margins of mass tourism settings. They value the difference of a smaller center like Perugia from places like Florence or Rome, where mass tourism has transformed the social composition of the city and where many people are able to speak English. After traveling to Florence and Rome, many students comment they are actually happy to be back to a smaller center that they now call “home,” where street vendors are not trying to sell them souvenirs, and restaurants do not offer fettuccine Alfredo on their menus, a quintessential Italian–American dish. Students are often shocked at the discovery that the Italian–American dishes that they know are not “really” Italian, and they prefer to live in a place like Perugia where these dishes cannot be found. Within the student population of the institute, about twenty students per semester enroll in the FSSP with classes, activities, and workshops designed to explore this fundamental aspect of Italian culture, through global and local perspectives. The program includes courses that range from the history and culture of Italian food, sustainability and food production, wine and olive oil marketing, the anthropology of food, food and literature, water preservation and management. Some students enroll in the FSSP with a vague idea of the reasons why they chose this path, writing in their initial statements “I love food, and I love Italian food” or “My grandmother always cooked Italian food.” The majority of them, however, come from food and environmental studies majors and minors: they want to study food not only for its pleasurable aspects but also as a tool to understand the complexity of food systems

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with an interdisciplinary perspective in a new setting. However, when they arrive, they are usually not familiar with Italian economic, political, and cultural history. The reasons for enrolling in the FSSP in Perugia are manifold, fluctuating between academic motivations and the desire to experience something new, leaving the old behind. Kate, a FSSP student, for example said, “I chose the FSSP because coming here I could continue my academic path. I did not think of Italy in particular at the beginning, but I was looking for Food Studies. I also thought that if I didn’t have the chance to experience a different culture I would regret it for the rest of my life.” Rachel wanted to experience life in a new cultural setting, as her mother did before her studying abroad in Vienna, “If I had chosen just based on cities, I would have not chosen Italy maybe. I really chose it for the classes. Perugia is a small city I had never even heard about it. The location was more of a coincidence. Also, I needed to have a break from the heavy workload of my school.” Even if students are already interested in food and environmental studies, they also view their semester abroad as a way to “disconnect” and to discover new aspects of themselves. Rob for example said, “I needed to leave; I didn’t know what I wanted, but I wanted to leave the USA. I was excited at the idea of being uncomfortable, but maybe naive to think that I would always love it. I just wanted to be elsewhere, and then it came the choice of Italy.” Here Rob articulates the concept of “elsewhere” as an undetermined point of desire in the student-as-tourist imaginary: places can be almost interchangeable insofar as they represent a difference from the daily routine. In a similar vein, for Peter, traveling means a rupture of the structures of daily life: I saw it as an opportunity to travel. I saw my future as mostly structured already, working long hours, and I just wanted to get away. Most jobs would not offer vacations as soon as you begin to work, so I did not want to miss this opportunity. I did not think of it in academic terms at first, I just wanted to go. In addition, I checked it in terms of academics; it wasn’t just a semester off.

For George, studying food actually meant a break from his major, studying something that he was very passionate about, “I felt overwhelmed and burned out with computer science. It was my opportunity to study something else, and to get away from the competitiveness involved in my school.” Studyabroad, just like tourism, can be a break from the everyday to feel renewed and rejuvenated (Graburn 1977), and just like much contemporary tourism, where experiences and “must-see” places are filtered by books and guides, it does not really represent a journey into the unknown, since students are presented with a menu of options from which they must choose, carefully designed by academic institutions.

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Italy is sometimes chosen for its “convenient location” in Europe, and students often engage in extensive traveling throughout the semester during the weekends, often staying for only one or two days in major European cities. Some of the Italian faculty of the Institute perceives this fast-paced travel through Europe as a superficial way of visiting places, encouraging instead the discovery of local surroundings providing guidance to smaller towns and villages in Umbria. As time passes, some students start to develop a different approach to traveling. Rob says: I chose Italy also because it gave me the opportunity to travel across Europe. At the beginning, I wanted to do food studies in New Zealand, but I was afraid of the isolation. It’s funny because in the end I spent most of my time in this country, I visited a few others, but I focused on Umbria, and Central Italy. So much more fulfilling than travelling only for a day all over. At the beginning of the year, I did go to Budapest, Spain, Portugal, but then I started to have this desire to know more about my neighborhood, and this area.

Students’ engagement with their surroundings shifts as time passes, as they consider Perugia their temporary home, and as their vision of Italian culture and history becomes more nuanced. When they initially reach Perugia, they usually have not previously researched the history of the city and they often cannot speak the language. The language barrier is, however, not a major problem since at their arrival students are picked up at the airport, brought to their apartments, shown where the shops are and how to weigh fruits and vegetables before reaching the cash register, given an emergency number that they can call 24 hours, and many more services. One of the main desired outcome for engaging in study-abroad programs is that students, by traveling and getting out of their comfort zone into new and unfamiliar territories, acquire global competences and become culturally responsive global citizens (Santoro and Major 2012; Doerr 2012). At the same time, study-abroad institutes must guarantee that students will be safe, and not left to negotiate by themselves bureaucratic and practical aspects of their experience in Italy: while marketing the experience of cultural diversity, they actually tend to standardize such diversity in order to offer predictable outcomes and achieve desired results (Kirshbenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Di Giovine 2009). Although institutes are there to respond to needs and problems, students still have to face unexpected situations. When this happens, they perceive their incapacity of “knowing what to do” as something that encourages growth. Rachel says: I am more independent here. I’m so far away from my safety net. Here even a small thing like getting off at the wrong train station, at 12.00 in the morning, as it happened to me, can become a big deal. We didn’t know what to do, who to call, we couldn’t speak the language. It was transformative.

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Students perceive their direct engagement with the unknown as part of their growing process, and they say that they want “to adapt” and engage with the local culture. I wanted to adapt to the local culture, more than the program needs to adapt to me. I was aware of this even before I came, because I really wanted to respect the culture. We watched a video in my Italian class in the USA, about things we should and should not do in Italy, for example, “Italians don’t wear white socks.” I really wanted to fit in, so I never wore them. Even if this example is silly, I really wanted to respect the culture; I’ve learned to not expect that things should be the way I imagine. (Gerry)

Some of the aspects mentioned about their process of adaptation and discovery are: stores are usually closed during lunch break; they cannot have a meal in a restaurant in the afternoon; they cannot easily find food of other nationalities; there are fewer options for breakfast; Italians have a different sense of how to behave in public spaces, and they do not jog in the historical city center (as it is a place for people watching) but it is acceptable for couples to kiss in public showing too much “PDA” (public display of affection); there is a more formal dressing code, and many others. Kate adds that she realized how “the concept of time is not as strict as in the USA, but it’s easy to adjust to this,” referring to the tendency to be more flexible in following pre-decided schedules or being late to meetings. When asked what changed their initial idea of Italian culture during their time abroad, they all stressed that they developed a deeper connection with Italian history and that they reformulated some romantic ideas that they had before coming. Since Perugia becomes students’ temporary home for four months, the extraordinariness of a shorter touristic experience is partially transformed into the ordinariness of everyday life, creating a continuum between behaviors that students may have as tourists and as residents. In the USA, we have a romanticized vision of the country, the culture and the food. There are dangers about this narrow viewpoint, we imagine everyone happy just eating all the time. It is true that there is a deep connection between people and their culture, and how proud Italians are of their food. But I see it in a more complex way, as a fruit of history and not just because Italians inherently are in a certain way. (Peter) Many aspects changed. My view of Rome, for example, was very romantic. In the USA, we forget that a lot of stuff has happened between the fall of the Roman Empire and now, so for example my view changed about that city, realizing that there is also a contemporary Rome, and different neighborhoods, that I never thought of. Another thing is that for example today is the 25 April, which

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is National Liberation Day from the fascist regime that is something I did not know at all, that completely was out of my mind. Usually American institutes abroad do not follow Italian national holidays: we found out yesterday that today it was a national holiday. In terms of immersion, I think that it is great to experience certain important dates. Instead, if we did not know about it, then for us it is only an inconvenience because we do not realize that shops were going to be closed today. (George)

Many of the students that learn enough Italian language are then able to communicate with people and have first-hand, independent experiences of Italian social life in different settings. For example, the students involved in the focus groups went to the stadium to watch matches of the local football team, realizing that the official drink of Perugia’s football fans is a coffee-based spirit called Caffè Borghetti. They were excited to discover that there are songs linked to its collective consumption during games, and that football teams in Italy are often associated with different political affiliations and sympathies. On another occasion they reported to the class their discovery of Cynar, an artichoke-infused liqueur that people in Italy associate with good digestion. By doing so, they sparked interesting in-class debates on the cultural construction of health and sickness in relation to alcohol in Italy and the United States. Because of their receptivity and curiosity, they have gained deeper insights on the social use of certain foods and drinks, grasping cultural meanings that would usually be precluded to tourists. “In the beginning I looked for arancini, which are Sicilian, or tortellini in brodo like in Bologna, and in Perugia I couldn’t find them,” says Peter, explaining how he has learned to think of Italian culture not as a monolith but as a set of diversified local practices. Since discovering new foods in Italy represents for this group of students more than a touristic consumption, the people I interviewed almost never posted on social media the extraordinariness of their meals as discoveries. Students agreed on the fact that they would never post a gelato picture as many of their study-abroad peers often do, because they want to differentiate themselves from other kinds of students that “remain on the surface of things,” that only “show off” their consumption of Italian iconic products without asking deeper questions. They reflect on the optics of selfies and the recording of “brag posting” images that circulate landmarks as touristic photo sets. Rob: I have not posted at all. I have not taken pictures of my pretty meals. I just did it to send to my mom to reassure her. George: Social media is interesting, but many come abroad to post about as many places as they can, traveling only one day. Their Instagram feed is a picture of them in every city: Prague check, Paris check. I have seen this so many times. I

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do not want that. For me there is a difference between traveling and staying in a place to really get to know it. Kate: I also avoided pictures, I want food to have an academic sense for me, I don’t want to give it the sense only of showing off. Peter: I hate social media. I have it, but one of the reasons that I hate it is that people use it as a means to brag. I do not like that. It detaches the cultural meaning of the food from the setting. You guys have seen me with a camera taking pictures, but for me is trying to become a good photographer, using the aesthetics of food but not to brag about it. Rachel: I went together with some people travelling through Europe, they were not part of the FSSP, and it felt like the entire fieldtrip was just a big photoshoot. Instead, I wanted to feel and experience things, and they were obsessed with taking pictures of themselves doing things.

Some study-abroad students want to differentiate themselves from the stereotypical image of tourists taking pictures of all that they encounter. The relationship between photography and tourists has been debated within the tourism literature (Palmer and Lester 2005; Robinson and Picard 2009) and it has been stated that travel could be summed up as a search for the photogenic (Urry 1990: 139) and as a strategy for accumulating photographs. The reasons behind touristic photographs are varied and, among others, pictures can serve as a protection against time, as communication with others, as expression of feelings, as self-realization, as social prestige, and as a distraction or escape from the routines of everyday life (Palmer and Lester 2005: 19): Consumption as a sign of status and the use of photographs to construct a person’s exclusive visual biography may go some way towards explaining the ‘photo-mania’ behavior of some tourists; reflecting the accepted creed that taking photographs is part of what being a tourist means. It is almost unthinkable not to take photographs while on holiday.

Through time, I have been able to see numerous students’ posts on social media about their Italian experience, observing different modes of representation of Italian food. Even if some study-abroad students want to differentiate themselves from ordinary tourists by having a different approach to photographs, many construct their own visual biography of their time abroad. On their social media pictures Italy appears, at times, as the background, rather than the subject, of their experiences. Pictures include portraits of themselves sipping glasses of wine with friends, close-ups of hands holding gelatos and pizzas against the backdrop of an historical site, sipping a beer and socializing in the main piazza. While usually food and drink pictures are very casual, wine is often portrayed more formally and pictures seem more carefully

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staged. Students seem to communicate that in Italy they have learned how to “properly” consume wine, showing that wine drinking has become a routine activity. Pictures with wine glasses become a symbol of their passage into a more adult world and as cosmopolitan consumers with newly acquired “culinary capital” (Naccarato and LeBesco 2012). Photography is a ritualized “theatre” that people enact to produce their desired and expected self-image of togetherness, wholeness, and intimacy with partners, family, and friends (Urry and Larsen 2006: 208). The processes of selfie-taking while studying abroad becomes a validating practice that is confirmed through an exchange of anticipated photos: here photographs seem both “evidential and evocative” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007: 192), serving as badges and validations of experience. Seen from an Italian perspective, these pictures at times contain “cultural mistakes” such as the use of fette biscottate (an industrial crisp toast) for bruschetta, which in Italy are only used for breakfast and are not associated with the message of relaxed sophistication that the pictures want to portray. However, the pictures are not meant to simply represent aspects of Italian culture and heritage, but American students engaging with new experiences. The “staged authenticity” (cf. MacCannell 1973) of these pictures wants to celebrate the extraordinary of their time abroad, as well as the new culinary capital that they have acquired as global consumers that have now the capacity to recognize and appreciate Italian wine culture. These pictures seem to tell tales of “personal transgression, self-discovery, and redemption in which the host country serves as a passive foil for the construction of an active, American self” (Feinberg and Edwards 2018: 27.) In the next section, I will provide an analysis of the courses and experiences designed by the FSSP, and I will argue that while some of the activities align with tourism, they also differ from it by allowing students to analyze contemporary food practices as outcomes of economic, historical, and sociocultural transformations rather than essential qualities of places and people, creating space for more critical reflections than is usually possible with shorter term programs. BETWIXT AND BEYOND TOURISTIC CONSUMPTION The courses, fieldtrips, and workshops of the FSSP expose students to different aspects of Italian and global food cultures. The core course, “Sustainability and Food Production in Italy,” for example, explores what modes of food production and consumption may be viable responses to the problems that a growing world population and ever-higher

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food production are contributing to faster use of non-renewable fossil fuels and environmental degradation. Through a combination of lectures, fieldtrips, and service-learning activities, students learn about alternative models of food production and the ways in which people are responding to increasing inequalities relating to food availability.

Among other topics, in the sustainability class, students become familiar with the work of local farms and environmentally friendly agricultural practices. They learn about the coexistence of different models of agriculture throughout the Italian peninsula: from industrial management of farms and plants (where some reforms toward more sustainable practices are taking place) to alternative systems such as organic and biodynamic farming. Students learn how the EU Common Agricultural Policy shapes Italian foodways, and how policies are contested arenas along the political spectrum, such as the organic agriculture sector where different interest groups lobby for tighter or more relaxed regulations. As students engage with the plurality of voices and groups that make up the varied mosaic of agricultural and production practices in Italy, they develop a more nuanced understanding of Italian culture and society. With time, they are able to go beyond a superficial description of Italy where everything is “local and fresh” (as they often state at the beginning of the course) to a more complex understanding of how land is used in different parts of the country, including issues of social justice around food production. They study, for example, the exploitation of migrant labor and how associations are fighting organized crime through organic agriculture on land confiscated from Mafia bosses once they are arrested (cf. Libera 2019). Students engage with readings and discussions on the sharecropping systems, learning that until the 1960s farmers in Umbria and Tuscany grew food in polyculture systems (today considered more sustainable than monocultures), because they had to be self-sufficient and give half of their produce to their landlords (Nowak 2011; Gaggio 2016). Students therefore realize that the acres of orderly vineyards that compose part of Umbrian and Tuscan landscapes are often contemporary, extensive monoculture cultivation, rather than timeless natural features of those regions. Thanks to readings and discussions, even when we visit wineries and engage in wine-tasting activities, studyabroad students are actually pushed to go beyond their immediate sensory experience by looking at historical, cultural, and economic developments, and by producing papers and discussions that show their engagement with this complexity, thus differentiating themselves from touristic consumers. Part of the appeal of study-abroad programs is the possibility of participating in community engagement projects, and many courses at the institute

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have, in fact, a service-learning component. Rachel, for example, has chosen this program because it got her out of the classroom: My favorite thing about my home school is that we do a lot of projects outside, so I loved here the fieldtrips, excursions, also I read a review on a study abroad website and the review said they were meeting locals, while other programs actually were reviewed as less immersive, and that students spent most of their time in clubs, and I wouldn’t have fit in that kind of programs.

The Sustainability and Food Production class offers a service-learning component as part of students’ final grade. On the first day of class, students are given documents that describe it as a type of experiential education: Students engage in an organized activity or project aimed to address a community need that is identified in collaboration with the community partner; students critically reflect on the link between the experience in the community, course content, and the learning goals; and there is reciprocal learning both by the students and by the community partners.

The voluntary work takes place in a residency for individuals with mental health disorders and conditions where horticulture therapy is used to enhance their quality of life and generate positive emotions and social interactions. Students work at the synergistic garden, a type of organic gardening, which uses plants that naturally protect and nourish each other. They help with seasonal tasks, including tilling the soil; planting herbs, vegetables, and flowers; and harvesting. The learning outcomes for such an activity are: Discover how to apply sustainable gardening in a community setting. Develop awareness and skills in intercultural communication and the Italian language. Improve teamwork and multitasking skills, and gain a better understanding of the host culture and community.

Performing manual labor as a form of “service” has been analyzed in a variety of educational settings (Bodinger de Uriarte and Jacobson 2018). Students get physically and symbolically “dirty” by performing activities often associated with lower income classes rather than with university elites, which could probably more successfully provide volunteer work in “cleaner” environment such as tutoring and teaching. Providing service through “getting dirty” is often a response of the university elites to the increasing inequalities that rest on neoliberal policies and ideologies: people “give back” physical labor from their privileged position as a form of personal penitence (Bodinger de Uriarte

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and Jacobson 2018: 81). In the case of the synergistic garden, together with a vaguer sense of “giving back to the community,” students need to get dirty to actually learn how to grow vegetables following alternative, no-till, “natural” agricultural methods, being part of a course on sustainable food production. Together with free labor, the cooperative that hosts our program receives a yearly donation covering the costs of materials and the costs associated to the person in charge of the garden. Together with cash and labor flows that help the garden to sustain itself, the encounters are transformative for both students and patients. Patients act as mentors, showing students how to perform tasks, leading students in the right direction when they do not know how to prune an olive tree or plant vegetables. The resident social worker of the project told us that patients experience a reverse of their social status by becoming helpers rather than needy recipients, as they are usually considered. This can enhance patients’ self-esteem and have positive therapeutic outcomes. There are many critical accounts on the rhetoric of “helping needy communities” in short-term “volunteer tourism” (Sin 2009). For example, the FSSP has received, and refused, requests from U.S. colleges that looked for volunteering opportunities at a local soup kitchen for their summer students. Staff of the FSSP and the manager of the soup kitchen decided that it was not possible to accommodate this request. The idea that a group of young students with no knowledge of Italian language, staying for just a few weeks, could work with vulnerable people without any significant training and continuity, seemed unfeasible. The colleges that proposed it never problematized this request, probably asserting a non-tourist goal for their projected program: by virtue of their provenance and higher social class, American students were seen as able to help others of which they ignored problems and concerns just because of their “good will.” The anthropologist Mary Mostafenazhad (2014) in her book Volunteer Tourism: Popular Humanitarianism in Neoliberal Times problematizes humanitarianism and “voluntourism” as more than just alternative ways of travel, analyzing them instead as cultural commentaries to responses to global economic inequalities (2). Volunteer tourism reframes questions of structural inequality as questions of individual morality, and by appealing to sentimentality, tends to engage with the outcome, rather than the causes of underdevelopment (4). Activism and social resistance are thus transformed into experiences that can be bought and sold in the market, where the consumer-cum-volunteer tourist can “make a difference.” They appeal to a “cosmopolitan empathy” (10) in a growing transnational moral landscape where good-willing individuals can act in benign ways toward places and people in the periphery without questioning power and political structures. A few students of the FSSP program have had past experiences of shorter term volunteer projects abroad and, as the student George reflected during the

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focus group, these kind of short-term experiences can be a “selfish pursuit” but also have positive outcomes: I’m not blind to the idea that it is a selfish pursuit. I went to Nicaragua for an agricultural project for a short program about rural community development. We did a fair amount of work, and the money that we paid went to the irrigation system and tools. So it had a positive effect, I think.

More than focusing on helping “needy communities,” longer term activities of the FSSP, such as the work in the synergistic garden, are designed as tools of action and reflection inside and outside the classroom. During their first visit to the garden, for example, students learn about the history of psychiatry and anti-psychiatry movements in Umbria, a region at the forefront of democratization of therapeutic practices and de-institutionalization of patients from the 1960s (Giacanelli 2014) becoming aware of the historical background and complex social formations that structure the lived experiences of the people that they encounter. Service-learning thus becomes a way to connect with and empower local associations and institutions: this is what Anthony Ogden (2008) calls stepping down from the colonial veranda, which he defines as the safe and privileged space of American study-abroad institutes, too often constructed as American bubbles on foreign soil where no meaningful relationship with other people and cultures are made. Together with service-learning projects, other hands-on activities consist of fieldtrips and workshops linked to the core class “History and Culture of Food in Italy.” The focus of the course is explained in the syllabus: The history of food in Italy is a gateway to understanding contemporary Italian culture. This course examines the factors of change that have shaped Italian food ways, the wide variations in eating habits of different socio-economic classes, and the fundamental role played by food in shaping Italian identities.

The fieldtrips include truffle hunting in Northern Umbria; a visit to the factories of Prosciutto di Parma, Parmigiano Reggiano, and Aceto Balsamico di Modena Tradizionale; cooking classes in two agriturismi; a field trip to Florence’s main covered market and a seventeenth-century pharmacy, exploring the use of spices, liquors, and unguents as medicine; followed by a historic cooking class in which they recreate and eat an ancient Roman meal. When I asked students if any of the fieldtrips made them feel like a tourist, they drew a clear boundary between tourism and study abroad. For George, some cooking classes in the agriturismi could easily overlap with the activity of tourists; however, he thought that it was important to know first what an agriturismo is. Although he enjoyed it, he wished he could

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have an even deeper intimate contact with Italian culture by having a lunch with an Italian family, which is of course hard to organize with a class of twenty students. The trips were not touristy. They are not things that I would do as a tourist, although they are available as touristic options. It would have been nice to have a meal in someone’s’ home, I know it’s not feasible, but we would have learned a lot in seeing an Italian home kitchen from the inside.

Peter, too, valued intimacy over performance and enjoyed the cooking classes organized inside the didactic kitchen of the school. This allowed him to have a backstage interaction with the young chef that was teaching them how to make fresh pasta, as if the ability to access a space beyond the staging of the event could provide a more “authentic” insight (Goffman 1959; MacCannell 1976). Whereas most of the other experiences, like the agriturismi, are already designed for tourists, meeting Elia the chef, who is a 24-year-old guy from Perugia, gave us an insight on the life of a young man near our age, I didn’t have the chance to engage so much with other Italians my age. All the informal talks we had as we cooked and eat, about his life, for example, were an important part of my intercultural experience.

The possibility of exploring aspects of food production and preparation that are not visible to everybody made students feel as if they were not simply tourists. Kate, for example, valued the connection she made with the truffle hunter: I know that he does this activity with many tourists, but taking time to talk to the man is what gave me the connection with him. He told us he’s writing a book on agriculture, I saw his engagement with the environment, listened to the history of his family, saw the interaction he had with his father as we walked inside the woods for hours. It gave me a deeper perspective into his culture and values.

For an experience to be “less touristy” it must involve some form of nonstaged, intimate contact with the producers and people encountered: students must “forget” that they’re actually engaged in an economic activity. George calls it “the gift shop syndrome,” when the illusion of cultural intimacy collapses because of an economic exchange: Somebody should do an ethnography of what people feel when reaching gift shops. If I think about authenticity, the experience that I really want is one for

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which not everybody can sign up for, and we had many of those experiences, I think. However, talking about the first farm that we visited, it was awesome, it felt like I could see things behind closed doors, but then the owner showed us the shop where we could buy things, and it felt like a pitch. I felt a sudden distance. When the commercial aspect stepped in, the bond that I had with this family felt ruined. I know it’s naive to say this, and that part of my money for studying abroad went to pay for this experience, but we like to forget and pretend that it was all real.

This sort of suspension of disbelief that the experience is both an adventure but also carefully scripted (or at least scripted enough to ensure safety and a somewhat predictable set of student outcomes) is a key component within the student experience. Students consider themselves as more than simply tourists: just like George, they are aware that parts of their experiences are included in a pre-organized setting within market relations, but at the same time, they yearn for authentic relationships, unmediated by money. Students need to believe that their presence represents more than cold commercial transactions and that they really “visit” places rather than simply purchasing educational and entertainment products (Oakes 2006: 235). However, just like tourists, students are not simply guests but also customers, and hosts are providers of experiences (Aramberri 2001: 746). In popular sites such as the production facilities of Prosciutto di Parma, Parmigiano Reggiano, and Aceto Balsamico di Modena, students come into contact with tourist groups, but they perceive themselves as a distinct group by virtue of their longer program and their developed knowledge about the site before and after the visit, exploring, for example, cultural and technical attributes linked to notions of quality, artisanship, and the heritage industry (West 2016). Alongside discussions and reflections, embodiment and the sense of the visceral emerge as important elements of students’ experience, actively unsettling predetermined notions of palatability and edibility. In the prosciutto factory, for example, seeing pork legs and perceiving new smells causes strong reactions in many students. The sight and smell of raw meat is usually not considered “repulsive” in Italian culture, and students test their ability to overcome their disgust and their cultural assumptions of what is “good” and what is “bad,” sometimes unsuccessfully, and deciding to walk out the premises. As their instructor, I usually warn them before entering the prosciutto factory that, while it is possible to leave the premises if they are uncomfortable, it is disrespectful to openly show disgust in front of people who are working there and that consider prosciutto curing an important local practice and economic activity. By actively preventing students’ negative reactions at the sight and smell of raw materials in a semi-industrial meat curing operation I engage with the prevention or compensation of disappointment

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of students-as-visitors in what has been called in tourism studies as management of the “expectations gap,” the dissatisfaction with an experience that occurs when one’s perceptions do not live up to expectations (Di Giovine 2009: 177). In tourism contexts, just like in study-abroad settings, disappointment can be generated by aggrandized illusions created in relation to places and services generated by media hype, advertising campaigns, and the experiences of others (Michalkò et al. 2015: 85): expectations can greatly differ from brochures and websites to the lived experiences of visiting food producers. However, differently than tourist settings, in a pedagogical studyabroad context strong reactions are not just managed and avoided but openly addressed and discussed. This generates reflections on the cultural constructions of likes and dislikes and on the symbolic consumption of animals in different cultural settings, allowing students to become more self-reflexive and aware of cultural diversity, critically engaging with the different worldviews that students and producers may embody. During the focus group, all of the students, including the vegetarians, wanted to differentiate themselves from peers with biased cultural assumptions. Kate: some of the people in our group were actually saying during Parma and Modena that rather than seeing meat and cheese preparation in an artisanal setting as we did, they preferred an industrial food system removed from sight, they didn’t want to associate prosciutto with real meat and animals, or cheese with the smell of fermenting milk. The sight of the real thing puts them off. Peter: some said that seeing the Parma ham factory wanted them to turn vegetarian. But that made me angry, because the act of seeing should actually educate you, and make you feel more connected to the food that you are eating. I think that people that come here should respect the culture; it is rude to act that way. George: it is a physical reaction but it is a form of disrespect, people just went off on their own while the worker was explaining the process of making prosciutto. The anatomical description put people off, but they should be respectful. Rachel: we need to be sympathetic to both sides, to the people that are working with prosciutto, and to the students that are not used to seeing raw meat. On the American side, people often feel disgusted at things; they can’t control it, while Italians deserve respect for their tradition.

The young prosciutto maker that guides the tour always smiles with tolerance at the way in which some American students cover their noses and eyes when they see the prosciutti hanging from the ceiling, a sight actually enjoyed by the many Italians that visit the premises. Service providers, in fact, also construct expectations and stereotypes of “gli americani,” the Americans. Locals sometimes look back at “students-as-tourists” who can occasionally appear relatively ignorant of local conditions, and thus perceived as incompetent

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and even ridiculous (Stronza 2001: 273.) This is also evident during some cooking classes when students are not able not chop fruit and vegetable “properly”: chefs and demonstrators have sometimes infantilized students comparing them to little kids handling food “like play dough,” showing no cooking competence that Italians consider basic adult culinary operations. This is what Maoz (2006) calls the “mutual gaze” between guests and hosts, a multitude of intersecting, responsive gazes between tourists and brokers, and even between the tourists and the students themselves. This mutual gaze is never fixed, as students acquire more culinary knowledge and language skills and meet some chefs and producers multiple times. Through activities that contextualize local practices and knowledge, students are given tools to become more self-reflexive, participating in the local culture also as ethnographic researchers and not only as tourists. Students of the Anthropology of Food class, for example, engage in fieldwork with restaurant and food shops that prepare “local” and “traditional” Umbrian food, studying restaurants as sites of cultural transmission that relocalize food economies in order to empower small farmers and artisans and as sites for dissent toward industrial agriculture, not selling mainstream food and soda brands as an act of resistance toward what they define as corporate globalization. The use of ethnography with long-term study-abroad students is welldocumented (Jurasek et al. 2002; Roberts et al. 2001) as they are exposed to the methods of ethnographic exploration and engage in a form of experiential learning that helps them to gain access to local meanings and practices, without the intention to transform them into specialists in cultural anthropology (Jackson 2010). According to the syllabus, the class Addresses food-related issues from an anthropological perspective examining the role that food plays in shaping: group and personal identities, ethnic affiliations in a global world, religious boundaries through rituals, taboos and avoidances, revitalization of local and global communities. Through readings, assignments, and ethnographic research in different settings, students explore how “food traditions” and “local food” are maintained and transformed over time and space, and how culinary knowledge is used by people to mark cultural differences.

The course has been running since spring 2016, and it is often the first cultural anthropology class for the majority of my students. The semester-long project consists of doing participant observation and conducting interviews in five restaurants, collecting data for a final essay titled “Unpacking the ‘local’: Food as cultural heritage in the city of Perugia, Italy.” We have dinners in restaurants that are popular with both locals and tourists, and students must critically assess how restaurants are not only commercial venues but also generators of ideas, beliefs, behaviors, and practices (Beriss and Sutton 2007). In

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order to do that, they must answer different questions as we have our meals. What meanings and values are given to foods in the places explored? Does “local” mean the same thing for everybody? How are identity and memory “emplaced” and performed in the venues? They focus on the material practices, the symbolic elaboration of food service, the artifacts, and what the staff and owner tells us during interviews. They must also compare this meal with other “eating out” cultures in the United States or other restaurants visited in Italy or abroad. What is similar and what is different? How is the décor? How do people behave? What is the food like? What is the overall impression of the message that restaurants want to send? This exercise helps them to problematize notions of authenticity and the search for “cultural purity,” focusing instead on the multiple meanings behind people’s choices, interpretations, and performances of their own tradition and heritage (Di Giovine and Brulotte 2014). We begin by visiting a restaurant that has had the same menu since 1984 and that celebrates the “Sunday traditional farmers’ lunch.” Before the 1960s, meals, especially, in the countryside were actually very frugal, in contrast with the abundance of festive days. During the interview, the owner tells us that customers should feel like “when your mother cooks for the family and wants you to eat a lot.” There is a fixed menu that changes with the season; there is no wine list but a simple house-wine that comes from a nearby social cooperative. By analyzing the culture of that restaurant, students notice that people do not receive individual portions but that the food is placed on bigger trays in the middle of the table, encouraging sharing rather than individuality. They also understand that, in this context, wine means conviviality and unity rather than cultural and economic capital since there is no special wine glass and no long wine list from which to choose. Students notice that at the back of the menu there is an old picture of a farmer family threshing harvested grain: I explain that in the past, families would offer a very important meal to everybody helping them out in the fields and how that meal would be in striking contrast to their daily regime of scarcity. The décor of the restaurant is very simple, there are many ears of wheat scattered around on the walls, and the menu is written in the local dialect. Comparing this restaurant with others that we visit, students realize that this is only one way of performing and reproducing traditions, namely reconstructing a fictitious family meal of an Umbrian family of rural origins. We also visit other restaurants in which the notion of “local” and “typical” are instead embedded in more political discourses, as restaurant owners describes how they want to oppose “global neoliberal market practices” through the re-localization of the food system. For other restaurants instead, the “local” functions as a marker of sophistication, as they serve Slow Food presidia and niche artisanal products, intelligible only to real foodies and connoisseurs (see Petrini 2019). Thanks to this ethnographic exercise, students are given the

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tools to produce papers that show a deeper, more sophisticated understanding of “local food cultures,” engaging with different practices and narratives around a shared past. Students become aware of the fact that in order to carry out ethnographic work, they have to try to look at the world with an unbiased framework. Curiosity and self-awareness are, however, also personal skills that not every student is willing or able to cultivate. Kate, for example said: Some people remained very superficial about their understanding of cultural differences. For some people the stereotypes remained, because some people don’t want to feel decentered. Some just complained, or they constantly asked that their food was changed during our ethnography of the restaurants. They never try anything unfamiliar. I’m usually a vegetarian, but I tried coppa di testa once the panino maker we were interviewing explained that this cold-cut has always been a very important preparation in order to use all the parts of the pig, including the muzzle and the ears. I remember somebody in the anthropology of food class saying instead “I don’t eat weird food,” and that sums up the difference between different kinds of study-abroad students for me.

Peter wanted to challenge his tastes and distastes, being open to the food and preparation that he encountered. During participant observation in one of the restaurants, the waiter served crostini with liver patè, a traditional specialty. While many students refused to taste them, Peter wanted to show to the restaurant owner, that we just interviewed, that he valued his food. He ate all of the liver patè crostini that his fellow students had left untouched, to the point of almost feeling sick. He wanted to conform to perceived Italian cultural rules of hospitality, feeling sorry that other students did not want to engage with unknown foods. Peter: I had six liver patè crostini; I felt pressured to do it. I did not want to offend the waiter, I wanted to show respect. We couldn’t give back a full tray and let waste all that. Other people didn’t want them just because it’s liver. George: I felt frustrated when I compared my reasons for being here compared to other students, like they didn’t eat some of the food that was served just for their cultural prejudice.

Throughout the semesters, I have observed that adventurous eating has gendered connotations. I regularly ask which new foods students have tried during the previous week, and usually more males than females share their food adventures, causing reactions of disgusts and admiration from their peers as they describe fried brains, spleen sandwiches, or pasta with veal intestines. At the end of their semester in Italy, students explained changes of their vision of Italy, Umbria, and Perugia after their time abroad.

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Rachel: my experience here changed my definition of authenticity, now it’s more nuanced. There can be a food culture in a place, and it’s not the same for everybody, but there is a common history, although it’s very ambiguous. Peter: I confirmed the importance of how regional identity is maybe more strong here than in other countries compared to the USA. I learned the intensity of attachments to products with appellations of origins, of food products from certain towns, and how strict they are. I saw how all these foods contribute to the sense of a specific place, that if they don’t come from a certain place they’re not even worth eating. I expected it beforehand, but here I really lived it. Kate: I learned most about regionalism and Perugian food culture. I was very interested in the simplicity that I encountered, for example the ways in which a panino, a simple sandwich, could be so indicative of a place and its attachments. Rob: I was surprised how people express their identity through food, and made me think how I can bring that back to the States. There are food cultures everywhere you go, but Italy is a great case-study to see the connections that people feel with it. How certain foods are linked to saints, to folklore. One cake can be found only in one city, in one particular day of the year, like the San Costanzo cake that is linked to the Saint Patron of Perugia on January 29.

In conclusion, study-abroad institutes offer services in a global market, and they attract students relying on some touristic narratives and activities that must reach high-quality standards of organization. As services in a competitive international education market, study-abroad programs rely, for marketing reasons, on the simplification and commodification of certain aspects of the local culture and on the selection of certain performances of the Self over others, proposing activities and imaginaries that are also common to the tourist industry. At the same time, students are provided with intellectual and theoretical tools that can be used to engage in critical, historically informed ways with their surroundings. Together with the “romantic gaze” and the “spectatorial gaze” that usually define touristic experiences, students also acquire an “anthropological gaze,” which describes how visitors scan a variety of sights/sites and are able to locate them interpretatively within a historical array of meanings and symbols (Urry and Larsen 2006: 20). Semesterlong study-abroad students cross multiple positionalities, engaging with local settings, at times participating in tourism activities and, thanks to the longer time of residence abroad and to courses offered by the institute, acquiring the awareness of inhabiting a “post-tourism” space: The post-tourist knows they are a tourist and tourism is a series of games with multiple texts and no single, authentic tourist experience. The post-tourist thus knows that he or she will have to queue time and time again, that the glossy brochure is a piece of pop culture, that the apparently authentic local entertainment

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is as socially contrived as the ethnic bar, and that the supposedly quaint and traditional fishing village could not survive without the income from tourism. (Urry and Larsen 2006: 214)

They oscillate between insider and outsider positions, trying to “live like locals” while feeding on some touristic imaginaries and activities, acquiring tools to frame and analyze what they are experiencing in the classroom and in the world around them, navigating betwixt and beyond touristic consumption. REFERENCES Aramberri, Julio. 2001. “The Host Should Get Lost: Paradigms in the Tourism Theory”. Annals of Tourism Research 28, no. 3: 738–761. Beriss, David, and David Sutton. 2007. “Starters: Restaurants, Ideal Postmodern Institutions.” In The Restaurant Book: Ethnographies of where we eat, edited by David Beriss and David Sutton, 1–16. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing. Bodinger de Uriarte, John J. 2007. Casino and Museum. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bodinger de Uriarte, John J., and Shari Jacobson. 2018. “Dirty Work: The Carnival of Service.” In The Experience of Neoliberal Education, edited by Bonnie Urciouli, 73–105. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. Bruner, Edward M., and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. 2009. “Maasai on the Lawn: Tourist Realism in East Africa” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 4: 435–470. Caton, Kellee, and Carla Almeida Santos. 2009. “Images of the Other Selling Study Abroad in a Postcolonial World.” Journal of Travel Research 489, no. 2: 191–204. Di Giovine, Michael A. 2009. The Heritage-Scape: UNESCO, World Heritage and Tourism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Di Giovine, Michael A., and Ronda L. Brulotte. 2014. “Introduction: Food and Foodways as Cultural Heritage.” In Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, edited by Michael A. Di Giovine and Ronda Brulotte, 1–28. Burlington, VA: Ashgate. Doerr, Neriko Musha. 2012. “Study Abroad as ‘Adventure’: Globalist Construction of Host–Home Hierarchy and Governed Adventurer Subjects.” Critical Discourse Studies 9, no. 3: 257–268. Dolby, Nadine. 2004. “Encountering an American Self: Study Abroad and National Identity.” Comparative Education Review 48, no. 2: 150–173. Feinberg, Ben, and Sarah H. Edwards. 2018. “Are We (Still) in the World? Service Learning and the Weird Slot in Students Narratives of Study Abroad.” In Cosmopolitanism and Tourism: Rethinking Theory and Practice, edited by Robert Shepherd, 25–49. New York: Lexington Books. Gaggio, Dario. 2016. The Shaping of Tuscany: Landscape and Society Between Tradition and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Giacanelli, Ferruccio. 2014. Nascita del movimento antimanicomiale umbro. Perugia: Fondazione Angelo Celli per una cultura della salute. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Graburn, Nelson. 1977. Tourism: A Sacred Journey. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jackson, Jane. 2010. Intercultural Journeys: From Study to Residence Abroad. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Jurasek, Richard, Howard Lamson, and Patricia O’Maley. 2002. “Ethnographic Learning While Studying Abroad.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 2, no. 2: 1–25. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leite, Naomi. 2005. “Travels to an Ancestral Past: On Diasporic Tourism, Embodied Memory, and Identity.” Antropologicas 9: 273–302. Libera. 2019. “Associazioni, Nomi e Numeri Contro le Mafie.” http://www​.libera​.it/, accessed 01/07/2019. Long, Lucy. 2004. “Introduction.” In Culinary Tourism, edited by Lucy Long, 1–19. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books. Maoz, Darya. 2006. “The Mutual Gaze.” Annals of Tourism Research 33, no. 1: 221–239. Michalkò, Gábor, Anna Irimiás, and Dallen J. Timothy. 2015. “Disappointment in Tourism: Perspectives on Tourism Destination Management.” Tourism Management Perspectives 16: 85–91. Minca, Claudio, and Tim Oakes. 2006. “Introduction: Traveling Paradoxes.” In Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism, edited by Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes, 1–21. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Mostafanezhad, Mary. 2014. Volunteer Tourism: Popular Humanitarianism in Neoliberal Times. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Naccarato, Peter, and Katie LeBesco. 2012. Culinary Capital. New York: Berg Publishers. Nowak, Zachary. 2011. “Looking Back to the Future: Historical Polycultures in Central Italy.” Agroforestry News 19, no. 4: 20–26. Oakes, Tim. 2006. “Get Real! On Being Yourself and Being a Tourist.” In Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism, edited by Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes, 229–250. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Ogden, Anthony. 2008. “The View from the Veranda: Understanding Today’s Colonial Student.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 15: 35–55. Palmer, Catherine, and Jo-Anne Lester. 2005. “Photographic Tourism: Shooting the Innocuous, Making Meaning of Tourist Photographic Behaviour.” In Niche Tourism: Contemporary Issues, Trends and Cases, edited by Marina Novelli, 15–25. Oxford: Elsevier. Petrini, Carlo. 2019. Buono, pulito e giusto. Bra: Slow Food Editore.

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Picard, David, and Michael A. Di Giovine. 2014. “Introductions. Through Other Worlds.” In Tourism and the Power of Otherness: Seductions of Difference, edited by David picard and Michael A. Di Giovine, 1–30. Toronto: Channel View Publications. Půtová, Barbora. 2018. “Anthropology of Tourism: Researching Interactions between Hosts and Guests” Czech Journal of Tourism 7, no. 1: 71–92. Roberts, Celia Michael Byram, Ana Barro, Shirley Jordan, and Brian V. Street. 2001. Language Learners as Ethnographers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Robinson, Mike, and David Picard. 2009. The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists and Photography. Farnham: Ashgate. Salazar, Noel B., and Nelson H. Graburn. 2014. “Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of Tourism Imaginaries.” In Tourism Imaginaries Anthropological Approaches, edited by Noel B. Salazar and Nelson H. Graburn, 1–28, New York: Berghahn. Santoro, Ninetta, and Joe Major. 2012. “Learning to be a Culturally Responsive Teacher Through International Study Trips: Transformation or Tourism?” Teaching Education 23, no. 3: 309–322. Sin, Harng Luh. 2009. “Volunteer Tourism—”Involve Me and I Will Learn”?” Annals of Tourism Research 36, no. 3: 480–501. Stronza, Amanda. 2001. “Anthropology of Tourism: Forging New Ground for Ecotourism and Other Alternatives.” Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 261–283. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2006. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. West, Harry G. 2016. “Artisan Foods, Cultural Patrimony and the Heritage Industries.” In The Handbook of Food and Anthropology, edited by Jakob Klein and James L. Watson, 406–434. London: Bloomsbury.

Chapter 10

Finding Home, Identity, and Meaning in Study-Abroad Programs Targeted to Heritage Students Annie Nguyen

“WHERE ARE YOU FROM?” These days, living in Seattle, a city where transplants may outnumber natives, I no longer pause when I hear this question. Rather, I discuss being most recently from Baltimore, but before that D.C. and Alabama. Sometimes I add my short stint in Vietnam and Montana. I interpret this question as an earnest one to seek a better understanding of what experiences may have led me to Seattle. I hear: “So you’re not from here, but it’s good you are now.” It hasn’t always been this way, and that question hasn’t always implied that. Growing up, those four words were enough to make me question my identity, my notions of home, and whether or not I belonged. By asking where I was from, the questioners were pointing out, I couldn’t possibly be from the place where we were standing. In their tone and how they eyed me, they imparted that they were entitled to that place and were granting me space. I didn’t belong. I’d shoot back, “Alabama” or some witty retort about how I was from “just down the street,” so as to shut down the conversation and its implications. I’m from the United States, my responses said, and this is the only home I know. Perhaps my strong feelings about this question are what have directed so much of my professional career—understanding where we are from, what connects us, and what makes a place home (as much in a physical as a socio-emotional sense). I have led or helped lead six short-term studyabroad programs in Thailand, China, England, and Central Europe; before that, I worked on the Department of State’s International Visitor Program, an effort to increase professional understanding and connections between the United States and other countries. Most recently, as a writing professor at the 259

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University of Washington Tacoma, I designed a short-term study-away program to Hawaii focused on multiculturalism and identity in Creative Writing. It was designed intentionally as a study away so students unable to leave the country for visa/passport reasons could experience something like study abroad, and because many of my university’s students—veterans themselves or children of servicemen—were born in or had spent significant portions of their lives in U.S. military island bases. When I saw self-identified Pacific Islanders enrolled, I invited artists and scholars to meet the students who spoke on Hawaii’s history before U.S. colonization and statehood and the current attempts to reassert independence today. The students reveled in learning about the Hawaiian monarchy and linked the loss of ancestral homelands to capitalistic development with the gentrification happening around our university. I watched as they disconnected the Hawaii built up by pop culture—a land of magical honeymoons and surfers—from what Hawaii is—a former nation rich in its own unique cultural background. I wanted students to consider how place and belonging shape ideas of identity, and after ten days of travel, utilizing daily journals that were part of my writing course, I had students reflect on that part of their experience. One student of Pacific Islander descent said: “Just taking in the air and water has made me feel like I am being brought back to myself.” Another of Filipino descent said that he was now considering graduate studies at the University of Hawaii to feel closer to home. Several minority students discussed feeling ostracized on beaches because their skin color placed them closer to native Hawaiians than with business and land developers and expressed frustration for Hawaiians who may be forced to feel like strangers on their own lands. Even those without Asian Pacific Islander roots or another discernable connection to Hawaii commented on how they had developed a better understanding of our country (“the history that no one wanted you to know,” wrote one student) and themselves by learning how other states have struggled with multicultural identity and nativity. (Our own Washington state and Puget Sound community has faced challenges trying to negotiate how to honor and recognize displaced Native American peoples, previously interned Japanese communities, and largely ignored African American and Latinx families [see Shimabukuru 2001]). These students seemed to develop more respect for their classmates’ hyphenated American experience (see Trinh 1991: 159) which has since informed how they interact with other students on campus (according to my colleagues who have had my program alumni in their classes). Their ideas on multiculturalism, heritage, and home made me reflect on my experiences studying abroad in my native home country and how they connected me to the larger Vietnamese diaspora. Their reflections

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reaffirmed for me how studying abroad truly can impact the rest of one’s life. FACTORS IMPACTING IMMIGRANT AND FIRSTGENERATION STUDENTS IN STUDY ABROAD Like many college students, I entered my senior year anxious about the future. What would I do after graduation? Where would I go? Who would I become? Most of my friends senior year were being recruited for consulting and accounting jobs, applying to grad programs or year-long service programs like Teach for America and Americorps, and securing internships that would lead them to a stable, 9–5 job. We contemplated moving home, staying where we were in D.C., or seeking jobs in another major city like New York or Chicago. Everything seemed to say those first steps out of college would shape our lives and future success. The pressure overwhelmed me when all I wanted was the freedom and inspiration to study and write. Particularly, my recent coursework on Asian American literature and the role of the media during the Vietnam War had me thinking and writing about my identity and heritage more than I had before. Most of my life, I had focused on assimilating and surviving, ignoring much of my family’s history before immigrating to Alabama or what it meant that I was a hyphenated, Vietnamese-American.1 If there was an identity to be had growing up in the Deep South, it was that of the Asian model minority (Wong 1998), and to avoid ridicule and make Alabama as much my home as it was for my native-born peers, I tried hard to be as “American” as I could. I was the only one in my family born in America after all, with an American nickname as my birth name (Goldstein 2016). To live up to my destiny in my family’s story, I embraced all things Southern American. I loved traditions and fried chicken, the way old oak trees laced with Spanish moss would droop over the sidewalks, how people said, “yes, ma’am” and “yes, sir” as they curtseyed and bowed. I joined a high school (and later, a college) sorority and made the varsity soccer and cross-country teams. I took on minor roles in school and community theater and won offices in a statewide youth government program. My parents, who had no understanding of social clubs and believed girls shouldn’t play sports, never came to any mother–daughter teas or watched any meets or plays. When I told my parents I had been elected as the first Asian Youth Governor of Alabama under a YMCA leadership program, my father responded that politicians got killed, and he didn’t want me in a life of public service. Then he walked away. It was an adolescence of conflict: one in which to be the model American girl, I went against everything that my parents believed was a model

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Vietnamese one. Researchers have referenced this as living on the hyphen, where immigrant children wrestle with conflicting identities (see Choi 2010; Sharobeem 2003), but I didn’t feel I lived on the hyphen between Vietnamese and American at all. I thought I had observed plenty of what it meant to be Vietnamese from my family and their expectations for my behaviors—docile, obedient, and studious—and I chose to be a well-rounded and outspoken American. But entering my senior year at The George Washington University (GW) and wondering about my future, I started thinking more about the past and the experiences I wished I’d had. I regretted not studying abroad when friends returned to tell their stories of hiking in the Serengeti or eating sushi in Japan, but the option had never existed for me. I had sometimes worked three jobs while going to school full-time, and I wasn’t going to ask for time off from an hourly job that could easily replace me. My parents had barely been able to help me pay for a portion of college so I couldn’t bother them to support any additional study-abroad expenses. As war refugees, they were also fearful of me leaving the United States. If there is some connection between refugees, it is the shared knowledge of how wicked the world can be. They had spent their lives working to give me a safe place and the opportunity to make their sacrifices worth it: how did an expensive study-abroad trip translate to a wellpaid career? Whenever I passed a university ad for study abroad, it was clear: studying abroad was a luxury for those who could afford the time and expense, not meant for scholarship students with refugee parents who waitressed to pay the rent. What changed everything for me was learning about the Fulbright program, an all-expenses-paid opportunity to pursue research abroad for a year. I could plan my trip wherever I wanted, I wouldn’t have to worry about money, I’d be studying under the auspices of the government, and the associated prestige seemed to offset any possible drawback of “taking time off.” A road less ordinary, which connected me to research on my identity, which would also win consent from my refugee parents—a Fulbright checked all of the boxes. I spent the fall of my senior year preparing an application. And just as my twenty-one-year-old self had imagined, that step wound up determining the shape of my life. FULBRIGHT STUDY ABROAD The Fulbright U.S. Student program stands unique among study-abroad opportunities for students. Under the research and teaching program, Fulbrights are awarded to graduates and graduate students to study abroad

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in over 140 countries and allow recipient scholars to continue their research interests. Further, while most undergraduate study-away programs are designed by specific faculty or universities, Fulbright research grants are developed by the student proposing the trip and are competitively selected to ensure that the research being conducted is in line with the host country’s interests. Since 2011, the Fulbright has had an annual average acceptance rate of 20 percent of all applicants, though this varies on available funds and the individual country, as countries like the United Kingdom receive hundreds of applications a year while other countries like Norway may receive a fraction of that (“Eight Essential Fulbright U.S. Student Statistics” 2019). Sometimes, countries will indicate that only certain projects will be funded in any given year. Other times, fluency in the native language is required and thus eliminates many potential applicants. Still, sometimes applicants are simply weighed against each other: a country may want an even balance between various disciplines (“Fulbright U.S. Student Program” 2019). The year I applied was only the second in which the Fulbright was being offered in Vietnam, compared to some other countries where Fulbright scholars had been studying since the program began in 1946. Since Vietnam was still a nascent program comparatively, there were both less restrictions on focus areas as well as less support for program development. Thus, no one advised or helped guide my Creative Writing proposal, but I understood enough from the application’s questions that a Fulbright did not mean a tour of a country’s highlights for a year. It meant immersing myself in a foreign culture, and through my own research, finding and building connections to the United States. My application rattled off a wish-list of ideas about reading texts in Vietnamese (though I could barely speak the language, much less read it), meeting local poets and writers (though I didn’t know of any), and traveling the country to capture descriptions and experiences in my own words (though I had never published anything outside a few articles in the student paper and yearbook). I was able to draw on my undergraduate studies and talked about how many Asian American writers had found their voice after traveling back to their heritage country (Hu 2017) and how I wanted to shed light on the experience of a child of refugees returning to view sites of war. Though I had never left the United States before and had no idea how I would survive on my own in Vietnam, I waxed on about the Fulbright jumpstarting my writing career. The application process involved several steps, from language certification to assembling a proposal with a partnership letter from a university in Vietnam, to getting appropriate recommendations and interviewing before a committee of GW faculty. After GW greenlighted it, my proposal went on to the Institute for International Education (IIE), which housed the Fulbright

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as part of its mission to make “the world a more interconnected place” and as a research-supporting arm of U.S. Departments of State and Defense (IIE 2019). From there, my proposal was presented to representatives from Vietnam, who were given the ultimate say. It was a long process followed by a long waiting period, during which I forgot I was being considered at all. I had instead secured an internship that eventually did lead to a stable, 9–5 job offer when I graduated in May. Then, two weeks later, IIE called and told me to pack my bags. SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY IN THE UNKNOWN Growing up, I knew I was different from other American-born friends, but I didn’t consider this in the context of being a refugee or even as the child of immigrants. We simply lacked roots and ties to the Civil War, and the extent of my heritage was limited to what I had immediately before me: my mother and father, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. I was never given the details of my family’s evacuation, and there was never discussion of return, which I’ve come to learn is common among children of immigrants and refugees escaping trauma or war. According to Alice Bloch of the University of Manchester, “Where there are on-going conflicts, human rights abuses and a lack of democratic representation there can be fear and uncertainty and these influence aspirations for return” (2018: 2). My parents, who had fought against communism in Vietnam (which was now the accepted form of government) and who knew many who had been tortured in re-education camps, had no interest in returning or inspiring me to return. I had heard that my family was sponsored into a military base in Arkansas, where my parents did the grueling work of sexing chickens for two years, before they saved enough for a car with help from the local church. My parents relocated our extended family to Mobile, Alabama, because a former colleague told my dad that there were job opportunities with the U.S. Navy and that the weather was similar to South Vietnam’s. Besides those minor details, what I knew about that time in my family’s history I learned from my own academic research in college, the evidence I found in my parents’ room, and from the pieced-together accounts of family members who didn’t want to talk about anything, but sometimes let their regrets slip. While my family’s story could be considered tragic, compared to the refugee stories I have heard since working with refugee communities as an adult, our story is one marked by luck. After all, we escaped. We had left in the fiery fallout of the war, from a beach outside Saigon in 1975.2 My aunt, who was seven at the time, told me she remembered

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losing a sandal on the beach as she ran to a helicopter. My father said this was impossible because there was no helicopter. My grandmother claimed that when we were in Vietnam, my mother and father had servants and security detail. What I knew was that my mother was a schoolteacher, and my father, a naval officer. Security guards seemed possible, if my father was really a military target, but somehow in my mind, an entourage of servants seemed to undermine whatever security guards would have provided. My grandmother, aunts, and uncles were full of stories about the country and family we had been forced to leave behind. Stories of family celebrations, of beaches, of markets, of holidays, and festivals, that sounded fantastical compared to the small homes and strip malls that made up our American lives. What would have happened had we won the war? My father would have been exalted as a naval officer, and my family would have risen to societal power as heroes against communism and China. Instead of barely making ends meet and my grandmother and grandfather subjected to backbreaking work even in their old age, we would have been honored by family and our community every Lunar New Year. Instead of my parents struggling to earn respect with their limited English, we could have held our heads high, knowing we had been on the right side of history, with all the glory in front of us a result of my father’s valiant efforts. But history wasn’t on our side, and every story wove the unimaginable—war! famine! escape!—with loss and regret. During the quiet Southern nights, my family would whisper, Who knows? If we’d stayed in Vietnam, maybe my brother wouldn’t have died of an aneurism at 9 years old because we would have had the best medical care at the earliest possible point of intervention, or my aunt wouldn’t have died of pneumonia because she would never have been waiting tables and overworking herself with such labor. Somehow my sister might not have been a juvenile diabetic; certainly, it had something to do with our adjusted American diets. I spent another lifetime wondering about the possibilities. Every other outcome seemed so different than the reality of our struggles in Alabama. I listened to my mother lament the quality of fruits and vegetables available in our local grocery, felt my grandmother’s sadness when she felt she didn’t have one neighbor she trusted, and tried to make my father proud by standing tall, lest people not know that my family line mattered. All of these ideas built upon themselves and reinforced each other: the United States was not really ours; we were not natives. Without my family ever directly telling me and with strangers constantly asking me where I was from, I understood America was not home. Vietnam was.

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DEFINING HOME AND “IMAGINED HOME” AS PART OF A DISPLACED DIASPORA What is home? I’ve discovered, as I’ve met others like me, that many firstgeneration Americans eventually ask themselves this question. Is home where your family is at this moment? Or where your family had always been before? If I were to reconcile the two parts of my hyphenated identity, then in Vietnamese culture, the notion of where my family had always been, where the graves of my ancestors laid, would define home. Growing up, my family made it a part of our weekly practice to visit the graves of my aunt and brother, to pay our respects and stay close to their memories. As additional members of my family have passed, my parents have bought plots close to those we’ve already lost and have often said they would never leave Mobile because who would tend to our family graves? As a culture that reveres and prays to ancestors who may have left land or property to be managed by their descendants, home does not just embody a mental state but also a very physical place defined by visible markers. In American culture, if you were to believe that art reflects society, then the question of home as connected to identity seems to reflect the fact we are a nation of immigrants, a nation founded by opportunists seeking religious or economic freedom and practically exiled from our native lands. The idea of home—which is forsaken when one leaves, even if leaving for opportunity and then returning—seems embedded in our subconscious. Many literary works, such as Joan Didion’s essay “On Going Home” (1968) and Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), famously fixate on notions of returning home in the American psyche, though in neither work is the protagonist able to comfortably return to the place their family raised them. Such works often depict the prodigal child who, after finding their identity as an adult elsewhere, tries to come home but cannot as they are no longer accepted (or perhaps because they no longer accept that life) and because the ideas, places, and memories associated with home have morphed beyond their recognition. It is notable that both of these American works illustrate that home is a place where one is not only born but where one stays, and those who leave feel discomfort upon return. While in these works home is to return to the home of one’s birthplace, it is arguable that returning to a heritage home for the immigrant amplifies these same desires for an accepting home. In literary iterations of immigrants returning home, we see examples of hyphenated Americans who return to the home of their parents and ancestors to find the roots of their own identity and upbringing, and maybe with the conscious intent or not, to reconcile feelings of guilt, sadness, obligation, and sometimes, even redemption. For example, in Vaddey Ratner’s novel Music of the Ghosts (2018), Suteera Aung returns

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to Cambodia and is pained by memories. She’s confused that, while she left as a child refugee, she no longer recognizes Cambodia as home and instead is forced to acknowledge secrets her family kept. Comedian Ali Wong, in her memoir-like work “Dear Girls” (2019), admits that she journeys to Vietnam as a student at UCLA because she doesn’t know enough about the Vietnamese side of her identity, her mother’s side. When her mom comes to visit, she discovers her mother is a “beaming extrovert,” one that is “confident and funny” and not made to “feel primitive” (95), as she imagines her mom feels in the United States. Seeing this side of her mother helps her understand her own life and upbringing more. These family secrets and altered identities seem to loom large in many first- and second-generation immigrant and refugee’s hearts, obscuring what is real and what is illusory. The kind of home that such immigrants of various diaspora return to is the imagined home, much like the home I imagined when growing up in Alabama which I had constructed from tidbits of stories from my family. My family had regaled me with these tidbits in such nostalgic terms that Vietnam could never be a real place. Imagined home exists in the “storied life,” a term Anastasia Christou discusses in Narratives of Place, Culture and Identity, which helps to reassess one’s “lived life.” In other words, what we imagine our ancestral home to be influences how we live our lives, and when we confront the realities of our ancestral homes, we reassess how we are living our lives and whether our lived lives are true to our roots. Christou’s work, which collects oral and written re-evaluations of home when second-generation Greek-Americans embark on heritage travel, sees return migrations “as much a political event as . . . a socio-cultural and personal activity” (Christou 2006: 66). She follows several heritage travelers who feel strongly connected to Greece, remaining connected to culture through food and dance, and return to find a “cultural anxiety” in which their very real connection to Greece in their lived lives makes returning to a storied life problematic. Suddenly, they feel as if they are strangers in a land that should feel familiar. (I felt even my limited understanding of my native language betrayed me. Certain words/phrases that were common in my family had become outdated in Vietnam in the 25 years since my family had lived there, and people laughed when I used them.) Christou’s work should be considered when designing programs meant to target those of refugee or first-generation background returning to a heritage home not only in how a person may not recognize the food and culture of their homeland as they expect to but also in how she problematizes the idea that the American immigrant story equals a story of survival that ends in success. America is infamously regarded as a land of gold-paved streets, but in reality, how many immigrants return to their heritage homes as successes or are even able to address the questions posed to them about their families and

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the paths they’ve taken? If they are not successes, then the question of why their family left at all can further isolate students completing study-abroad programs in their heritage countries. To address this disconnect or reservation that immigrants may feel in completing diasporic travel, Paul Basu, who studied Scottish-Americans who returned to Scotland, writes that the most significant part of diasporic tourism was seeing an ancestral home or graveyard and cited that they felt they were completing “a circle of life” (Basu 2007: 56). Basu claimed that members of a diaspora often cling to their roots more than even native people may in the ancestral lands. While the importance of an ancestral home may not be lost on Scots themselves, this importance is not one that they feel missing and must therefore seek. Basu’s work shows that by connecting students to places particularly significant to their families when constructing heritage travel or diasporic tourism, we may be able to supersede the feelings of regret or inadequacy that Christou alludes to. WHEN STUDY ABROAD CREATES DISCOMFORT In my own experiences, I understood what both Christou and Basu’s research subjects felt and argue students should prepare for study abroad by considering these situations and possibilities. I was surrounded by cousins, uncles, and more who wanted to know how my family had fared and wondered why no one had come back sooner. I spent my first few months in Vietnam living with my father’s closest brother Bac Dư, who was what I always imagined an uncle should be. He joked that his name meant “excess,” that as the eleventh child, he was really “dư,” “one more than needed.” He told me folk stories intended to impart some gem of wisdom and led me around proudly as his niece. “She got a scholarship to come here to study,” he’d say. “Didn’t speak any Vietnamese when she arrived and listen to her now!” Bac Dư felt that a lifetime of being separated from the Vietnamese side of my family meant that I didn’t have a clear understanding of the importance of family. He went through pains to bring me to every relative I had who lived in or passed through Saigon. Each week, he would say, “Are you ready to meet relative number x?” or “Would you like to visit cousin blank?” Outside of the relatives I met at the airport when I first arrived or the ones who regularly came by to visit or take me out, other more distant relatives remained a mystery to me. Most of them, I didn’t meet enough times to remember their names, much less understand how they were related to me. Others made me uncomfortable as they asked about my family’s success in America and implied that because we were successful (at least in the sense

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that we were Americans and not living in poverty in Vietnam), we needed to help them more financially. When I had first arrived at Bac Dư’s house, I had felt disoriented. My uncle’s house was the first one inside a community separated from the alley by a metal gate that was bike-locked at night. It looked more like a cave than a house, with a small opening that led to a bleak interior. Opposite the doorway stood wire chicken cages stacked on sheets of plywood and cinder blocks. The piles that built up to the shabby tin roof and pressed along the outside wall of his house rivaled my grandfather’s piles of junk back in Mobile. Within the mishmash beside his door, I could make out a table, some buckets and cardboard, maybe bricks and wondered how the objects were stacked so as not to come tumbling into the alley. My uncle didn’t have a shower or flushing toilet (so we bathed and flushed using water from a bucket) and while he had electricity, it often went out during the monsoon season. He didn’t have a refrigerator. We rarely ate meat and never wasted food; leftovers were preserved or eaten room-temperature within a day of preparation. There were also five of us crammed into 500 square feet of living space and sharing one queen bed and a concrete floor covered with mats. I became used to living without warm water or privacy. One day, Bac Dư asked me if I knew how often my father spoke with him. I shook my head; I couldn’t begin to guess how often they communicated. He pulled out a wooden box and thumbed through a stack of letters inside that I assumed were from my father. Bac Dư separated three envelopes and laid them before me. I recognized my father’s scrawl, the all capital, noncursive letters he used because he always worried about being misunderstood. I handled the letters with care, thinking that they must have detailed the significant events my parents had undergone after making it to the States. That must have been the reason Bac Dư had singled out these three. “That is all your father wrote in 27 years. Three letters.” The first letter, I was told, announced my birth in 1978. The second relayed my brother’s death in 1981. And the last letter, postmarked in 2001, told my uncle to pick me up at the airport. I imagined my own sister and our relationship. Even when I was in college and she was still living in Alabama, we spoke every couple of weeks. I cried when I first heard her voice from the university’s office phone in Saigon. My uncle and father hadn’t heard each other’s voice in nearly thirty years, and letters did not fill the silence. I imagined why my father didn’t write more. He couldn’t save his siblings or their families when Saigon fell in 1975, and he continued to be powerless to save them from reeducation and losing all of their lands in the aftermath of the War. My family in America had neither power nor wealth. There were too

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many to sponsor all of them to America on visas, and even though I remembered a childhood of sending “home” money, it had never been enough to reclaim lost homes, cover medical expenses, or pay for books and tuition. My father didn’t write more because he didn’t have more to give. I suddenly understood why my parents didn’t want me to return. The months I lived with my uncle challenged how I viewed myself and considered poverty in terms of my own identity. I had always thought of my family in Alabama as poor—we didn’t have namebrand clothing and ate Spam regularly—but to see poverty in a different context, the way David Shipler discusses in The Working Poor (2005), forever altered how I view poverty. Shipler states: “By global or historical standards, much of what America considers poverty is luxury” (8). He goes on to discuss sewer systems, electricity, and access to various kinds of foods, which are American standards that were absent in the poverty my uncle experienced. This is not to say that others around our house didn’t have access to showers and toilets and refrigerators and less people and more space but simply that my uncle’s level of poverty didn’t allow it. I had sought a “real” experience as a student, but I hadn’t expected the months of gastrointestinal problems, and had I not been living with my own family, I wonder if I wouldn’t have flinched more or otherwise insulted my hosts. As naïve as I was, I was ill-prepared mentally for what it would be like to spend months without air-conditioning in temperatures over 100 degrees, and I often complained about these circumstances when I wrote. I also felt terribly guilt each time I ate away from the house and spent more on a Western-style pizza than what my uncle and aunt earned in a week. Often, I hid how much I spent. Had I been prepared properly—perhaps understanding the conditions in which my relatives lived before arriving—could I have been more openminded and seen more? If the stay with my uncle had been shorter—a few days or weeks versus a few months—would I have understood their hardships or way of life? As a practitioner, I’m uncertain about these answers, but I now recognize that homestays in less affluent or less private circumstances can present various challenges for students. Western society is rife with luxuries we take for granted, so to expect anyone to adjust willingly and joyfully to a life of rustic challenges would be its own kind of naiveté. Rather, by choosing the right duration and framing homestays in the context of Shipler’s work, students may not only have a better sense of daily life but also “get woke” and be able to recognize that our view of poverty comes from a place of privilege. Those in poverty abroad may not even see themselves in poverty, and we should not assume their lives are lacking in any way.

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RECONCILING REAL AND IMAGINED “HOME” After living with my uncle, I began traveling as a backpacker and jumped hostels from Saigon to Hanoi and back, then moved in with a Belgian expat who had extra rooms to spare. He had dropped me off at my uncle’s home one day and upon seeing its squalor, said, “This simply won’t do. You must come live with me.” I spent four months learning Vietnamese at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Saigon, a month writing on the beaches of Nha Trang, and five months teaching English at both an international high school for Korean expats’ children and at a community school for working Vietnamese adults. I found time to write, frequented places enough so that the locals started to invite me to their homes for dinner, and eventually broke into a circle of high-rolling expats who would invite me for weekends in Singapore or golfing in Phan Thiet. These experiences were ones I could not have foreseen, while other unplanned ones helped shape my understanding of Vietnamese culture and where I fit. Once, a man who sat beside me was introduced as a soldier who had tricked servicemen into believing he was their ally before killing them. He smiled and lit a cigarette, and in the hatred I felt in that moment, I knew I was American. Another time, my uncle led me back to our ancestral graveyard to honor the death date of my great grandfather, and a great-aunt grabbed my hands and told me the blood that ran in her body ran through mine. In the love I felt in that moment, I knew I would always be Vietnamese. These experiences I would consider as my authentic ones that happened not because I wanted them to but because I was given the freedom, time, and space to live them as a person with dual identities. At the end of my year in Vietnam, I returned to the alley where my uncle lived. “Con bé!” my aunt said. “Con bé trở về nhà!” I smiled, embarrassed by her repeated term of endearment, “baby” and feeling guilty that it had been so long since I had “returned home,” as she said. My uncle ducked out of the house and welcomed me with a squeeze of both shoulders. He repeated my aunt’s words: The little one is back home. My aunt grabbed a bottled Coke from an ice chest by the push-cart and flicked off the cap. She stuck a straw in it, and I traded her for my bag of gifts. I sipped my Coke as I watched my aunt and uncle pull out item after item, their eyes smiling as they recognized one thing then the next. “The water pitcher,” my uncle nodded. He pulled the lid off and inspected the replaceable plastic tube of carbon that took out chlorine and lead. It was the more advanced model that was supposed to take out the microbes that

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caused giardia, though I never had the faith to test it. I only drank bottled water. “You have to replace the filter every three months,” I explained and gave them a package of additional filters. “And where are we supposed to buy extra filters when these run out?” my uncle asked. I hadn’t thought of that. If they really started to use the pitchers, was it fair for me to make them go back to boiling water when the filters stopped working? I rubbed my forehead. “I’ll mail you extras from the States when you need them,” I said. I held up a blouse to my aunt. My uncle looked over her shoulder as she held the shirt up to the sunlight. “But these clothes are too big for us,” my uncle said. “Give them to someone who can wear them, then.” I tried to smile. I noticed the hole in the shirt he was wearing, and recognizing it as one of his good shirts, I pushed more clothes into my uncle and aunt’s open arms. They folded the articles softly in their hands, considering them like curios. I watched as my uncle held up a pair of my pants to his hipbones. The rest of the gifts began to feel useless. All the clothes were too big, and the flashlight would need batteries they couldn’t afford. The bike lock implied that someone might actually take one of their creaky, one-speed bikes when all around them, most households had mopeds. I felt better thinking at least the moped I had bought and used the past year would wind up in their hands. “Follow me,” my aunt said when the bag was empty. Inside the house, I watched as she opened the doors of a rusting, turquoise wardrobe. Whenever I pulled on those doors, I had to brace against the frame of the wardrobe to keep it from toppling onto me. My aunt didn’t seem to have this problem. The doors gave with ease, and I watched her tanned sinewy hands disappear beneath her four sets of good rayon clothes, reappearing with a wooden chest the length of a business size envelope. My aunt had pulled out the chest once or twice before, and I knew it protected such important items as letters from family members, government documents, and a silver and gold watch she had been given in 1974. She set aside these very few protected possessions and drew a 24-karat gold chain that she held like thread in her fingers. Her mother had given it to her, she explained, and then cupped her hand over mine. I uncurled fingers to find a charm with two scalloped rows portraying ocean waves along the bottom, a sailboat rocking in the center, and a thin rim of gold—the sun setting on the horizon—making up the background. I ran a thumb over to feel the textured relief of the sail, then squeezed my fingers to sense its weight. Twenty-four karats and too weak for the story I wanted it to hold. Even the

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background sun did nothing but serve as a reminder of the day and night separating my family on either side of the Pacific. “But, Aunt, I never wear gold,” I said and pushed the necklace back toward her. She had already given me too much. After welcoming me on her chicken-feathered paveway, she and my uncle had fed me and given me a place to stay for five months; they had loved me as their own daughter from the moment we’d met. I didn’t want anything else from her, and I knew the necklace was worth more than anything else they owned. Certainly, her gift was not an equal trade for the unwanted things that had not made the cut from my possessions. My aunt shook her head. In the dry heat, with her hands clasped over mine, my aunt flashed me an ear-to-ear grin that always seemed more appropriate on a jack-o-lantern than on her withered 68-pound frame. She had greeted me with that grin each morning I lived with her, and it had become as much a part of my wake-up as the clucking chickens outside the house. After I’d moved out on my own, I came to visit to find her grin assuring me that home was really with her and my uncle. Both almost sixty, she and my uncle were childless, and there was little hope another niece would materialize from a war-filled past to be the daughter in their lives. She and my uncle were more likely to end their days alone in a city that seemed to be leaving them in dust as well. The smile pulled her chin up and compressed her weathered face into two halves. She patted the charm closed into my hands. “Cho tình cảm.” Tình cảm was the hardest word for me to understand when I was learning Vietnamese. In the bare classroom of the Ho Chi Minh University of Arts and Humanities, I had learned that by English translation, it most closely means “affection,” “concern,” “sincerity,” or “love,” depending on the context. (Recently, I also learned that paired with the name of a relative, it can also mean the relationship between those relatives.) However, from what I gleaned from the dense and smog-filled streets of Saigon, in the salty air of Nha Trang, and on the marshy rice fields of Qui Nhon, tinh cảm had many more connotations. It was the devotion children celebrated when worshiping the death anniversaries of their parents, the kinship that connected families separated by wars and continents. It was what Southern Vietnamese felt separated them from their Northern brethren. In turn, Northerners seemed to believe that the separation was more like ignorance and slothfulness. “Tình cảm,” she said again, and I abandoned her standing in her doorframe, dust settling on the concrete floor. I watched my aunt and my uncle wave farewell to me through the rearview glass. They followed the car a few steps before stopping in its wake of dust to let me out of sight. As I watched them becoming smaller and smaller, I noticed something peculiar in their smiles,

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something I had misread at first. Their slightly pursed lips were filled not with loss but, instead, hope. My hand relaxed around the necklace as I began to understand the meaning of the gesture. She wanted to make me feel better about leaving her in Vietnam to return to the States. REFLECTING ON THE STUDY-ABROAD EXPERIENCE As a writer, similar to an anthropologist, I knew the importance of keeping meticulous records so I saved stories: of my uncle teaching me how to ride a moped through the congested, monsoon-flooded streets of Saigon. Of learning to do a traditional dance with teacups for International Women’s Day. Of getting certified as a SCUBA diver, though I still don’t know how to swim. Of children who watched me as a curious novelty and my aunt-inlaw’s mother who spat curses at me because she couldn’t see me through her blinding cataracts. This led to my work in graduate school, where I wrote a memoir capturing my experiences and discussing the ways my mind moved from confusion and skepticism to understanding and wonder, and my heart changed from reacting with fear to embracing love. One of the friends I made in Vietnam, a German American expat, told me over a beer one day that, “People are motivated by only two things: fear and love.” At the time, I smiled at the sage-like way he delivered the line, but I discovered his words to be true again and again in Vietnam, and in the twenty years since I’ve returned home to America. We can list so many reasons for the important decisions we make in life – which college to attend if any, where to live or move to, what job to seek or not—but ultimately, every decision can be distilled as one driven by love or running from fear. As Americans, we tend to think of money as the driving force for so many decisions, but even then, it’s the fear of not having money that is the motivation. In studying abroad, in going back to the home of one’s ancestors, there could be the love of adventure or family or the fear of never knowing who you could have been or understanding fully who you are. It was such a simple concept, an idea I may never have come across if I hadn’t lived abroad, but one, like other revelations I discovered abroad, that I come back to again across cultures and experiences. I also understood after my year abroad that America would always be home. I realized this in the way I seized up when 9/11 happened (I was celebrating someone’s return to their home country when the news hit Saigon) or when I found myself seeking turkey on Thanksgiving or befriending anyone near me speaking English. But home was also Vietnam. I left able to speak the language, understanding my own sense of humor and superstitions better, realizing that family—not money or success—was the love that propelled

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me, and that, as my father always alluded to, one day I would have to return to Alabama to take care of my parents when they could no longer care for themselves. Because I was not a traditional study-abroad student, worried about grades for a class perhaps or unsure of a major, I was studying for studying’s sake and already knew what I was most interested in researching—art, current events and history, and literature. Much of my planning and advising for students now involves whether the courses they are pursuing abroad align with their majors, and to this end, I try to offer multiple writing courses (like Creative Nonfiction and Research Writing) on one-study abroad program to fit students’ ever-tightening course credit needs. For students who are unsure of their studies or have no interest in studying and simply want to experience a different culture and foreign environment, I find myself coaching ideas of cultural respect more, that their time abroad is a time to study and learn, not just party and become Instagram influencers. In both circumstances, I always emphasize the privilege students have to be able to engage in the experience of study abroad at all. I wanted to learn and absorb as much as I could in my own year abroad. I wanted to come back saying that it had been the best experience of my life, that without it I wouldn’t be who I would later become. I knew I would have to return to the States and somehow be able to explain how much my year in Vietnam after graduating had been a wiser decision than, say, taking the job offer extended to me after my college internship ended. For that reason and because I was alone, I probably took more risks and pushed harder to find the unique, authentic experience, but as I consider these thoughts, every student who travels abroad wants to feel that their time abroad was time well spent, that without it, they wouldn’t have had a complete college experience. Reading the journals I filled about these experiences helps me remember what the young student experience can be—full of wonder, joy, fear, and guilt. A HOME IN TWO PLACES Since 2001, I have returned to Vietnam several times, at times taking family members and friends in America with me. My mother and father have reconnected with their lost relatives and have even journeyed back without me. This is a far cry from when I had first told my family I was going to study abroad for a year in Vietnam, when my mother told me that if she had a say in it, she would not let me go. When I came back from Vietnam, I mentored a Vietnamese American girl for three years in D.C. through an at-risk youth organization called Asian American LEAD, and later served as the Maryland manager for BPSOS

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(formerly Boat People SOS), a nonprofit that furthers social programs for Vietnamese both in America and abroad. My understanding of poverty and global impacts have changed (n.b. it is called the American War in Vietnam), and I have dedicated much of my career to address the inequities that foster poverty here and abroad. Now that my husband and I have relocated to Seattle, where there is a much larger Vietnamese population, I work with a refugee organization that was founded by successfully resettled Vietnamese women and often visit Vietnamese grocers and cafes. My daughter, at three, is as comfortable eating phở with chopsticks as she is eating macaroni and cheese with a fork. She knows that she was born in the year of the goat, and next summer, during my next study-abroad program, I plan to take my husband and daughter to Vietnam for a few weeks. It’s important to me that she experiences her roots as a lived life, not a storied or imagined one. I’ll take her to where her grandfather graduated from the Naval Academy and her mother studied Vietnamese. That year of studying abroad in Vietnam helped me understand how I could live a hyphenated existence. I could be proud of the roots that gave me strength—my parents’ sacrifices and resilience, their morals, and their hopes and fears—while embracing all of the things like activism and voting, freedom of speech and freedom of religion, handshakes and sarcasm, that I valued as an American. Neither identity is any less real nor imagined. At this point in my life and career, I very much consider myself part of the growing Vietnamese diaspora, which, as a result of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the mass exodus of South Vietnamese refugees in the following decade, has burgeoned from Europe to Australia to the United States. My year abroad meeting other Vietnamese and Việt Kiều—foreign Vietnamese like me who had grown up elsewhere like France, Germany, and the United States—made my world larger than I could have ever imagined; the stories we shared helped me build a better interconnected understanding of my family and my place. Home had become much more than the street I grew up on in Alabama. THE LASTING IMPACTS OF STUDY ABROAD In the almost 20 years since my year in Vietnam, I have traveled to more than thirty-five countries and am designing short-term study-abroad programs at UWT, after previously serving as the Study-Abroad Coordinator at the Community College of Baltimore County. My current project is designing a quarter program to Vietnam, where students under a statistics class taught by my Vietnamese-born colleague and in my writing course will collect and analyze research for PeaceTrees Vietnam, an organization that seeks to remedy

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the aftermath of the war, still, more than four decades later. We intend to couple our courses by co-teaching an Art, Film, and Literature course on Vietnam that will explore the country from both a native and American lens. While I have already heard interest from students in the Vietnamese Student Association, I have also generated interest among other students who are interested in learning more about U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War or are otherwise interested in learning more about Vietnam and her people. I want students to understand that our world is interconnected and that we study other cultures and travel abroad to cultivate a better understanding of these connections. I am privileged to be able to teach students from a wide variety of backgrounds, including first-generation students who are Latina, Vietnamese, Filipino, Native American, Pacific Islander, and more. My work focuses mostly on first-year students and students interested in writing, global education, and studying abroad. In my writing courses, I make every effort to include voices that examine multicultural and multiethnic issues and consider concepts like bilingualism and immigration. I push students in my writing courses to reflect on identity and what home means to them. I have them consider language and its relevance to culture and how your use of language may impact how others perceive you. On travel programs, I have students journal on what differences they perceive and why they may be noticing these differences. What does it say about what they expect in a home? I ask them to consider daily experiences that challenge their beliefs or make them more comfortable or not. I have them consider what makes a place home. The notion of belonging and one’s authentic home or true identity is one that I see many students still considering and obsessing over, like I did. I have helped students apply for Fulbrights, and in those applications and the ones I review for my own study-abroad programs, I ask students again and again, why you, why this country, why your expectations? I hope that by helping them ask the hard questions before they go, I’m also putting a check on the idea of studying abroad as merely an escape. Sometimes they look at me in the same pained way I imagine I must have looked at my own professors. What do you mean? they plead. And then I draw from my own travels and let them know that no one can tell you where you belong or a heritage country may not offer anything more than a current one, but by studying abroad and opening their world to travel, they have the chance to discover and sometimes create the home they want for themselves. I recognize that their trips may be shorter, that they may not have family waiting for them or have a way to genuinely connect with the country they wish to explore. Authentic experiences can rarely be predicted or planned, and I warn them that their expectations may not be in line with reality.

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This is particularly true among children of refugees, asylees, or immigrants who come to the United States under persecution or economic tragedy. In these cases, like my family, students have not had the opportunity to return to the ancestral home because of the guilt their family may have from leaving or the way their family no longer identifies with the native land as “home” (because being persecuted and then fleeing dissolves notions of home, and because in the U.S. naturalization process we ask immigrants to give up prior identities). Further, while some immigrants may become successful once they have transitioned to the United States, the vast majority of immigrants, and by extension their children, struggle to make ends meet, and returning home can be read as a sign of success attained in the new country. If that success has not materialized, the pressure or disappointment students feel in the home country can be palpable. Thus, a well-crafted study-abroad program goes beyond connecting students to a place they’ve imagined, to also emphasize identity, voice, self-advocacy, and inclusion. As universities and colleges focus more on intersectionality and diversity initiatives, we need to seek more ways to create study-abroad opportunities that recognize identities students may share with host countries while creating environments where students without that heritage background are able to immerse themselves in the culture in meaningful ways. In fact, study abroad focused on connecting diasporic students with their homelands alongside students without that cultural background provides the unique opportunity to help students better understand the meaning of home and identity and see their potential as advocates and diplomats for hyphenated experiences, and for the lands left that have become part of our American fabric. In this way, we have the opportunity to create global citizens with a humane understanding of the world while giving students an experience that could lead to a lifelong connection to a place and to a life full of experiences beyond what they may have grown up imagining or believing they could have. As educators, we do not always know the circumstances from which our students come, the sacrifices they may have made to study abroad, the individual motivations for a certain country at that certain time, whether they have ever felt at home in their own skin or in the physical surroundings of their community. All we can do is consider what identities a student already claims and appreciate that a student chose our program over another or chose a program at all. We can foreground their experience so that their expectations are tempered with reality, and they are better prepared to welcome different, new experiences and learn from them. If we’re lucky, they’ll come home understanding themselves and their place in this world better.

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NOTE 1. Author’s linguistic note: Denoting bicultural identity in this chapter consists of using a hyphen between cultures, in line with scholarship at the time of the author’s own understanding of identity. Recent challenges to this denotation centers on the notion that hyphens should not be used and that by incorporating a hyphen, the emphasis is on “America” rather than the initial culture named. That is not the intent of the author, as both identities are seen as equal. 2. Saigon, or Sài Gòn in Vietnamese, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976, after the fall of South Vietnam. The renaming is commonly cited as a tribute to the revolutionary communist leader Ho Chi Minh, as well as a way to recognize the North’s success in the Vietnam War. As the author’s family fled South Vietnam in 1975, the author and her family refer to this city by its original name of Saigon, which the author continues to use throughout this chapter as a nod to her own positionality as the daughter of refugees who fled a country that also no longer exists (South Vietnam identified as its own country from 1954-1975). It should be noted that members of the Vietnamese diaspora as well as residents of Vietnam today use the original name interchangeably with its current name, but officially, the city is now Ho Chi Minh City.

REFERENCES Basu, Paul. 2007. Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis. Bloch, Alice, and Shirin Hirsch. 2018. “Inter-Generational Transnationalism: The Impact of Refugee Backgrounds on Second Generation.” Comparative Migration Studies 6, no. 1: 1–18. Chou, Julie. 2010. “Chapter 8: Living on the Hyphen.” In Language and Culture: Reflective Narratives and the Emergence of Identity, 66–71. London: Routledge. Christou, Anastasia. 2006. Narratives of Place, Culture and Identity Second Generation Greek-American’s Return ‘home’. IMISCOE Dissertations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Didion, Joan. 1968. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “Eight Essential Fulbright U.S. Student Statistics.” 2019. ProFellow. Accessed from www​.p​​rofel​​low​.c​​om​/ti​​ps​/8-​​essen​​tial-​​fulbr​​ight-​​u​-s​-s​​tuden​​t​-gra​​nt​-st​​atist​​ics​-f​​or​-th​​e​ -201​​8​-19-​​award​​s/ on July 27, 2019. “Fulbright U.S. Student Program.” 2019. Fulbright. Accessed from https://us​.fulbrightonline​.org​/about on July 27, 2019. Goldstein, Joshua R., and Guy Stecklov. 2016. “From Patrick to John F.: Ethnic Names and Occupational Success in the Last Era of Mass Migration.” American Sociological Review 81, no. 1: 85–106.

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Hu, Jane. 2017. “The ‘Inscrutable’ Voices of Asian-Anglophone Fiction.” The New Yorker, November 15. Accessed from https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​yorke​​r​.com​​/book​​s​/pag​​e​-tur​​ ner​/t​​he​-in​​scrut​​able-​​voice​​s​-of-​​asian​​​-angl​​ophon​​e​-fic​​tion on February 12, 2019. IIE. 2019. “Institute for International Education Home Page.” Accessed from https:// www​.iie​.org/ on July 29, 2019. Ratner, Vaddey. 2017. Music of the Ghosts. New York, NY: Touchstone. Sharobeem, Heba M. 2003. “The Hyphenated Identity and the Question of Belonging: A Study of Samia Serageldin’s The Cairo House.” Studies in the Humanities 30, no. 1–2: 60. Shimabukuro, Robert Sadamu. 2001. “Born in Seattle: The Campaign for Japanese American Redress.” Accessed from http:​/​/sea​​rch​.e​​bscoh​​ost​.c​​om​/lo​​gin​.a​​spx​?d​​irect​​ =true​​&scop​​e​=sit​​e​&db=​​nlebk​​&db​​=n​​labk&​​AN​=10​​92318​. Shipler, David K. 2005. The Working Poor: Invisible in America. New York: Vintage Books. Trinh, T. Minh-ha 1991. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge. Wolfe, Thomas. 1940. You Can’t Go Home Again. New York: Scribner. Accessed from https​:/​/ww​​w​.ove​​rdriv​​e​.com​​/sear​​ch​?q=​​9193A​​7EC​-9​​FF5​-4​​718​-9​​864​​-E​​ 9DFBB​​5B715​​4. Wong, Ali. 2019. Dear Girls. New York: Random House. Wong, Paul, Chienping Faith Lai, Richard Nagasawa, and Tieming Lin. 1998. “Asian Americans as a Model Minority: Self-Perceptions and Perceptions by Other Racial Groups.” Sociological Perspectives 41, no. 1: 95–118. doi: 10.2307/1389355.

Chapter 11

Between Tourism and Anti-Tourism The Ethical Implications of Study Abroad Michael A. Di Giovine

INTRODUCTION: THE ANTI-TOURISM CONTEXT In the hot summer sun of 2017, protests against the unsustainable nature of modern mass tourism erupted in major tourist destinations—first Barcelona and other Spanish towns, then spreading across the Mediterranean to Venice and Dubrovnik. Teens slashed tourists’ bike tires. Medieval walls were spray painted in English with hostile messages such as “Tourists are the Terrorists,” “Mass Tourism = Human Pollution,” and “Tourists: Your Luxury Trip is My Misery.” Banners were unfurled from Baroque balconies condemning AirBnB and tourists’ complicity in the “tourism gentrification” it fosters (see Gotham 2018); one of the most prominent to emerge in Google image searches is quite articulate in its explanation of the problem: “Welcome Tourist: Your rental of this holiday apartment in this neighbourhood destroys the socio-cultural fabric and promotes speculation. Many local residents are forced to move out. Enjoy your stay.” Marching in the streets, locals demanded that “tourists go home” and that their historic centers and beaches were “closed” and “only for locals.” While most of these messages were in the international tourism language of English, Venetians emphasized their local-ness and its precarity by carrying banners written in the largely extinct dialect: “Mi no vado mi resto. So Venexian no so in vendita voio viver qua” (I’m not leaving, I’m staying. I’m Venetian; I’m not for sale. I want to live here). What started with frustration over the unsustainability of tourism among small but vocal groups of disenfranchised locals (and, in the case of Barcelona, mobilized by left-wing political parties [Hughes 2018])—particularly the crush of tourists inundating narrow cobblestoned streets as they were unloaded daily from mega-cruise ships, the destabilizing effect of AirBnB that prices locals out of their own neighborhoods, and unfulfilled promises of social and economic 281

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benefit stemming from tourism development schemes—snowballed into a veritable movement that continues to inform critics of tourism today. To wit, anonymous graffiti artist Banksy made headlines with an uninvited and unauthorized art installation at the 2019 Venice Biennale: evoking the work of eighteenth-century Baroque artist Canaletto, it was an installation of elaborately framed landscape paintings of Venice, which, when put together, reveal an enormous cruise ship marring the traditional romantic view of St. Mark’s Square. The commentary was clear: Venice, like other iconic tourist cities, is in trouble; it suffers from “over-tourism”—that is, too much tourism, too fast, too destabilizing, and too superficial to foster and maintain local wellbeing. Milano, Novelli, and Cheer point out that over-tourism involves “the excessive growth of visitors leading to overcrowding in areas where residents suffer the consequences of temporary and seasonal tourism peaks, which have caused permanent changes to their lifestyles, denied access to amenities and damaged their general well-being” (2019: 354; see also Milano et al. 2018, 2019). Such pressures on, and marginalization of, the local community then produce, they contend, a sensation of “tourismphobia”—a somewhat xenophobic aversion and hostility to tourists and the tourism industry (Milano 2017; Milano et al. 2019a, 2019b; see also Delgado 2008; cf. Turner and Ash 1975). Yet tourismphobia could also be considered a direct and perhaps exaggerated reaction to the “tourismphilia” that some industry professionals and even interdisciplinary tourism scholars embrace, particularly when the benefits of tourism do not seem to pan out as promised (Zerva et al. 2019). While most of the protesters may have been unaware of it, the timing was important: it had been announced by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) earlier that 2017 was the International Year of Sustainable Development for Tourism. Based in Madrid, the UNWTO is the United Nations’ arm for promoting tourism economically and politically. Unlike the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), whose flagship initiative is the World Heritage program that is intended to safeguard natural and cultural sites (see Cameron and Meltzer 2013: 244), and which notably has held an ambivalent stance on tourism despite (unintentionally) contributing to its growth (Di Giovine 2014: 7898), the UNWTO is more business-oriented, occupied with the promotion of tourism destinations as well as favorable policies for tourism development. Telling of its business bent, the UNWTO’s slogan in 2017 was “1 billion tourists, 1 billion opportunities” and featured graphs of how much money can be produced for the nation-state by adopting tourism development schemes. Unprecedentedly, these two organizations, which traditionally had not collaborated with each other, had just ratified the 2015 Siem Reap Agreement to foster a partnership to develop more sustainable tourism; 2017’s International Year of Sustainable Development for Tourism was their first public foray into

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collaboration. The anti-tourism movement thus simultaneously criticized and bolstered the year’s theme: on the one hand, it indicated how seemingly out of touch (or uninformed, or greedy) some policy makers and industry professionals could be in their unabashed support for, and promotion of, increased mass tourism; on the other hand, it emphasized the very need for greater attention toward sustainability in the sector. But although the anti-tourism movement purports to be a new phenomenon—a spontaneous bubbling up of frustration with the unsustainability of mass tourism in specific, heavily touristed areas, or yet another reason to critique the current unsustainability of our market-based, neoliberal capitalist system in general, as sustainability activists might see it (see Hughes 2018 for the case of Barcelona)—the sentiments of anti-tourism are not new. It is not a movement as much as it is a historically situated set of ethical forms of visitation, an oppositional category defined against all that seems to be wrong or unsustainable with modern mass tourism. And it has been around for a long time, beginning at least in the mid-nineteenth century when upperclasses engaged in “tourist-bashing” to assert their cultural capital amid an increasingly mobile working classes, drawn en masse to seaside resorts by Thomas Cook’s affordable travel packages (Welk 2004: 84), and continuing to the present day—most notably among young, upwardly mobile backpackers who symbolically, discursively, and performatively “reject everything that is assumed to be typically ‘touristy.’ As anti-tourists, they claim to have more ‘authentic’ experiences . . . and to be ‘closer to the real people’” (83). Eschewing mass tourism, these backpackers travel “off the beaten path” and cheaply “on a shoestring” (as Lonely Planet guidebooks say) in search of an elusive paradise, which “serves as the antithesis of modern civilization (i.e., to its negative excesses) and, in this way, it is a projection of our own romantic yearning for virgin innocence and originality . . . the touristic ‘return’ to paradise” (81–82). Yet criticizing this “tourist angst,” which he sees as particularly class-related (after all, these backpackers are often the children of the wealthy middle- and upper-class tourists who are also loathe to call themselves mass tourists), Paul Fussell famously states, “the anti-tourist deludes only himself. We are all tourists now” (1980: 49). Yet imbued with these rather class-based anti-touristic assertions are strong moralizing discourses about how visitation ought to be managed, how visitors ought to behave, what outcomes ought to occur, and even who ought to travel. Indeed, Jim Butcher points out that such discourses developed around the 1980s, when travel become increasingly associated with wider moral, social, and political projects of “ethical selfhood,” the “forging of an ethical sense of self in a world in which that import of older political and moral parameters has diminished” (2017: 127). Tourism in general has been connected to modern travelers’ self-fashioning as cosmopolitan, of being in and

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of the world (Shepherd 2018; Picard and Buchberger 2013), and anti-touristic processes such as volunteering, traveling off the beaten path to experience the authentic, studying and engaging in educational activities, and otherwise bodily engaging with locals seems to enhance a sense of cosmopolitanism (see Butcher 2017). While there are different definitions of cosmopolitanism, many focus on the idea that one is inherently worldly and world-wise, comfortable with diversity, morally unified with people outside of their own ethnic group or nationality. They are, as universities like to call it today, global citizens—the cultivation of which is a prime formational objective of many study-abroad programs (see Feinberg and Edwards 2018). While the two terms are roughly the same thing, the concept of citizenship connotes a sense of contractual belonging that cosmopolitanism does not, of rights and concomitant obligations, duties, and expectations. Ethically, as a citizen, we should actively participate in the process; we must likewise behave in a just manner to other citizens. But unlike the kinds of social contracts associated with citizenship in the modern-era (see, for example, the Enlightenment writers Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau), global citizens transcend the geographic entity of a nation-state (Butcher and Smith 2015: 89–90) and take on a more ecological understanding of the interconnectedness of the world system and the traveler’s place in it. Consequently, the actions associated with global citizenship are more holistic, focusing on issues that transcend the problems of one nation-state, such as global poverty and development, health and inequality, environmentalism and climate change (Dower 2003). It also should cultivate reflexivity concerning the policies of one’s own country, an interest in international affairs, and a commitment to just action, states Bhikhu Parekh (2003: 12–13). “Global citizenship does not come with its own passport, or legal/political rights. It is, however, an important reference point for people’s moral, social and political ambitions, connoting a cosmopolitan view of the world and a desire to act in support of others,” Butcher writes (2017: 127). As the contributions in this book reveal, study abroad falls into this category of anti-tourism. Study abroad is a form of mobility that encapsulates anti-touristic values: traditionally slow and immersive, based on education and quality local interaction, purporting to be work and not a holiday or a party, and aimed at breaking down ethnocentrism and creating cosmopolitan “global citizens” rather than transient visitors, it positions itself against the stereotypically fast, superficial, uninformed, socially destabilizing leisure pursuits that are often perceived to occur within the tourist bubble. This book’s purpose, then, has been to examine the ways in which study-abroad programs are perceived to stand in opposition to the stereotypical forms of mass tourism; how they are conceived of, marketed, and carried out to both capitalize on tourist imaginaries yet transcend them and how the program

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creators and directors—most of whom are anthropologists here in the volume—consciously or unconsciously engage with the ethics of visitation as they lead their students abroad. It is important to emphasize that neither I nor the volume as a whole argue that tourism is necessarily and universally unsustainable or that study abroad is definitively the antidote to the perceived ills of mass tourism. Indeed, many (if not all) of the authors here critically engage with study-abroad practices, even as they embrace, participate in, and promote them. Rather, the book points out that study abroad is often presented in opposition to mass tourism as an antidote or form of anti-tourism by study-abroad marketers, the university, faculty directors, and even the students themselves. Furthermore, while the contemporary anti-tourism movement is clearly a product of distinctive socio-economic and political ideologies, and has been critiqued (sometimes rightly) as “touristphobic” if not xenophobic, this book decouples the term from its current political usage, considering it a discursive and performative means of presenting certain forms of mobile travelers and processes of visitation as a perceived antidote to (stereo)typical tourism. This chapter unpacks the common claim that study abroad is “antitouristic” in nature—particularly emphasizing the ethical dimension of both interrelated phenomena. Based on over two decades working in and studying the travel sector (including a short career as an educational tour operator for university alumni organizations and museum docents), ethnographic research, and a lifetime of study abroad (having first participated as a child (Di Giovine 2009: 1), then as a college student (Di Giovine 2010: 181–182), and later as a professor/director), this chapter theorizes study abroad as existing on a spectrum between traditional tourism processes and historically situated anti-tourism initiatives and provides some ethical considerations of student engagement in study-abroad programs, particularly those—such as many here—that utilize an ethnographic component. STUDY ABROAD AS A HISTORICALLY SITUATED FORM OF ANTI-TOURISM As anti-tourism is an oppositional category, placed in juxtaposition to tourism, it is opportune to first briefly examine what tourism is. The United Nations broadly defines tourism as “the activities of persons traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for no more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited” (United Nations 2010: 10). Interdisciplinary tourism scholars typically view it through the lens of business and management, pointing out that it is an industry (really

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a collection of hospitality-related industries), and, when done correctly, one that can lead to economic development, individual and community empowerment, the conservation of cultural resources, and even better integration into global markets and world political systems. Through the years, social scientists have deepened the definition of tourism pointing to its voluntary, temporary, and perspectival nature (Di Giovine 2013); they point out that it is a ritual inversion of workaday life (Graburn 1977), a seeking out of authenticity that may be performed or staged by hosts (MacCannell 1976), a way of seeing difference informed by one’s worldview (Urry 2002), and travel to engage with Otherness (Picard and Di Giovine 2014)—an act of contact that allows hosts, guests, and others to negotiate identities and self-representations (Bruner 2005; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Leite et al. 2019). Yet as Nash (1977) famously argued, it is predicated on unequal power relations that translate into the marginalization of hosts to such an extent that it can be considered a modern form of imperialism, often benefiting foreign institutions more than host countries despite the promise of “tourism development” (de Kadt 1979). It is thus complex and paradoxical; as an encapsulation of global political, economic, and social relations (see Nogues Pedregal 2019), it can be a powerful tool for self-expression by all stakeholders in the touristic field, of economic development and the improvement of well-being, and even has the potential to foster intercultural understanding and peace (Carbone 2017; Var and Ap 1998), but it also simultaneously produces a number of pressures on different communities because of these same processes (Di Giovine 2017). As the name suggests, anti-tourism practices, in theory, should thus be placed in opposition to these central stereotypical tropes: Instead of fast and short, they should be slow and longer-term. Rather than being superficial and “staged,” they should be deeper and authentic. Instead of separating or gentrifying tourists and the toured through the imposition of a tourist bubble (Cohen 1972: 166), they should be immersive and interactive (cf. Cortini and Converso 2018). Rather than being purely commodities, they should transcend profit-based interests in favor of loftier aims, even if they are costly. Instead of being a voluntary leisure activity—an escape, as Graburn (1977) famously pointed out, from the typical work-a-day routine—they should require effort and dedication, even hard work or challenging study; they may be considered an extension of one’s obligations in daily life even if still undertaken willfully, unremunerated, and without coercion.1 In the course of human history, and especially since the advent of modern mass tourism, there have emerged a number of non-coerced forms of mobility undertaken in periods reserved for rest (such as school or work breaks) that are nevertheless considered by the practitioners to meet such an anti-tourism ethos. Some of these have emerged well before modern tourism, while others in response to it. Likewise, despite often stated objectives differentiating

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Figure 11.1  Spectrum of Anti-Tourism Forms of Travel.

themselves from modern mass tourism, most—if not all—of these anti-tourism forms of mobility utilize the same infrastructure, imaginaries, and cultural distinctions as tourism. Study abroad, then, can be seen as existing on a spectrum of historically situated ethical approaches to visitation that predate the current anti-tourism movement, and which exist in opposition to the kinds of mass tourism from the post–World War II era onward. There are, of course, other forms of niche tourism promoted on the supply side that attempt to mitigate some of the same problems—such as ecotourism, community-based tourism, indigenous tourism, and the nebulous sustainable tourism (see UNWTO 2019 for an attempt to define these different terms)—but while consumers do exercise ethical decision-making in choosing these forms, I argue that they nevertheless consider themselves as tourists. Contrarily, I argue here that visitors participating in the anti-tourism types of visitation on this spectrum frequently see themselves as something different than tourists altogether, based on the ethical forms of engagement they perceive as an antidote to modern tourism pressures; the spectrum proposes service as an antidote to inequality, education as an antidote to superficiality, and relationship-building as an antidote to staged authenticity and the separation between stakeholders in the tourism field. Uniquely, study abroad not only falls at the center of this continuum but also frequently integrates other anti-touristic forms on this spectrum as well. As Figure 11.1 shows, study abroad thus rests at the center of a spectrum of anti-touristic travel forms, which provide antidotes to typical touristic stereotypes through service, heightening education, and forging relationships with locals. Study abroad also may incorporate other anti-touristic forms on this spectrum. Pilgrimage and Mission Work At the far end of this spectrum is pilgrimage, the first and possibly the oldest form of human mobility outside of warfare (Di Giovine and Elsner 2016).

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While some scholars of pilgrimage and religious studies argue that pilgrimage is a separate category from tourism altogether (see Di Giovine 2013), much of the mobilities literature recognizes a shared structure and core behaviors between the two (see, for example, Badone and Roseman 2004). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to enumerate all of these, suffice it to say that pilgrims patronize the same commercial infrastructures as tourists (hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, historic buildings and sites, but also transportation infrastructures like trains, buses, roadways and bridges); they often entertain similar “tourist imaginaries” (Salazar and Graburn 2014) of the land and the people; and base (if not share) their expectations of comfort and security on those in tourism—even if they explicitly attempt to negotiate levels of comfort with an intent to suffer (Di Giovine 2015). In short, “a pilgrim is half a tourist if a tourist is half a pilgrim” (Turner and Turner 1978), and they can be conceived as parallel lanes in the same roadway across which such travelers constantly change (Smith 1992). Yet the perceived outcomes are decidedly, and markedly, opposed to that of tourism even if scholars approach tourism, as Graburn did, as a “sacred journey” (1977) or a “secular pilgrimage” (2001). Indeed, pilgrims who often see themselves as existing “above and beyond” secular tourism, often in discourse utilize the term pilgrimage as an oppositional category— vaguely considering their journeys and behaviors as “pilgrimage not tourism” something more meaningful—hyper-meaningful even—for themselves, at least (Di Giovine 2013: 64). While still short-term and temporary, the goal of pilgrimage is often to obtain a transformative experience with Otherness (often conceived of as the sacred or supernatural [Di Giovine and Choe 2019]): this can be physical, as in the case of seeking miraculous interventions for health or good fortune (for the latter, see O’Regan et al. 2019); spiritual, as in the case of earning merit that will liberate the suffering soul in the afterlife; or existential and informational, as in obtaining a better understanding of a saint’s life that can be a better model for how to live out their religious values more effectively. Thus, even the mass-produced souvenir trinkets, which tourists may also purchase, have a formative purpose: “they help me pray” as pilgrims have said to me (Di Giovine 2013: 82), or, gifted to others back at home, they bring the sacred’s “contagious magic” (Frazier 1994[1890]) to others, or at least provide concrete evidence that their friends and relatives who could not make the journey were nevertheless thought about as subjects of prayer at the sacred site (Kaell 2012). Thus, pilgrimage is classically anti-touristic not because it remediates the common pressures on host communities—the hajj to Mecca, the Kumbha Mela at the Ganges, and the Shiite Arbae’en attract tens of millions of visitors at a time, and generate the same commercial interests that lead to economic and political pressures among different stakeholders and the local population

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(for example, the government of Saudi Arabia has been critiqued for this as it profits off of hajj pilgrimage through the use of indentured workers [see Butt 2013]). In fact, it often necessitates great expenditures on the host community that do not economically pay-off: my field site of Pietrelcina, the birthplace of the popular Catholic saint Padre Pio, does not earn much economic benefit from the some half-million pilgrims who visit annually because pilgrims’ major expenditures occur at Pio’s shrine some 135 km away, yet they generate so much trash that it is the most accurate way to count annual visitation to the town. Pilgrimage also does not necessarily provide instances of deep interpersonal interaction with locals, as the goal is rather to build connections with the unseen divine, often embedded in saints’ tombs, landforms, and other sacred sites (Di Giovine and Elsner 2016). Furthermore, it might not even foster the sense of unity among pilgrims that sponsoring churches and religious organizations hope to produce; Eade and Sallnow (2000[1991]) famously argued that, rather than fostering a unifying sense of “communitas” as Turner (1974) proposed, pilgrimage is predicated on contestation and the negotiation of difference. Rather, similar to study abroad, it is directed at the formation of the individual visitor, shaping them intellectually, psychologically, and morally. Also similar to study abroad, the individual’s social status may change; those who return from the hajj, for example, enjoy the status of a hajji which is accompanied by elevated roles in the society just as we might consider students who complete study-abroad opportunities to be more “global citizens” that can better open doors for jobs in the business world when they put their experience on a resume. Pilgrimage as such might not be frequently integrated into study-abroad programming at North American liberal arts institutions that attempt to remain religiously neutral, though often study-abroad students may visit the same sites and are even encouraged to observe or participate in religious activities as a method of education and engagement; one theology professor at a Franciscan university builds Mass attendance into his program: “I encourage them to come but I don’t push,” he said to me (fieldnotes 5/25/2019). Yet for some religious institutions, short-term mission work is indeed built in. For example, though unaffiliated with a university, Mormon (male) teenagers must go on a gap year mission domestically or internationally in order to enjoy the full member status in the Church (see McIntyre and Olsen (2019) for a discussion of the similarities between pilgrimage and Mormon mission trips). Similarly, in this book, Katharine Serio accompanied several shortterm mission trips through the United Methodist Church and points out that it is decidedly anti-touristic in its rhetoric and approach, partially resembling pilgrimage in its goal of making students moral members of the Church and strengthening their individual relationship to God, while at the same time resembling study abroad in its targeting of college-age students, its focus on

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personal education concerning the land and culture of the destination, and its emphasis on deeper, more meaningful interaction with locals. What possibly sets this type of experience apart from the classic Mormon mission is the service component: rather than strictly visiting historic sites like tourists do, or going door-to-door as Mormon youths often do, student-age missionaries also conduct volunteer service projects aimed at bettering the local community by helping to provide medical (and perhaps spiritual) outreach. Students are explicitly made to reflect on their experiences, their interactions with locals and their discomfort in being elsewhere. This ultimately helps forge more tolerant and educated church members, strengthens their sense of community identity, and provides them with the life skills of a missionary who is able to “witness” (publicly model Christian values with the intent of conversion) to people in unfamiliar settings. Thus, short-term mission work plays on the traditional missionizing goal as well as the standard anti-tourism ethic of “doing good” for the host community through service, to use Coffman and Prazak’s term in this volume. “Focusing too much on their own spiritual growth with less attention to service undermines the official purpose of the mission, especially for any local organization run by community members who do have a vested interest in the health of their community,” Serio writes (p. 205, this volume). Voluntourism and Service Service is often seen as a key anti-tourism ethic in study-abroad programs, as many chapters in this volume reveal (see, in particular, chapters by Coffman and Prazak; Serio; and Ascione); and indeed, volunteer tourism, or “voluntourism” itself is a growing anti-touristic form of tourism. The sentiment is shared by voluntourists themselves—who, Harng Luh Sin argues (2009: 482), often consider themselves students of “service learning.” Sin also shows that tourism scholars tend to regard voluntourism as a sort of anti-touristic practice as well: “Voluntourism is frequently seen as an alternative to the ills observed in other forms of tourism (Gray and Campbell 2007), or at least assumed to bring about positive changes in either volunteer tourists (McGehee and Santos 2004; Zahra and McIntosh 2007) or their communities” (Scheyvens 2002; Uriely et al. 2003). Vrasti (2012: 2) argues the increase in voluntourism’s popularity likely stems first and foremostly from its positioning “as an alternative to and critique of mass tourism and its notoriously destructive effects”—that is, its positioning as an anti-touristic practice. Furthermore, she continues (2012: 2), the emphasis on professionalization and institutionalization has likewise “turned volunteer tourism into a ‘standard requirement for higher education and career development’” (Simpson 2005: 448).

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Like mission work, voluntourism is intended to provide more meaningful interactions with locals, help those perceived to be less fortunate than the comparatively wealthier student travelers, and engage with discomfort so as to deliver a more “authentic” in-country experience. Proponents of voluntourism (Wearing 2001) as a perceived antidote to the unsustainability of modern tourism argue that it also provides economic benefits to the host community; it captures a demographic of relatively wealthy travelers and keeps them at a site for an extended period of time and provides expensive services to the host communities ostensibly at little or no economic cost to them. Particularly when coupled with study-abroad programming, it is further conceived of as educational—important for sensitizing students that people live in different ways and with different (and often seemingly more serious) problems than they do, and, particularly for “pre-medical” undergraduate voluntourism experiences like the organization Medlife provides, hands-on, “high impact” learning (Kuh 2008) of medical practices usually reserved for traditional internships in-country. This, in turn, might allow the student to be more competitive when applying to medical school (McGloin and Georgeou 2016)—a primary motivation for my advisees in the Medlife Club. (I became a very reluctant advisor to the club when the original advisor left the university.) In short, it is conceived of by practitioners as “traveling with a purpose” (Brown 2005), as opposed to the perceived superficiality of mass tourism (despite the fact that tourism still is purposeful travel). However, there are a number of ethical considerations concerning voluntourism in general, and particularly with utilizing undergraduates. While voluntourism advocates argue that it can monetarily help the host community, McCall and Iltis (2014) point out that this is not necessarily the case. On the one hand, undergraduate students are not skilled laborers and are often unprepared for the tasks at hand, leading to wasting the recipient’s resources and ineffective, and sometimes negative, impacts. On the other hand, the same sort of economic “leakage” (de Kadt 1979) occurs in voluntourism situations as it does in broader tourism development schemes for developing countries; instead of staying in the developing country as promised, the majority of profits benefit larger, Euro-American-based companies that facilitate the services—one of the earliest critiques of modern mass tourism (see de Kadt 1979; Di Giovine 2009b). As McGloin and Georgiou (2016: 405) remind readers, “Voluntourism is an economic activity driven by profit occurring within an unregulated industry and operating without any accreditation process. Monies are paid to a tour operator whose business is based in the Global North and who profits from sending others to developing countries and communities.” Arguably, there are qualitative differences among the various types of voluntourism experiences that impact the host community differently, as

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evidenced by their program’s goals. For Tucson-based Borderlinks, which takes students on migrant trails at the U.S.–Mexican border to help refill giant water canisters left for undocumented migrants and to collect clothing, backpacks, documents, and other discarded “trash” (or artifacts) left behind during their difficult journeys—some of which are then donated to museums and organizations (such as my own university museum; see www​.wcupa​.edu​ /museum) or cleaned and resold to help their work—the objective is to sensitize the student to the plight of the migrant, to break common stereotypes produced by politicians and the media concerning legality and illegality and the purpose of border walls, and, they hope, to create new activists. Borderlinks does not seek to cultivate interactions with migrants or locals (many of their travelers do not speak Spanish anyway!) but rather with migrants’ artifactual material culture, with the environment that claims so many of their lives, and with the United States–based humanitarian activists working on the ground to change policy for them. Similarly, the aforementioned theology professor had conducted a service project in Italy wherein his students joined new immigrant youths from North Africa on a day’s work on the farm; while he admitted that the experience probably did not help out the farmer, it did sensitize the students to the plight of these refugee youths and humanize the migrants living in a social context where they face increasing hostility (fieldnotes 13/6/2019). But many other non-profit organizations do cater specifically to voluntourists’ interest in temporarily lending a hand with tasks that directly engage them with locals, such as working for a day at Southeast Asian orphanages, building homes and wells in Africa, helping farmers plant and harvest their crops, and, yes, providing basic medical outreach despite a lack of true professional knowledge of the subject on the part of the students. The latter form brings up deeper ethical issues: Can the student-cum-voluntourist really make a difference given their length of time working and their lack of professional knowledge? Do they do more harm than good? Certainly, any work of charity can have a positive impact at the material level, but as Wallace (2012) points out, the use of unskilled laborers may provide more pressures on the host than benefits. This seems to be particularly evident the shorter the voluntour is (Bailey and Russell 2012: 123; Guttentag 2009). First, undergraduates are often unqualified for the work they are undertaking; Wallace cites scenes from the voluntourism documentary First, Do No Harm, in which pre-med students are made to deliver babies unsupervised, or to complete several highly specific medical procedures for understaffed physicians despite never learning how to do them (Wallace 2012: 1). While most Western institutions have a rigorous process put into place that includes a background check and evaluation of skills, host communities do not (2); such negligence is further deemed acceptable because

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students’ Western education and wealth seem to outweigh the risks, given the imaginaries of the host’s extreme need and lack of (Western-style) education (see Sin 2010: 986–987).2 Second, short-term student volunteers often lack cultural and linguistic competency that is essential for sensitive interactions with locals. On the one hand, language barriers may prevent the volunteers from being able to effectively explain procedures, diagnoses, or prescriptions. This, coupled with a lack of cultural understanding, on the other hand, can lead to miscommunication, offense, or mistrust—such as recommending condoms or birth control in some countries where this is taboo (Pinto and Upshur 2009; McCall and Iltis 2014: 288). Furthermore, as I have argued (futilely) to my Medlife students who do not study anthropology, different cultures have different worldviews that both foster “culture bound syndromes”—illnesses that are only experienced in a particular culture—as well as culturally specific ways of resolving them, and that well-meaning attempts to impose Westernstyle remedies often exacerbate the illnesses, as Ong’s (1987) classic study of psychotherapy on outbreaks of spirit possession among female Malaysian sweat shop workers shows. (The outbreak itself was a result of imposing Western-style sanitary rules regulating how menstrual fluids were to be disposed of.) Without cultural competency, this reality might foster serious misdiagnoses, and even create more problems; in turn, students’ reactions to this might also lead to the very ethnocentrism that study-abroad practitioners wish to break by engaging them in service activities. Third and possibly most germane for study-abroad practitioners beyond the medical field is that economic costs incurred by the host community often outweigh the positive work done by unskilled students, despite their ostensibly free labor and good intent. Indeed, it is a misunderstanding to think that their labor is free. Those accepting service from students often take time out of their schedules to provide basic training concerning the job at hand—time that could be better spent doing the tasks themselves, given the fact that the students are only volunteering for a brief period. In business terms, it might not be a good investment of their time to keep training unskilled workers with extraordinarily high turn-over. Additionally, students might not work hard or be as motivated, particularly if they are being made to volunteer through the study-abroad class, rather than choosing to do so on their own. Coffman and Prazak’s study in this book also shows that students can get disheartened by the unexpected difficulty of the work and their lack of prowess in this regard, as well as by the ridicule more professional volunteers (and perhaps even some locals) extended to them. Locals accepting the service also may incur the costs of feeding the students and providing for their well-being; in certain countries like Italy, the organization receiving a service must also carry insurance for the students, which can be expensive. For example, a close friend of mine who owns a vineyard

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near Perugia will not take my students who want to volunteer because of the time and economic cost necessary to obtain insurance to cover them, though he does invest in insurance annually to take in one semester-long, skilled student from the EU. Another one does take my students for three half-days of work over the course of the five-week program on his didactic farm, and charges a fee to cover the insurance, time, and food costs: students learn to feed animals or plant some beans for a few hours, then are treated to a big meal with the owners. The farmer does this not because he needs help (though he could use a hand) but because he sees education of traditional, sustainable forms of living as the mission of his enterprise. Rather than perceiving the students as providing service to him and his family, he really sees himself as providing a service to my students. Furthermore, students’ touristic imaginaries of working on a farm or with the needy may not live up to expectations, and, as Trundle (2014) shows in her study of American expat volunteers at a Florentine soup kitchen (who stayed in the city after studying abroad), might actually generate negative stereotypes about the perceived ungratefulness of locals who become frustrated with the lack of competency, or seek to obtain more benefits from the perceptibly wealthier volunteers. But this also occurs on the service provider’s side, as the didactic farm’s example reveals. Ascione, too, in this volume, reveals that such a lack of competency in doing even simple tasks that are takenfor-granted in the host culture, such as knowing basic cooking methods that Italian children have witnessed their parents and grandparents doing all their lives, translates into the service recipient talking about, and treating students as helpless little babies. Thus, it might foster or solidify ethnocentric ideas about the Other on both sides of the service activity. On the broader level, like other forms of tourism, voluntourism, service, and charitable missionary work impacts locals’ well-being in more ways than just the material. It serves to perpetuate colonial-era narratives of the “white man’s burden” (Kipling 1907) in civilizing the native Other, expanding Western neoliberal moral economies as it reinscribes a “‘geography of compassion’ that maps onto the ‘Third World’ and the children who live there” (Mostafanezhad 2012: 318)—much like mass tourism in general often does, particularly as it plays out in developing countries (Picard and Di Giovine 2014). Indeed, while voluntourists loathe to use the term, and, just as pilgrims and missionaries see themselves and their behaviors as existing beyond the superficial touristic encounter (Mostafanezhad 2014a; see Serio this volume), critics point out that their motivations are ultimately egocentric and their behaviors are touristic: in search of the perfect selfie with poor African children to post on social media, voluntourists temporarily play out “popular humanitarianism” (Mostafanezhad 2014b) fantasies as modeled by celebrity spokespeople such as actress and Special Envoy for the U.N. High

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Commissioner for Refugees Angelina Jolie, who famously visited, donated to, and ultimately adopted children from orphanages in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Ethiopia (and intentionally gave birth to her first biological child in Namibia). This “Angelina Effect,” as Mostafanezhad terms it (2013a; see Fitzgerald 2007), naturalizes a colonial aesthetic of the host community’s poverty as authentic and cultural (Mostafanezhad 2013b: 150) much like the morecriticized slum tourism does (Frenzel 2012, 2016); those locals who embrace it thus must paradoxically negotiate tensions in perpetuating negative colonial stereotypes for the purpose of trying to transcend them (Di Giovine 2009b). Furthermore, Mostafanezhad argues, voluntourism “perpetuates an aesthetic structure that systematically depoliticizes the global economic inequality on which the experience is based” (Mostafanezhad 2013b: 150)—that is, it serves the interest of the global neoliberal market by obscuring the political and economic inequalities fostered by the same neoliberal policies that produce and exacerbate the poverty in the first place (see also Vrasti 2012: 4). At best, then, it is a venue for the “cleansing of developed world middle-class guilt” (Kwa 2007; qtd. in Sin 2009: 480) while simultaneously achieving the cosmopolitanism so desired by middle-class travelers through these (anti-) touristic experiences (Nelson 2018). Ultimately, then, while service and volunteerism inside and outside the study-abroad endeavor purport to be a powerful and meaningful antidote to the typical tourist experience, it often creates the same seen and unseen pressures on the host community that typical tourism is accused of doing. Educational Tourism and Study Abroad While service-oriented forms of mobility propose an antidote to the superficiality of traditional mass tourism ostensibly through doing good to the host community (and more importantly, to the tourist) through perceived impactful and “authentic” engagement with locals, educational tourism (including study abroad) approaches anti-tourism from a knowledge-based standpoint. One of the hallmarks of an anti-touristic ethos is that mass tourism is predicated more on convenience and site-seeing (see Urry 2002), a collection of relatively quick experiences with a place that often lacks deep understanding of the history and culture of the place. To wit, at an ICOMOS meeting I attended in 2017, one Croatian art historian expressed her frustration with the ignorance of cruise ship travelers on a day-trip to Dubrovnik, one of the settings for the immensely popular HBO series Game of Thrones, by recounting a comment overheard by travelers taking pictures at the site of an important scene in the show: “Wow! How did HBO construct this set so quickly?” And in a survey of anthropologists from the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group that I used to prepare

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my speech at that ICOMOS meeting, members urged that, to be sustainable, tourism providers should dedicate more time to educating the tourists on local culture—rather than locals on the benefits of accepting tourism development projects (Di Giovine 2017). As John Bodinger de Uriarte and I discuss in this book’s introduction, there have been several iterations of educational travel in the modern age, especially the Grand Tour upon which the present form of long-term study abroad is based. Popularized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Grand Tour was a rite of passage for wealthy, educated Northern European young men who would travel to Italy, Greece, Egypt, and the Ottoman world to supplement their studies of classical language and history. Informed by notions of unilinear cultural evolution—that all cultures were on a universal trajectory toward “Civilization” defined as whatever Northern culture from which they came—they embraced an Orientalist meta-narrative that proposed that civilization began in the Mediterranean world (the Middle East, Egypt, Greece and Rome) yet moved west (and north), such that French, German, and British were the heirs of this civilizing “light from the East” that left these Southerners behind in their original primitive state (see Said 1979). Living for extended periods of time in the Mediterranean world, communing with (and sleeping with!) the natives, and experiencing the Romantic ruins that belied the rich and formative history of the land, Grand Tour participants felt as if they were traveling back in time, gaining a fuller understanding of their European ancestors. And it was an enlightening, inspirational experience: Shelley and Keats produced their great Romanticera poetry while living near the Spanish Steps in Rome; Lord Byron lived and wrote in Venice and Ravenna (and frequently visited Shelley in Rome); Goethe wrote in Sicily; and even the American memoirs of Mark Twain, novels of Hemmingway and short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald were produced in Spain and elsewhere in Southern Europe as they replicated the Grand Tour. Today, many (wealthy) youths from the Anglo-Saxon world (Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand) continue this process by taking a “gap year” between high school and university to travel the world, sometimes even coupling it with service activities; the U.K.’s Prince William and his eventual wife Kate Middleton both volunteered with Raleigh International in Chile, where he painted houses and she worked with underprivileged children; and William’s younger brother, Prince Harry, volunteered with AIDS victims in Lesotho and worked on a cattle ranch in Australia. Traditional study abroad was informed by such “gap year” processes, founded on the premise that experiential learning outside of one’s host environment was integral to the formation of a well-rounded liberal arts education (for those who could afford it). This is particularly the case for those studying art history or archaeology; early twentieth-century scholars believed in

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“object-based epistemology” (Conn 1998)—that seeing the authentic artifact was qualitatively more educational than viewing its image or plaster cast; that by employing a well-trained gaze onto a piece of art or an artifact, one could unlock a fixed set of knowledge about the history and culture of the people who produced it. Furthermore, linguistics instructors believe, rightly, that while language acquisition is complex and varies among individual students (Dewey 2007; Segalowitz and Freed 2004), the best way to learn a language is through immersion that study-abroad experiences often provide (Carroll 1967; Dyson 1988; Freed 1995)—by listening, reading, and speaking it in daily life. Consequently, like the Grand Tour youths of ages past, a pre-#MeToo joke among study-abroad students was to find a “sleeping dictionary,” that is, a lover with whom one would practice the language in the most intimate of settings (see Spurr 1993: 170–183). Indeed, as Trundle (2014) again shows in her book, Americans in Tuscany, this was not just an option open to American males; female art history and Italian language students would often study abroad in Florence with the hope of finding a native lover—and the darker, more Mediterranean-looking, the more authentic. And several would marry, only to realize that their romantic imaginaries did not live up to expectations in day-to-day married life. Aside from the ethical implications of, and some similarity to, current-day sex tourism, these young women would often find themselves trapped—expats never truly accepted by locals, who could not leave unhappy marriages with mammone husbands (the stereotypical devotion of an Italian male to his mother over everyone else) because their children identified with, and had their lives in, the host culture (Trundle 2014). While of course current-day study-abroad directors may take great strides to prevent irresponsible activities (not only sex, but excessive alcohol or drug use) and, as Barkin argues in this book, need to balance safety concerns with encouraging students to viscerally engage with the cultural Other (see also Bodinger de Uriarte, this volume), I know some of my own students have forged non-platonic relationships with those they met during their study-abroad experience: one male student even married a foreigner he met in Perugia and now lives in Europe with her; he has yet to return to finish his degree because of his wife’s visa issues. Beyond (or outside of) dating, forging relationships with locals is often a key formative experience that is encouraged by study-abroad practitioners. Service opportunities, but also behind-the-scenes tours of farms and production facilities, cooking lessons and meals at locals’ homes, and meetings with local students who study the same subjects as ours, are built into much of the study-abroad programming discussed in this book because they are high-impact; as embodied experiences, they can help language acquisition and provide deeper knowledge of the culture and local life when they are veritably experienced in an ostensibly authentic setting. At the least, provided

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that students are in a safe environment (see Doerr and Barkin, both in this volume), we may encourage them to eschew spending nights in American or tourist bars in favor of local venues, such as a club featuring live music or sitting on the cathedral steps among locals. Yet this is easier said than done; as both Bodinger de Uriarte and Biggs in this book show, there is a delicate balance between fostering comfort and discomfort, adventure and safety, for students. One study-abroad professor in a medium-sized Italian city said to me, “I hate [the American-owned bar in the central piazza]; they capture the students on the first day and then the students just do exactly what they do at home. I guess it’s a factor of feeling comfortable, but I wish they would be more adventurous and meet some real people, not other American students studying abroad” (6/11/2019). As it is clear from many of the chapters that focus on shorter term studyabroad (and domestic study-away) programs, the development of the neoliberal university has significantly transformed the traditional study-abroad experience from its Grand Tour roots. The privileging of pre-professional and business studies, the specificity of General Education requirements, and intense departmental competition to retain students that cause rigidity in major requirements, all make it more difficult to get away for a whole year or even a semester to study traditional art and culture-based liberal arts courses. Many of the students in my own five-week summer course lament that they cannot spend more time abroad, either because of rigid course requirements, or because—contrary to the original idea of molding Renaissance men or women—that taking a semester full of study-abroad courses outside their major would not be looked on kindly by their major advisors, employers, or graduate school. Furthermore, as the shift toward “internationalization” and creating “global citizens” has charged universities such as my own to admirably work toward maximizing the number of students who study abroad, universities must provide incentives, small grants, and financial aid; cheaper, shorter term travels thus may be preferred in this environment. Another unintended consequence becomes the very real dilemma for those who really cannot afford to travel, but who are told by their institution or their peers that they should; many incur more debt, or have to work longer hours, to see this to fruition—another reason my students have told me they prefer short-term travels that nevertheless give them college credit. Thus, short-term study-abroad programs have taken on the model of edu-tourism (Keith and Keith 2010), a form of educationcum-tourism in which students are taken on thematically focused tourist trips with a professor; often short service experiences and behind-thescenes tours are embedded to make the trip more hands-on and meaningful. Many times these trips include pre- and post-departure coursework and on-campus classes; some models at my own university tack a week-long

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spring break trip onto a spring semester class where students can earn an extra credit for participating. In this way, edu-tourism or short-term study abroad takes on the model employed by many university alumni associations of educational travel, another long-standing type of touristic mobility predicated on an anti-tourism ethos. Educational travel is a form of niche tourism that promises more in-depth, formative engagement with the people, history, and culture of a destination. Tailored to university alumni associations, museum docents, and members of other non-profit organizations, it is often more highly focused on a particular theme germane to the sponsoring organization’s membership (such as Palladian architecture around Venice for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Jesuit sites in Spain for Georgetown University, Japanese contemporary art for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Persian gardens in Iran for adventurous garden groups), and its cost usually includes the presence of a representative from the sponsoring organization as a “study leader”—a university’s professor, priest or theologian, curator, architectural historian, or landscape designer, for example. Hallmarks of higher end educational travel also include curator-led tours, an on-site lecture either by the study leader or a colleague, and private luncheons at often opulent estates with their owners. Even when they do not include such “privates,” as the industry calls it (Di Giovine 2009a: 163–165), a set of readings—usually a good travel article and/or an academic paper suitable for undergraduates—is mailed out to these mostly retirement-age travelers along with a suggested reading list a few weeks prior to departure as a way to help them intellectually prepare for the journey. In short, educational tourism factors into universities’ initiatives to provide “lifelong learning” or “continuing education” opportunities to often retired, economically mobile alumni and community members. Attempting to transcend the typical tourist experience, then, educational tourism (of which study abroad is a part) usually attempts to foster meaningful, “backstage” interactions with locals. Forging deeper relationships with locals, particularly those the same age of the students who are in similar life situations, is key to humanizing local people and breaking stereotypes and inaccurate imaginaries—to show that, ultimately, “they” are just like “us” (see Picard and Di Giovine 2014). This, of course, is another anti-touristic ethos, an antidote to the superficiality and separation promoted through the tourist bubble that often seems to perpetuate misinformation, ignorance, stereotypes, or harmful meaning-making processes of local life and culture (Di Giovine 2017). It also helps forge better understandings of Westerners to the locals as well. For example, although students in a colleague’s studyabroad program in Rwanda are largely barricaded inside their field station at the edge of town—causing young children in the village to peer curiously at the largely white foreigners and to shout out “hello” in continuum to get

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their attention—at night the professors will allow their students to leave the compound and play children’s games like duck-duck-goose or soccer with the teens. This might be perceived of as a magnanimous act of “public diplomacy,” breaking stereotypes of the wealthy and aloof Westerner, to at least show at some superficial level that we are just like them. But it also helps break students’ perceptions of the poor and unintelligible local as well. Sharing in an activity understood and enjoyed by both host and guest—this is what Geertz would consider engaging in “deep play” (2000[1973]: 435– 475); students attest that such interactions taught them so much more about a country and a people, their norms and values, their commonalities and differences in a perceptively more “authentic” and revelatory way. VFR Tourism, Networked Hospitality, and Homestays In the most extreme embrace of such an ethos, study-abroad practitioners may also place their students in homestays (such as in the programs described in this book by Lampman and Schweitzer, Doerr, and Nguyen)—a way to veritably break the “staged authenticity” of tourism (MacCannell 1976) by living in a local’s personal home. This most closely resembles what the tourism sector calls VFR tourism—“Visiting Friends and Relatives”—which is seen by the traveler, at least, to be a more authentic and anti-touristic form of mobility (see, for example, Seaton and Palmer 1997). VFR travelers often regard themselves not as tourists but as a kind of liminal local, or at least someone who has qualitatively different roots or connections with the location. They may stay in the hometown of their ancestors (Boyne et al. 2002; see Nguyen, this volume) rather than in major tourist cities, with people with whom they have (through kinship, friendship, or romantic links) some sort of deeper bonds. As Doerr intimates in this book, and as Picard and Buchberger (2013) argue in Couchsurfing Cosmopolitanisms, even those tourists who do not have friends and family may engage in forms of “network hospitality” (Molz 2012) such as couchsurfing to gain a seemingly authentic experience of living like, and with, a local. Indeed, particularly on the study-abroad side, sharing in the intimacies of everyday life with locals in ways living in hotels or even apartments cannot do, students’ embodied experiences in the mundane aspects of local life may add depth to their understanding of the culture and authenticity to their experience. Seasoned homestay families, for their part, may go to great lengths to nevertheless meet students’ touristic expectations, such as cooking quintessentially local meals, taking them on trips to tourist sites, and even accompanying them to stores and markets. But some do not. For example, studies point out that homestays may not enhance language acquisition among study-abroad students, since many homestay students have been found to isolate themselves in their rooms and

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actually have fewer interactions using the local language than if they were placed in dorms (Rivers 1998). Frank (1997; qtd. Dewey 2007) further points out that even when there are interactions in homestay situations, they may be limited, mundane, and centered on television watching. This could limit language acquisition, but, as Doerr shows in this book, it also may not live up to the desired expectations of a study-abroad experience. Indeed, Doerr recounts a particularly poignant story in her contribution to this volume of “Suarez” who opted to stay with extended family in Spain, only to remain frustrated and disappointed by the mundanity of life with family: babysitting his young cousin and sitting at home watching TV—things he does at his own home in the United States—made him feel that he was not getting an “authentic” experience. Consequently, he left, opting for a couchsurfing opportunity in which the host, a German expat who understood what constituted the “authentic” in the tourist imaginary, took him out to local venues and sightseeing trips. For my own part, while writing this chapter, I paid a visit to my own cousins in Southern Italy during a weekend break in my study-abroad program. My family lives mostly on self-sufficient farms in one of the most impoverished parts of Southern Italy, though like elsewhere in Italy, their children (my cousins) have abandoned this rural way of life. The first thing we did was go to McDonald’s; my cousin’s young son apparently loves the McCrispy bacon cheeseburger there! We then played with his young children before contemplating going out for sushi. However, unlike Suarez, I have had a lifetime of experiences with my family there—and as a youth engaged with such practices of Otherness as slaughtering pigs, making wine, collecting sacred water from Roman fonts, doing pilgrimages, and gorging on too much home-grown food—that I saw it more as a funny happenstance and a learning opportunity, even as I craved some good Neapolitan cuisine over ItalianAmerican celebrity chef Joe Bastianich’s special BBQ hamburger (there are some glocal differences even in the McDonaldized world!). At the other extreme, experiencing too much difference in how a relative or friend lives their mundane life might also cause great tension or depression for the homestay student/VFR tourist, particularly in the long-term. In this book, Annie Nguyen reflects on her experience as a Fulbright scholar in Saigon, where she stayed with her uncle for several months. Because her father was a prominent officer in the South Vietnamese army, her family was airlifted to America during the fall of Saigon; that uncle had to remain, however—forced to endure reeducation camps, a ban on telephones and a salaried job, and had to live in a mud-floored, tin-roof hut. They went out of their way to be hospitable to their niece, cooking constantly what they believed to be her favorite meal, which included meat they could hardly afford. The guilt of having to accept such hospitality, as well as in contemplating her arbitrary luck in being born in America, ultimately seemed to prove too much for

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her—she moved out, staying with Western expats in their luxurious villa, out of sight of the poverty which painfully reminded her of her good fortune. Ethnography At the other far end of this anti-tourism spectrum can be added anthropologists’ own rite of passage travels, ethnography. Just as scholars may sometimes place pilgrimage in an entirely separate category from tourism, anthropologists—particularly in the twentieth century—placed the classic ethnographic method of living and participating in mundane daily life with locals in a completely different category of tourism (Leite and Graburn 2009: 38). Consequently, anthropologists have held a notoriously ambivalent stance, if not hostile, toward tourism and tourism studies because our activities closely resemble those of tourists: we temporarily visit a place, fixing our gaze on supposedly authentic objects, artifacts, and cultural performances, particularly those that seem “native” or “indigenous”; we record our observations in writing and photography and videography; and we promulgate imaginaries of people and places through evocative narratives categorized by “thick description” (Geertz 1973: 3–32) that closely resemble other travel texts. Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques (1973)—which begins with the sentence “I hate traveling and travelers”—is more akin to Twain’s (1869) travel memoirs than to an academic monograph. Furthermore, we benefit, as do tourists, on global economic and political inequalities that have traditionally afforded Western travelers the resources, mobility, education, and power to be there in the first place; like voluntourism does, most of the classic ethnographies that normalize the “primitive” obscure their very presence as indicative of the root of geopolitical political-economic inequalities. Indeed, as Bruner points out in a recent interview (Di Giovine 2019), early anthropologists constructed imaginaries of the primitive “Other” while erasing or denying the presence and impacts of tourists on these communities, and some, such as the Geertzes, would ignore Bruner and his students/tourists in Bali until they needed something from them. In short, though, ethnography captures well the total ethos of anti-tourism: while the processes remain the same, the key is to construct substantive, meaningful relationships by living with locals like homestays and VFR tourism does; to enter into the experience in an educated manner and to learn from the experience as educational tourism purports; and, increasingly, to engage in “action anthropology” (Tax 1975) or “activist anthropology” (Hale 2006)—entering into the service of our informants as their more powerful advocates (Gonzalez 2010). In a word, it emphasizes close engagement with the Other (see Low and Merry 2010). Because it condenses so many anti-touristic qualities for which study abroad aims, and also is a key component in anthropological practice, when done

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correctly, ethnography can be a powerful tool for fostering the kinds of “high impact” learning experiences (Kuh 2008) that we strive to deliver through study-abroad programming. Kuh (2008) argues that higher ed institutions should move toward providing students with “high impact educational practices”—highly participatory experiences that provide deep learning, practical experiences, encounters with alterity and diversity, and personal gains by “demand[ing] that students devote considerable time and effort to purposeful tasks; most require daily decisions that deepen students’ investment in the activity as well as their commitment to their academic program and the college” (2008: 14). Drawing on a report by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Kuh lists a number of such types of experiences, especially “study-abroad opportunities” and “student-faculty research.” He argues that while the former provides venues to experience diversity through intercultural contact (15), the latter fosters first-hand learning of how a faculty member or mentor deals with challenges in a critical and creative fashion (14)—essentially humanizing the professor and personalizing the student–professor relationship. This, in turn, could create a better understanding and appreciation of the practice of the discipline, which ultimately could be a more effective way to deliver topical course content. Indeed, as Bodinger de Uriate points out (personal communication 6/30/2019), when undertaken in a study-abroad context, students often have the opportunity to engage in extended, reciprocal conversations with the professor and among themselves that could connect the professor’s knowledge and research with student questions and interests. In this scenario, students are instructed in basic ethnographic methods, such as participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, and visual anthropological methods, and asked to conduct research projects often in line with that of the professors. As Greer and Schweitzer, Barkin, and Lampman and Schweizer all show in their contributions to this book, integrating ethnographic methods is intended to enhance the educational component of the experience, focusing students’ gaze on substantive “social facts” (Durkheim 1982[1895]: 74) like gender, class, religion and ritual, and providing a very embodied way of understanding and interacting with the people and place. Topical readings and discussions inside and outside of the classroom complement the research, providing the undergraduate student with keys to understanding and analyzing what they are experiencing. Thus, the research is not completely independent; the topic and focus of the ethnographic gaze is constructed through the structure of the program and the choice of field sites and visits; Lampman and Schweizer take students to local Cuban music and dance performances and teach students about Cuban history and culture, ethnomusicology, and theories of ritual. In organizing an ethnographic field school in Italy, I also utilize this antitourism component for study abroad because I feel that ethnographic methods

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training itself is a high- impact learning experience, as it is embodied and fosters critical thinking and learning and requires students to go out of their comfort zone and interact with locals. But I also do it because I found that it meets the increasingly pre-professionalizing, high-impact learning requirements of the neoliberal university and the expectations of students to engage in practice-oriented endeavors that they can put on a resume to show they made the most of their free time. Furthermore, almost counter-intuitively, it can translate well in marketing the trip to anthropology and non- anthropology majors. That is, I specifically make the case that demand for graduates knowledgeable in ethnographic and qualitative methods is increasingly growing in the business world (Baer 2014) but is not rigorously (or even correctly) taught in other disciplines (my business, nutrition, communications, and psychology students may come into the class with some knowledge of qualitative research as entailing focus groups or open-ended interviews, and perhaps with some experience in reflexive journaling of their observations). Indeed, when I began inviting my friend and colleague—a registered dietician who teaches in the Department of Nutrition—to co-teach the course with me, I offered to change the emphasis on ethnographic methodologies, but she specifically wanted to keep the pedagogy the same because she saw it as a valuable skill for professionalization that nutrition majors should master. Consequently, one of our nutrition graduate students, who was the dietician for a leading grocery store chain, was able to convince her employer to support her participation as professional development, and, upon her return, even published an article in our town’s local magazine on the training she received. Although a hallmark of classic ethnography is to live alone (or in one’s small family group) among locals for the long-term so as to “grasp and render” the intricacies of daily life (Geertz 1973: 10), paradoxically, integrating an ethnographic component could actually work well for the shortest of group edu-touristic experiences, such Greer and Schweizer’s two-week ethnography trip to Trinidad. Specifically requiring students to hone their gaze, observing and participating in daily life, and trying to make sense of these fleeting encounters with alterity all come with the territory of ethnography regardless of the length of time. Indeed, we anthropologists often take short research trips to unfamiliar locations outside of our primary field site—sometimes even guided by a so-called “native informant”—either to complement the research or as follow-up. Multi-sited or “global” ethnography also may involve short stays at different locations, and I have argued elsewhere (2011) that this is particularly a useful method for anthropological research into tourism practices. Finally, there is a long tradition in applied anthropology of utilizing Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) and other “quick-and-dirty” shortterm, directed ethnographic research, particularly in developing countries— though critics point out that this procedure is sometimes abused, particularly

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in development projects that pay but lip service to trying to understand and integrate into the development plan locals’ lived experiences (Ferguson 1994; Mosse 2005). But as one applied anthropologist co-owner of an ethnographic consulting business said during a workshop we led for Princeton anthropology and religious studies students some time ago, the length of time might not the issue; rather, the key issue to effective applied ethnographic research, however long, is that it is being conducted properly by those trained in anthropological analysis—that is, with a deep understanding of not only the culture that is being studied but also with the proper tool kit of sophisticated anthropological knowledge of theories of how culture and society work. This, of course, is something that undergraduate students do not yet possess. However, this constraint might be transcended in study abroad if time can be divided between theoretical study, methods training, and (semi-)independent research. Furthermore, as Kuh intimates, it can also be effective if it can take part in the professor’s broader research project; that is, students are treated as a team of co-PIs in an on-going research project with which they are familiarized beforehand, and who are “managed” and given direction by the professor who possesses this unique set of knowledge and skills. In addition to having led students abroad to directly assist in research outside of a formal course structure, I also approach this through traditional study abroad (the 5-week “field school”) that teaches ethnography. Prior to departure, students must complete the federally mandated ethics training and their certificates of completion are added to the IRB proposal for continuing review. All read the proposal and we have two informal predeparture meetings to not only discuss the nuts-and-bolts of the trip and what to expect but also to go over the main research project and where they, as student-researchers, fit in. In-country, the course syllabus is front-loaded, such that, in the first two weeks, we meet every day (often twice a day) including the weekends, where one session will be devoted to theoretical and culture-based lecture and discussion complemented by readings and the other will be either guided tours or excursions where they interact with locals. In many of these experiences, I model the traditional ethnographer, interviewing locals who are my longstanding research subjects in front of the students (rather than have the local deliver a canned presentation), and as I translate for them (if the locals do not speak English, since most of the students have only a basic understanding of Italian), I provide side commentary on what would be useful to write down in their first-order notes. Then as the weeks progress, I increasingly give them more free time to return to many of these venues with which they now have been familiarized, such as public markets, restaurants and shops, or help place them in servicelike experiences (such as doing menial labor with farmers, though I realize

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that the service is really provided to the student and her research), before meeting up in the classroom or in a café to collectively “workshop” their notes in a focus-group setting. By the fourth week, the meetings become less frequent and more individualized as students engage in their own independent research within the bounds of the pre-existing research project; the end assessment involves a presentation of their research to the class and a final research paper. As they forge more substantive relationships with certain research subjects, many will create their own networks and experiences that I did not plan; they have been asked to work as English-proficient vendors in markets, to help bottle wine at a small-scale vineyard, or are taken on meetings with the subjects’ friends and contacts. Some have kept in contact with these locals well after the field school and their graduation. The perceived benefit to the students is that they have been strongly encouraged to interact meaningfully with people and places, to gain deeper insights into the culture as well as the topic of the research project (in this case, sustainable food systems as cultural heritage) and to produce a project that they can use as a basis for their majors’ capstone project, present at undergraduate research conferences, or to put on a resume as an attestation of having engaged in professional anthropological training. The benefit for the professor, it should be said, is—like in other field schools (such as in archaeology) where students are essentially working in service to the professor’s research project—that I often gain helpful insights (and sometimes some new data) for my own project, as they increase exponentially the number of perspectives, research subjects, and venues in the short amount of time I have to conduct my research. In certain cases, the opportunities uncovered by the student-researcher have been integrated into subsequent iterations of the course (such as bottling the wine), as well as made its way into my own research. There are obvious and significant ethical considerations here, some of which have been brought up in the context of other promised anti-touristic experiences in study abroad. First and foremost is proper, ethical engagement with locals. While prior to departure the students have undergone the federal CITI training course (Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative, www​.citiprogram​.org), it is quite tedious (even for the professor, as many have complained to my colleagues and I who sit on my institution’s IRB committee) and students may not connect its applicability to their work on site. And although their research is largely innocuous—we are not working with marginalized populations, for example—their every action is not always supervised when conducting independent research, and so trust must be built not only between the professor and the student, and the student and the subject, but also between the subject and the professor and the institution (s)he represents. This is not always easy, and the first year I had a student working

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with a truffle vendor sign a contract to emphasize that he should take his work and the ethics of his engagement seriously. Second, similar to all educational tourism practices—and as Greer and Schweitzer ask in this book—what is the extent to which we should promise, and hold students accountable for, substantive research and the knowledge gleaned? This is particularly an important consideration given that my own program draws students from across many very different disciplines, from the social sciences to Italian language studies to health sciences such as nutrition, kinesiology, and exercise science. A multidisciplinary research team can be considered a boon to the study— everyone brings their own disciplinary knowledge to bear on the specific subject of the research, the object of their gazes, and the analysis. But these are mostly third-year undergraduates, many of whom do not have any substantive research experience or experience with Italy. Not all have even taken an anthropology class before, let alone are anthropology majors who are comfortable with the style and jargon of anthropological readings or with qualitative research. (After discussing meaningmaking processes surrounding foodways, one nutrition major said to me, “I thought anthropology of food was just about what countries eat what.”) This lack of a common knowledge base can be overwhelming to the student. I have had some in pre-professional majors like business and nutrition visibly exhibit anxiety about having to conduct a qualitative research project, and then write about it in narrative form; they were familiar with grasping and rendering quantitative and “scientific” papers with numbers, graphs, and charts, were taught not to write in first person, and were not sure what would constitute data if it did not involve a statistical sample. In the end, these also are opportunities to teach about disciplinary differences, anthropological methods and the complementary nature of qualitative research, and the value of effective self-expression—but this might do little to allay their insecurities. Third is the aspect of free labor and the ethics of acknowledgment. Like the use of research assistants in the home university, interns at a business, or even the classic “native informant” (or the early twentieth-century male anthropologist’s wife or female partner), the intellectual work that the student provides is not only often unpaid but can go unacknowledged. Indeed, like in voluntourism, students actually pay to do this work. As professors, we may justify this by saying that they are compensated in other ways—enjoying a deep and meaningful “anti-touristic” experience abroad, earning credit toward graduation, and gaining potentially marketable research and life skills. But is that not expected, or promised, in any study-abroad experience? Erasing their presence in the final research product, no matter how minimal, once again obscures and perpetuates differential power relationships. Consequently, some anthropologists specifically discuss the ways in which their study-abroad ethnography students contributed, as Schiller (2016) does

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in the introduction to her monograph on the famous San Lorenzo market in Florence. This is not always as easy as it seems; during the blind peer review process of a recent article based on research during my field school, reviewers were divided about how to handle this: one skeptical reviewer asked for more detailed justification of using students while the other suggested that I delete any mention of it because it raised too many questions and obscured the research I did myself. Consequently, I encourage students to use their final papers for other means—the capstone thesis for their major, presentations at our university’s undergraduate research day or at international conferences, or to co-write an article with me (something that has never come to fruition). Some of the students have been successful; one psychology major won a monetary prize for best paper examining PTSD among Umbrian earthquake victims, some have written about their experiences in the university newspaper and local magazines, and some presented posters and papers at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meetings, the Sorbonne, and other international conferences. THE DIFFICULT POSITION OF THE PROFESSOR All of the contributions to this book were written by professors facilitating study-abroad programs for their students and have focused on one or more of the ways in which they utilize these various anti-tourism forms of tourism to create a high-impact, formative experience for the students in their charge. Many of their trips, like mine, are informed by their own study-abroad and tourism experiences (see in particular Nguyen, this book), or professional and personal connections to the culture; all bring their specific academic expertise, interests, needs, desires, and expectations to bear through their choice of pedagogy. Some take a more hands-off approach, utilizing the expertise of professional tourism and study-abroad service providers; others are more hands-on, attempting to personally guide their students through the land and culture, introducing them to their friends and contacts, and involving them in their research. Latent, then, in all of the chapters in this book is the often multifarious and difficult positionality of the professor and the ethical decisions that they make and model for their students. In short, we study-abroad providers must simultaneously wear multiple hats and assume multiple personalities, throughout our students’ study-abroad experience— and negotiate different and often competing moral actions. Based on my own experiences, as well as on the chapters in this book, I would argue that study-abroad leaders see themselves first and foremost as professors teaching a course abroad. Though requirements are different for every institution, and some trips are pre-packaged by third-party suppliers,

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the professor ultimately should have the power to construct and teach the syllabus in the way that makes most sense for them. Each chooses different touristic and anti-touristic activities to meet their course learning objectives as well as the broader institutional goals for fostering study abroad. Yet complicating this, as Lampman and Schweizer discuss in this book, the professor also has to be the recruiter and marketer of a study-abroad program—often perpetuating common, romanticized touristic imaginaries of the venue to “seduce” students into participating; encouraging students that they can indeed afford the program without knowing their family’s particular financial situation; promising high-impact learning experiences that may not pan out; and perhaps even promoting one program (theirs, or their colleagues’) over another. The professor also has to be the program director, ultimately responsible for the well-being of the students and therefore must make risk-benefit decisions on the ground. Does (s)he allow students the freedom to roam the streets at night or give them curfews and keep them under lock and key? Does the professor know enough of the language and infrastructure to provide real help at a doctor or pharmacy, or does (s)he require the assistance of a studyabroad service provider, guide, or local? Is the professor properly trained to undertake this responsibility, and is (s)he equipped to deal (legally, psychologically, emotionally) with this kind of liability, this kind of responsibility? Should the professor really be required to serve as counselor, student life administrator, even provost and concierge? Facilitating touristic visits and “backstage” interactions—or at least providing the visible face of these visits to students even if they were set up by an in-country provider—the professor also takes on the intellectual capacity of a tour guide, and may be looked on to answer questions or solve problems that are generally outside of their academic training. They may also slip into a kind of tour guide mode, employing what Salazar (2014) calls the method of “seducation”: education through the delivery of seductive narratives and imaginaries that serve to both foster a better sense of appreciation for the land and people, as well as make people remember the information better. Indeed, tour guiding is an art; one has to be “all things for all people” (see Katriel 1997); a good guide knows how to read the audience and present information in different ways than one would inside the classroom and is subject to a different set of criteria by the student/visitor. It is a different sort of knowledgeand-service delivery for which one may not always be fully equipped; as Israeli-American anthropologist and pilgrimage tour guide Jackie Feldman writes (2015: 71): Shortly after I switched from guiding pilgrims to lecturing in anthropology, my wife remarked, “As a lecturer, your first responsibility is to instruct; as a guide

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it is to seduce.” She was referring to the role of tour guides to convey the proper appearance, to ferret out the desires and beliefs of the pilgrims and “play the game” in ways that would win their confidence, satisfy their expectations, and yield compliments, requests for future services, and generous tips.

While I doubt students have tipped any of the contributors in this book, the point remains that the professor-cum-tour guide must not only deliver information in a satisfactory manner but (s)he must also satisfy touristic expectations of the place and the experience to deliver an overall positive experience for the trip—which, in turn, can itself turn into positive word-of-mouth for recruiting students the following years. Yet on the flip side, by participating with students in their touristic activities, and particularly in high-impact experiences such as missionary work, service, or ethnography, the professor might also veritably become one with the group as they work side-by-side to complete a task. Indeed, as several scholars have argued (Turner 1974; Graburn 1977; Di Giovine 2009a) tourism and its associated forms are rituals, which may also foster what Turner called “communitas,” a temporary “anti-structural” sensation of the unity among all participants, wherein they shed the divisive social distinctions they entertain in everyday society and recognize each other as co-equal humans. While this is clearly utopian (Graburn [2011] points out that Turner developed this notion fully while in 1960s Palo Alto during the height of the hippie movement)— and scholars such as Eade and Sallnow (1991) have argued that the anti-touristic form of pilgrimage might be predicated on the construction of difference, rather than unity (see also Eade 2011)—institutions from churches to universities employ tourism to foster a sense of shared identity and solidarity (see Di Giovine 2009a) by capturing and routinizing such sensations into what Turner calls “normative communitas” (Turner 1969: 131–140). Thus, within the touristic ritual in study-abroad experiences, professors might be looked on as equals by the students, which in certain situations can be beneficial—after all, humanizing the professor is one of Kuh’s outcomes of high-impact study abroad and faculty-led research. But what implications does that have for fostering the kind of authority that is also necessary as a professor and/or tour director? For example, recently I had a professor bring his small group truffle hunting with my class; his students would call him by his first name—and then also did that to me. While I am not at all one who balks at informality, and indeed I sign my first name on my emails, my students emitted an audible gasp at the breaking of their traditional norms of address (fieldnotes 6/11/2019). Likewise, in carrying out her research, Doerr (this book) talks of how students spontaneously called her by her first name, since the studyabroad experience, coupled with her ethnographic research, rendered their

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relationship palpably different than the professor–student relationship inside the classroom. Yet it is not only the students who might see the professor as their coequal, a member of the group on this challenging experience together. Often the locals themselves make little distinction between professor and student, particularly when they are the service provider (see Doerr, this book)—in the end, all are paying tourists. This palpably denies the professor’s attempt at presenting an antidote to typical tourism, both to herself and to her students. With the exception, perhaps, of Ascione, who is native to the city in which she operates her study-abroad classes, we have all been treated as, and acted like, tourists. How do we negotiate our desires to sight-see, our comforts and discomforts, our satisfaction and dissatisfaction, our economic interests? How do we try to overcome our own stereotyping of the people, our own preconceived notions, our own tourist imaginaries that we receive and perpetuate especially to our students? This also gets complicated when being the long-term ethnographer, or repeat study abroad leader, who also may be treated as a sort of tour guide to the students by locals—a sort of intermediary that is not quite a tourist (defined by a short, fleeting, and temporary presence) but also not quite a local (whose presence is regular and normal and has cultivated enduring relationships with locals and research subjects that extend beyond the end of the summer session). Every year when I return, my presence is like a celebrated homecoming, much like VFR travel to my family’s farms; like the Gospel story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-32), my return is marked in a rather celebratory way. It certainly feels nice, to be sure, but since it is often done when I arrive with my students, it also serves to perform to my own students that I have deep and authentic local ties; that they will receive an anti-touristic treatment when they are with me. Yet I realize that were I living here full time, seeing and being seen regularly and participating regularly in daily work like the prodigal son’s brother, my presence would be normal and unnoteworthy. Indeed, Ascione, who is a friend and collaborator (and native of Perugia), jokes to me every time she witnesses this treatment: “I take my students to the market and instead of greeting me, they say “‘Where’s Michael Di Giovine?’ Michael Di Giovine—why are they asking? I’m here all the time!” But this also plays out in complicated ways. As a tour guide or operator we pay for visits—often not too much, a few dollars for a tasting here, a couple for a meal there. But because of my long-term personal relationships with these providers, many of the providers with whom I have transcended the typical tourism relationship feel odd about accepting money for their “services.” This is particularly the case of a well-respected winemaker in the region, who has been a good friend of mine since our youth the 1990s, and whom I have hosted in my home and I in his. I have been bringing students

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(and before that, educational tourists) for visits and tastings for free, but in the last few years, for the purpose of research, I have been volunteering at his vineyard at wine festivals, and he has thrown parties for my students at his place. He will not accept economic reimbursement for these expenses, despite the time and money on food, wine, and free rides to and from Perugia. I used to insist, but it makes the relationship a bit odd; these kinds of exchanges are clearly gifts in the Maussian sense (1966), an exchange of indebtedness used to create and reinforce social bonds, and it is paid back through nominal help at his farm, hosting him and his family in America, supporting his endeavors, and other ways that friends stay in touch through the decades. Nevertheless, I do feel with him, as well as with my other close contacts in the marketplace, that I have an obligation to “help out” how I can, whether it is by being a spokesperson for their business even with the students, or jumping behind the market counter to explain truffles to British tourists. When I provide tastes of their products, even to the students, I find myself often saying “this is the best” and encouraging everyone to purchase the meats, cheeses, and vegetables from them rather than in the supermarket or at other vendors. Of course, patronizing local, organic farms is also in line with our goal of teaching sustainable food practices, but other professors, such as my colleague in nutrition, do it in other ways; she tells them it is simply healthier, better, and more ethical to buy from them, and that they should not go to the industrial supermarket if they can avoid it. But are these tactics much different, given the intent is largely the same? Again, where is the line? Is it so different from the role of the tour guide, who helps support vendors with whom they have relationships, and receive benefits in return? These benefits may not be monetary kick-backs (like I witnessed with my tour guides in Japan, for example), but they could be free or highly discounted food or meals; or, as professional tour guides who live out of suitcases do, a free room on off days in hotels to which they bring business. Tied to this is the liminal position of the ethnographer-as-mentor to studyabroad students. Like the friend/tour guide, ethnographers must walk a fine line between cultivating relationships with locals that are intended to last well after the students return home and to ensure the well- being and contentment of the student under her care. What happens if it seems that a local is taking advantage of the student? In a recent trip to Pompeii, this happened to one of my students when he was clearly overcharged for his purchase, and in typical Neapolitan fashion, I argued loudly with the vendor until he gave back some of the money and publically prohibited my other students from buying from him; but what if this occurred in Perugia where I do my research and count on good relationships with these vendors? Would I have been so vocal? Another common problem, which Ascione also identifies in her chapter, is when an informant/service provider does not deliver a satisfactory experience

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to the students. Despite the ethnographer’s interest in returning to conduct research with the person, one might decide to forego future visits to the site. Furthermore, the cultivation of longstanding relationships with “key informants,” particularly when they provide positive experiences for the students, might compete with the ethnographer’s desire to branch out and explore other similar vendors and farmers. Indeed, I bring students to the same market stalls in the large Thursday market and eschew visits to their competitors because “my” informants treat us well and deliver solid educational experiences to the students, but I am aware that by doing so, I am potentially limiting the breadth of my own research by not engaging with other vendors who might be able to give me new and different data and produce new and different insights. Indeed, the ethnographer/mentor must thus negotiate what I call “ethnographic proximity”—that is, a cultivation of a sense of closeness with different stakeholders in the ethnographic process. One must be careful to be close, but not too close, to her informants so as to remain objective. This is particularly an issue in autoethnographic practices but is common in all forms of participant observation. As Black (2012) points out in her excellent ethnography of Turin’s Porta Palazzo market, where she gathered data by working with different types of vendors over time, key informants may not truly understand the nature of the research or the ethnographer–informant relationship, particularly when the ethnographer has broken through the superficial touristic interactivity and entered into personal or work relationships with the person. When, after working with one vendor’s stall at length, and earning their trust, Black decided she needed to branch out and work at a different stall, her key informants were taken aback; they viewed her patronage of, and help working with, other vendors as an affront or a reaction to something they did wrong, and, she said, it was difficult to get them to understand the dispassionate aspects of ethnography. I, too, have been forced to negotiate ethnographic proximity while also serving as a mentor. In the most striking example, I took five students to conduct ethnographic research on St. Padre Pio’s cult by traveling on a Catholic pilgrimage to Rome and his shrines of Pietrelcina and San Giovanni Rotondo. None identified as Catholic, though one was raised Catholic in an Italian-American family. As is common, a priest accompanied the group, and led the pilgrims in prayers and devotional activities. While at first some of the students were ambivalent about participating fully in devotional practices that were not their own (and which they did not really know how to do, like Mass), they eventually became quite enthusiastic participant-observers— praying rosaries on the bus, keeling and standing at Mass, even climbing up the Scala Sancta on their knees with the predominantly elderly American pilgrims. They astutely attested that this ethnographic proximity was useful for

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understanding the embodied, lived experiences of these devotees, and helped inform their questioning and analysis. It also built trust and created opportunities to interact with the pilgrims. My Italian-American student found he was from the same suburban Philadelphia town as the priest, and they knew many of the same people. Consequently, he would talk in great lengths with the priest; the priest was his key informant, but for the priest, the student was a seeker, one who could use a little encouragement to come back to the Church. When the priest was called away halfway through the pilgrimage, he came to me and asked that I encourage my student to go to Confession. I took a step back, and told him that I was his professor (in a public university, no less!) and that I did not feel right with such proselytization despite also being a practicing Catholic myself. It was clear that he did not understand the nature of my presence there as a professor and ethnography mentor. CONCLUSION: THE ETHICS OF STUDY ABROAD Study abroad occupies a special place in the tourism literature; it is a form of anti-tourism itself, which also may simultaneously integrate other antitouristic forms such as mission work and pilgrimage, service, edu-tourism, homestays, and ethnography (among others). At its essence, anti-tourism is less a movement than a set of discourses and ethical approaches to remediating some of the perceived unsustainable aspects of modern mass tourism. As all of the chapters in this book reveal, those involved in study abroad, as with other forms of tourism and anti-tourism processes, are confronted with different and often competing moral behaviors, and thus are required to think ethically about their position as leaders, as well as the impact that their programs have on different stakeholders—from personal relations to locals to the students themselves. Ethics is different from morality. While morality is situational and relational—a cultural product that is learned and passed on formally and informally through institutions, the media, norms, and values (Zigon 2008; Zigon and Throop 2014), and therefore may vary from culture to culture—ethics involves the weighing of these oft-conflicting moral decisions for the purpose of doing what is “right, fair, just or good” (Preston 2007: 16). Such moral questioning has a future-oriented bent: “Ethics,” states McCabe, “is not about simply how to talk about being good, but intended to make people good as well” (2005: 49). As Sidgwick argues, “it is a rational procedure by which we determine what human beings ‘ought’—or what is right for them—to do or see to realize by voluntary action” (1981: 1). Morals are about the here and now—they are the decisions one enacts on the ground, in full context; ethics are about the overarching governing principles of just behavior and

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are intended to not only guide actions in the here and now but also to shape future decisions. It is about doing what is right, just, and good, producing a future that is just. This fits in with study abroad not only because anti-tourism practices are, in essence, ethical stances, but because our own intentions as study-abroad leaders are future-oriented in and of themselves. We sponsor study-abroad programs not (only) for the benefit of the professor—after all, we do get financial compensation to teach a class abroad, to engage in touristic activities, to conduct research—but also, and more importantly, for the benefit of our students and their formation. Ideally, we do this because we want to educate—to impart knowledge in a highly impactful way—knowledge that students can call upon later in life that can stay with them in everyday life and inform the way they approach alterity. And there are examples where it seems to be working. There is a professor who leads a study-abroad program through the Umbra Institute in Perugia who, when he was an undergraduate student, participated at the same institution; he said it was his goal to bring a new generation of students to have the same positive experience he did. The Bologna Cooperative Studies Program (BCSP), a consortium of universities in the United States that organizes a year-long, direct-matriculation program to the University of Bologna, regularly posts Facebook stories of former students—some from many decades ago—who come back to visit and attest to how that year impacted their life; in 2016, the program celebrated its first half-century at a gala that drew a range of past participants, from retirees to recent graduates (fieldnotes 5/5/2016). I, too, conduct my study-abroad program and student-faculty research trips with strong positive memories of the programs I participated in as a child in Urbino (Di Giovine 2009: 1), and then as an undergraduate with BCSP, and aim to provide a similarly impactful, immersive experience. Those programs have definitely made me who I am, have inculcated in me an appreciation for art, history, food, and heritage, and have helped pave the way for my career in anthropology. And is this not the main, ethical goal of so many study-abroad initiatives—to create “global citizens” (see Stearns 2009)? Cosmopolitan citizens who feel a part of (not apart from) the world, who might see the “unity in diversity” of humanity (Di Giovine 2009a), who can successfully negotiate different ways of being and living in the world? Members of humanity who can look critically and holistically at the impacts of national policies and engage in “systems-thinking” concerning broad issues of global import, such as global poverty, sustainability and climate change, economic development, and inequality (Benson 2007; see also Winter-Simat et al. 2017)? While most study-abroad programs may not live up to such lofty goals, as Greer and Schweitzer suggest in this book, the very endeavor of creating global

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citizens itself is an ethical stance; it is intended to make good, just people for the future. “Caring, embracing cultural diversity, promoting social justice and environmental sustainability,” student participants in study-abroad programs are themselves supposed to become people with “a sense of responsibility to act for the betterment of the world” (Reysen et al. 2014: 5). In short, as Coffman and Prazak state in their contribution to this book, study abroad is ultimately about “doing good”—to our students, and to others. Tourism can be seen as a “total social fact” (Mauss 1966: 76–77), a microcosm of a type of globally instantiated cultural forms that implicates all important aspects of human life—from our well-being and embodied sensations with the environment to our language and discourses, from structural aspects, such as race, class and gender, to economic and political stratifications. Study abroad, as part tourism, and part ethical response to tourism, equally calls upon considerations of how to address these basic aspects of human culture and society and proposes to craft a more just engagement with the Other. Our charge, then, as study-abroad leaders and advocates, seems to be exceptionally ethical—it is future-oriented, designed to make fair, just, and good adults. A study-abroad leader is more than simply a tour guide, a program director, a marketer, a student life coordinator, a professor, or a mentor—(s)he must be the embodiment of right and just action, of being a global citizen. Modeling what we want students to do is, of course, easier said than done (see Biggs, this book), particularly as we move across different identities and different positions during the course of the study-abroad process (see Nguyen, this book). Yet despite its difficulty, despite the range of moral actions that we must enact on the ground, if our goal is to create global citizens, we should keep such higher ethical imperatives in mind. How we model that for them, in our own actions and dispositions as their teachers, leaders, guides, traveling companions, and mentors, is therefore of the utmost importance.

NOTES 1. In this chapter, I am not discussing involuntary mobility, such as that which is forced upon a person or group; immigration, diaspora, forced marches, or seeking refuge from warfare or persecution are qualitatively different than anti-tourism experiences. However, certain forms of anti-tourism—including study abroad, but also ethnographic research and VFR tourism—may be considered an obligation. 2. See, for example, the satirical Instagram account of Barbie Savior (http​​s:/​/w​​ww​ .in​​stagr​​am​.co​​m​/bar​​​biesa​​vior)​, which mocks selfie-taking Western volunteers in developing countries; it presents images of white Barbie dolls hugging little dark-skinned dolls, posing in front of slums while supposedly doing volunteer work, or writing on

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blackboards with taglines such as “Who needs a formal education to teach in Africa? Not me! All I need is some chalk and a dose of optimism. It’s so sad that they don’t have enough trained teachers here. I’m not trained either, but I’m from the West, so it all works out. Good morning class!” See Zane 2016 for a discussion of this. My thanks to John Bodinger de Uriarte for directing me to this Instagram account.

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Epilogue Questioning the Future of Study Abroad in a Post-COVID-19 World Michael A. Di Giovine and John Bodinger de Uriarte

We began this book with a series of questions posed to examine how study abroad—as a discourse and a phenomenon—worked to distinguish itself from mass tourism in terms of attitudes, imaginaries, ethics, and practices. We focused on components such as education, service, and internationalization as key areas in which study abroad qualitatively positioned itself as an antitouristic process, despite its utilization of the same structures, imaginaries, and forms of mobility. And we questioned the promise and problematics of such programs to foster, or even guarantee, global citizenship. Informed by scholarly research as well as practice in executing and administering student travel, the volume’s contributors have teased these components out, focusing on different pedagogical practices, volunteering and service learning, affect, and cultivating embodied sensory experiences, safety, and risk. As this volume entered the production phase, the world suddenly changed in unforeseen ways. The novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, swept across the world, its spread facilitated by the relatively free movement of people. A highly contagious severe acute respiratory (SARS) illness, the virus is transmitted through droplets released in the air when a person sneezes, coughs, or speaks, and attacks one’s breathing, sometimes resulting in death. As of July 1, 2020, the COVID-19 virus has infected over 10.5 million people and killed over half a million (WHO 2020), with many epidemiologists predicting another wave around the time that this book comes out in print. To limit its spread, quarantines and socio-physical distancing measures have been enacted around the world, to varying degrees of success. Students studying abroad suddenly were recalled to their home countries, and future trips were 325

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put on hold. Schools switched to online learning and are continuing to grapple with pedagogically sound and safe methods to instruct students. Destination countries with some of the largest numbers of tourists and study-abroad students—such as Italy, China, and France (not to mention the United States)— were locked down, often severely restricting movement. Many of these changes are felt in questions of mobility—where is it now safe to travel and, indeed, is travel itself no longer safe? What will happen— both long and short term—to institutional infrastructures built to promote and expand study abroad as a “value-added” experience for undergraduate liberal arts programs? What will happen to our “on-the-ground” providers, many of whom look forward to the income generated by hosting or partnering with study-abroad programs, and many of whom are elements of personal and professional relationships carefully built over time? Will the current dip in study-abroad experiences continue in institutional practice or be reflected in institutional funding and support, especially during a time of economic crisis? Will study abroad, as a global phenomenon, fully recover (and how)? While many of these questions and effects are still unfolding, we would be remiss if we didn’t recognize their current urgency. With that in mind, we worked with the volume contributors and asked them to speak to some of the effects of the global pandemic on their own programs, extended study-abroad networks, and institutional futures. We also talked with several administrators in different higher education institutions, as well as representatives for some study-abroad providers.1 HOW DOES COVID REVEAL THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TOURISM AND STUDY ABROAD? The central tenet of this book has been that study abroad is both a tourism and anti-tourism experience. It is touristic, in that it shares the same infrastructures as typical tourism: from the planes, trains, and automobiles (and buses and cruise ships) that move travelers from place to place, to the myriad hospitality entities, such as hotels and AirBnBs, restaurants, guides, and sites that welcome them. Study abroad also shares many of the same phenomenological attributes as tourism—from its preoccupation with authenticity and experiential embodiment to its utilization and negotiation of seductive imaginaries of otherness, and of the transformative potential of being elsewhere. Even the rate of expansion of study abroad mirrors that of global tourism. Yet at the same time, we have argued that study-abroad positions itself to be something more than—or something qualitatively different from—the so-called “typical” tourism experience, such that it is often considered an antidote to the perceived ills and excesses of modern mass tourism. The recent COVID-19

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pandemic, and the unprecedented quarantined closures around the world, highlight this contradictory quality of study abroad. On the one hand, COVID-19 affected, and was affected by, both forms of travel in similar ways. Indeed, the novel coronavirus outbreak evolved into a full-fledged pandemic thanks in no small part to global mobility, particularly tourism. It is not coincidental that the most heavily affected countries during the height of the pandemic in spring 2020 are also the most-visited countries in the world (France, Spain, U.S., China, and Italy, according to the UNWTO (2020)). As discussed in the Introduction to this volume, these countries—as well as the United Kingdom and Germany, which also were on the top-ten for number of COVID-19 cases, also account for the most popular student travel destinations, with the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain topping the list (Martel 2020: 5). Occurring around the Western and Chinese New Year celebrations, when domestic tourism would peak in China, COVID-19 spread quickly to Europe and the Middle East. For example, although recent studies of wastewater indicate that the novel coronavirus was already present in Italy by December and Spain during January (Amante and Pollina 2020), the first documented cases of coronavirus in Italy were among two Chinese tourists in Milan, quickly followed by an Italian returning home from a trip to Wuhan, China (Seckin 2020). Likewise, Cuba’s first reported coronavirus death was an Italian tourist (Gámez Torres 2020). The chart below compares the top 5 non-U.S. study-abroad destinations with their overall tourism numbers and COVID-19 cases. Some of the most highly publicized cases involved cruise liners, the icons of mass tourism; in several instances, the staff contracted the virus, spreading it to the tourists and, it is feared, to those at other ports of call. When

Figure E.1  Comparison of Inbound U.S. Study Abroad Students, Inbound Tourists, and COVID-19 Cases in Top 7 Study-Abroad Destinations Among U.S. Students. Sources: Study abroad: IIE 2020; Tourism arrivals: UNWTO 2020a; COVID-19 cases: WHO 2020. Data compiled by Lena Morella.

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quarantines began, many countries refused to allow the ships to dock, and they remained sometimes for months offshore, the coronavirus festering and spreading to the rest of the passengers—sometimes leading to casualties. Just as cruises and their patrons were affected—some severely—by quarantine and the closure of ports, so too were some 540 Semester at Sea students, who pay upward of $34,000 to earn 15 college credits by visiting 11 countries on 4 continents in 104 days. Ports were closed to students in Indonesia and India, the ship skipped China and other affected destinations, accelerated their classes, and finally ended the trip in South Africa amid news of U.S. travel bans—two months into the semester (Kragen 2020). Semester at Sea cancelled its fall 2020 program, but plans to run a spring program, touting their flexibility in avoiding ports of call with outbreaks (Semester at Sea 2020). In addition, the most highly affected businesses have been those in the tourism and hospitality sector. Based on first quarter 2020 reporting, in which the tourism sector lost 67 million estimated international arrivals and $80 billion in receipts, the World Health Organization projects a 60–80 percent decline in global tourism for the year (UNWTO 2020b). Italy, where tourism accounts for over 13 percent of its GDP, estimates a loss of nearly $75 million for the summer alone (Netti 2020), and 180,000 tourism workers are estimated to be unemployed (Carli 2020). If we were to pinpoint the most radical and lasting changes in the college experience due to COVID-19, study abroad would top the list. According to a 2020 Institute for International Education COVID-19 survey, 285 institutions reported a total of 22,041 students studying abroad in spring 2020; 253 of these institutions evacuated some 17,787 students (81% of the total). Students sent home from their programs early lost those embodied engagements in host countries—such as site visits, hands-on internships, cooking lessons and food tastings, volunteering and service activities, and faculty-student research projects. Elisa Ascione, who was actively teaching U.S. students in Perugia when the coronavirus sent them home, stated that students said that they “felt robbed of a life-changing event.” On the other hand, there were pedagogical and interactive aspects of study abroad that allowed some programs to be effectively continued even during quarantines—unlike mass tourism. Although many study-abroad programs were cancelled (as were tourist vacations), several could be completed by shifting to the virtual realm; 38 percent of the institutions surveyed by IIE developed virtual classes to correspond with the study-abroad program, as Ascione did, while 46 percent simply integrated students into current classes to finish their studies (Martel 2020: 7). Since Gareth Barkin’s trip to Indonesia was tied to a spring semester preparatory course, he had to reimagine the learning outcomes and exercises to meet the reality that they would

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not be traveling abroad; he also took the time to set up a corresponding virtual study-abroad session for the summer. Except for three sets of contributors to the volume (Aaron Lampman and Kenneth Schweitzer, and Aaron Greer and Don Schweitzer, who completed their most recent Caribbean programs in January 2020; and Catherine Serio, who did not run a program), the contributors were constrained to cancel their planned spring break and summer trips. In several cases, such as Michael Di Giovine’s, the decision was made to “postpone” or “roll over” registrations for 2021 as many of the students were eager to travel the following year. As Jennifer Coffman similarly tells us, “Of the original thirty [registered for the trip], every one of them expressed interest in participating next summer (2021), and indeed we all hope they can.” Unfortunately, Di Giovine’s university later decided to cancel all 2021 trips as well out of an abundance of caution, as Annie Nguyen’s did, too. WHAT WAS THE FALLOUT FROM COVID19 ON STUDY-ABROAD PROGRAMS FEATURED IN THIS VOLUME? As of this writing, all contributors are addressing the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and the need to cancel and/or reconceptualize their programs. First, our contributors have been dealing with programmatic effects of COVID-19, that is, how the cancellations affected the universities’ course and program offerings. This is particularly an issue with universities such as John Bodinger de Uriarte’s, where studying off-campus is a requirement. Second, they have been dealing with fallout at the student level. Many of those registered for trips in the summer expressed frustration and disappointment, as well as disbelief, at the prospect of not traveling. Although several like Barkin and Coffman thoughtfully reconfigured their trips to be online experiences, several students were understandably reluctant to participate, citing the value added of the actual travel component. Coffman states: One-third of students withdrew immediately and understandably from the program. While they were kind about it, many of those students spoke about not being willing to shift from plans to learn in a wide variety of places in Kenya and Tanzania to being parked in front of a computer in one’s childhood bedroom or university town apartment that would not forgive their leases. Credit hours still cost money, and, as it turns out, many students explained they are already tired of online learning and will hold onto their hopes for place-based learning later.

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Last and perhaps most pertinent to this volume, our contributors dealt with the fallout at individual program and provider levels, contemplating the plight of those on-site providers who have come to rely on their study-abroad programs. Jennifer Coffman and Miroslava Prazak’s homestay hosts faced a “particularly difficult” time because they “come from rural areas in which our presence—as exciting and challenging as it can be—is also a direct source of revenue that helps support less advantaged households.” All our contributors have been cognizant of the challenges that their providers faced during the pandemic, let alone how the lack of American students’ presence would impact them. Melissa Biggs tells us that the travel shutdowns provoked by COVID-19 “sent the Mexican tourism industry reeling,” negatively impacting 3–5 percent of the country’s GDP (Sáez 2020). As in other countries, these shutdowns have particularly affected the informal sector and individuals and family who are set apart from the large, and officially sanctioned, tourist enterprises (see Breglia 2006), which would not be eligible for any state-sponsored unemployment assistance. For example, Biggs’s program includes cooking lessons by cocineras tradicionales who receive visitors in their private homes. “Not only do they rely on the income that receiving visitors bring, these visits also provide them with an opportunity to sell products they grow or make.” Likewise, Italy’s extremely strict quarantines—in which citizens could only leave their house with a note explaining that they were purchasing essential groceries—hit right around Eastertime, when Ascione and Di Giovine’s market vendors make their biggest sales and domestic tourism is high. Cheesemakers talked of “pumping and dumping” their animals’ milk, for there was not enough of a market to even produce their cheeses. Summer tourists would have been a saving grace to recuperate some of these losses, since they are most predisposed to purchasing artisanal honey, chocolate, wine, and truffles; but tourism in Italy was one-third the level it usually is, and the hundreds of American and Chinese students in Perugia who used to frequent their market stands are absent. Consequently, vendors in both countries have been forced to shift the focus of their efforts on two opposing communities: the local surroundings and the virtual, international community. “Some cocineras located in or near metropolitan areas have begun marketing prepared meals to the local community,” said Biggs of her Mexican collaborators, while vendors in Perugia promoted door-to-door sales of luxury goods such as wine and truffles. Some Italian winemakers and agriculturalists with significant international patronage directly emailed their American and Northern European patrons, offering discounts on shipping abroad. Likewise, in Mexico, Biggs reports that others have turned to social media, giving cooking lessons on Facebook Live or Instagram, either independently or with the help of promoters. Some have

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been able to reach a wider market for non-perishable goods such as mole paste or embroidered linens via social media. . . . These efforts provide needed financial resources now and allow them to promote their offerings for when travel eventually resumes.

The cancellation of programs also created stress and psychological hardship. Many of our contributors collaborate with universities, guides, and other on-site instructors. Some, such as professors and guides working for studyabroad providers, were furloughed, as were workers at study-abroad operators. “Every single one of our affiliate partners have had furloughs,” said one university administrator; “all of the different vendors who have depended on study abroad are hurting.” The loss of income, as well as the feeling of abandonment by American universities, was psychologically taxing. There was also a feeling of gratefulness when program directors tried to help their providers. In talking to one on-site collaborator, Di Giovine was told, “We know and appreciate who’ve helped us when we’re down, and we won’t forget it.” In addition, without diminishing the plight of local providers, we should note that our contributors themselves have felt “significant amounts of stress” (as one wrote) at the thought of how their decisions, and those of their institutions, are affecting long-term friends and collaborators. This intimacy, perhaps, is an indication of how many study-abroad programs differ from mass tourism: “Because we work directly with our hosts in East Africa,” Coffman tells us, “we know personally who is affected and can estimate the ways in which our NOT being there negatively impact livelihoods.” Consequently, our contributors were sensitive to involving their on-site partners in the necessary redesigns of their study-abroad trips, if they were not altogether cancelled or postponed. Ascione, Coffman and Prazak, Biggs, and Barkin have all seen or worked on the transformation of materials and experiences to online platforms; they were all conscious to integrate their local providers wherever they could. Coffman and Prazak “changed the syllabi significantly to accommodate this new context, while still covering our primary learning objectives. We have integrated tutoring in Swahili via WhatsApp with native speakers of Swahili who would normally travel with our program, and for the human–environment interactions course, we have arranged for real-time conversations with some of our overseas partners so students can communicate with people they were meant to meet in person. Further, we have guaranteed admission to our future overseas program to all students who successfully complete the online coursework. Thus, in some ways, we have adapted to these circumstances rapidly and are still delivering a rigorous academic program.” Ascione, who is an on-site “provider” herself, offered her course digitally to Americans—even concluding with a virtual cooking lesson (one of Di Giovine’s West Chester University students, who

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took the class, Zoomed afterward to show him the tagliatelle pasta and zucchini pesto she made for her family’s dinner that night). This integration of local voices online is mutually beneficial, as locals continue to be supported (at least marginally), while also attempting to retain some of the experiential integrity of study abroad for American students: “As it became clear the travel portion of the program would be cancelled, I began thinking through ways we could all still make something of these connections we had worked hard to establish, in the hopes everyone could still experience some elements of a cultural exchange program, even if it was online,” said Barkin. Consequently, his students began corresponding with Indonesian students applying to the U.S. Embassy’s Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI). WHAT WAS THE EFFECT ON INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS? Although our volume deals primarily with U.S. student educational trips abroad, it is important to remember that some of those most affected by COVID-19 are foreign students studying abroad in American universities, and an examination of the complexities of the coronavirus impact on this segment sheds light on the unique circumstances of study abroad in general. Increasingly, internationalization efforts at U.S. universities are reliant on international students. Since the number of college-age students is no longer growing as it used to, international students help keep classes full and generate significant revenue, especially for public institutions that charge more for out-of-state and out-of-country students (Krislov 2019). They also are estimated to generate $39 billion to the U. S. national economy and support more than 400,000 jobs (NAFSA 2018). The COVID-19 crisis affected all aspects of the study-abroad process for these students—from recruitment to visa applications to actual travel and return home. When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, some 441 institutions reported a total of 251,385 international students. Because travel restrictions had already been in place in Europe and Asia, only 18,551 were able to return home; 92 percent were stranded in the United States, causing the universities to scramble to provide housing, food, and other services (Martel 2020: 6). By the summer 2020, travel restrictions and quarantines have eased, and some have been able to return home. But it is uncertain whether they can return to the United States or how a new cohort can be generated amid such uncertainty. Exacerbating this, over 63 percent of universities cancelled most face-to-face recruitment travel and events, preferring to conduct virtual campus tours, online events, and outreach through third-party agents (Martel 2020: 8–9). To further attract

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students who might be wary of traveling to the United States—which, as of this writing, continues to see significant increases in coronavirus infections—84 percent of IIE’s survey respondents indicated that they have put new measures in place for international students, such as deferred enrollments, extension of deadlines, online application submissions, waiving transcripts, SATS and other credentials and tests, and allowing online testing (10). Yet there are still hurdles for study abroad that are out of institutions’ hands. Many embassies and consulates continue to be closed or are operating at minimum capacities, making visas difficult or lengthy to process. COVID19 travel restrictions are currently in place as well. And in early July 2020, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) announced that non-immigrant students will not be allowed visas to remain in the country if they take a fully online course load, as many U.S. universities were proposing for the coming academic year. ICE recommended returning to the home country or transferring to a different university if their U.S. institution could not provide them with at least one face-to-face or hybrid course (ICE 2020). This would penalize the student, who often has no choice in the matter, and professors, who may feel pressured to teach face-to-face despite their own misgivings; but it also would penalize the university, forcing administrators to weigh its financial interest in retaining international students with safety procedures. In response, some universities who were going online nevertheless planned on implementing a face-to-face class only for international students in order to retain them. Fortunately, ICE backed down amid pressure from some twenty states and several university and Silicon Valley lawsuits (see Jordan and Hartocollis 2020). Nevertheless, 88 percent of IIE’s respondents anticipate a drop in international student enrollment for the academic year 2020–2021 (Martel 2020: 11). It is important to note that a similar percentage of universities foresee declines in their U.S. students traveling abroad in the academic year as well. “With global travel advisories in effect, a pandemic that may still be ongoing throughout regions globally, and concerns from students, parents, faculty and staff, approximately 85% of institutions anticipate a decline in the interest of students to go abroad in the coming academic year. These potential declines could be exacerbated by a global recession, which would make study abroad more financially difficult for students,” says the IIE report (Martel 2020: 12). Yet it also begs other questions about the future of study abroad: Will there be new and on-going travel restrictions set in place? What will happen to the longevity of the program that professors have often spent years to establish? What will happen to on-site providers, such as guides and instructors? What are the financial implications for universities?

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HOW WILL STUDY ABROAD CHANGE IN THE FUTURE? A major concern is how study abroad will look in the future. Aaron Greer and Don Schweitzer believe that their 2022 course to Trinidad and Tobago “will likely have to be radically reimagined. What lies nearly two years in advance is, of course, impossible to foresee, but that the usual norms and forms of travel will be affected is almost certain.” Yet Barkin muses that “it is difficult to apprehend the extent to which this experience might be reframing faculty and staff attitudes across the U.S. and around the world in relation to study abroad.” And in discussing the situation with providers, one dean said that these companies are looking at this “limbo” period as a year-long opportunity to reimagine and redesign the study-abroad experience from the ground up. “I think it’s fair to suggest that, with the exponential growth of study-abroad programs, many providers and universities have been galloping in place to keep up with the demand and innovation for years, and, while I hate to suggest a total ‘reset button’ being deployed, the pandemic does provide an opportunity for some structural and delivery rethinking,” Bodinger de Uriarte says. Indeed, according to administrators and providers who monitor studyabroad listservs, there are two broad responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, while none project a simple return to pre-COVID programs and structures, many are optimistic that necessary changes to study abroad will not completely overturn some semblance of “business as usual.” They propose modifications in destination choice, safety procedures, and length of time, for example, but not a fundamental reworking of the system. On the other hand, many urge a radical rethinking of study abroad, arguing that the entire practice, as we currently know it, will have to change fundamentally. They envision extreme transformations in what constitutes international education, including eschewing the necessity of travel. This polarization between, essentially, rebounding and transformation corresponds with a similar tack that interdisciplinary tourism scholars take on their listservs, such as the Tourism Research Information Network (TRINET), which Di Giovine monitors for broad trends in the industry. During the quarantines, debates raged between the tourism practitioners and business school instructors who were seeking practical advice from experts on how to reopen successfully and many social scientists and critical tourism scholars who advanced more theoretical and ethical notions on how tourism could be transformed. Because, perhaps, those on study-abroad listservs were primarily practitioners, these debates were not reported to be so heated, but there nevertheless were two camps—those who sought fundamental transformation and those who want to keep study abroad fundamentally the way it has been.

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“The unexpectedly sudden and radical changes wrought by the novel coronavirus outbreak is clearly impressive, and gives one pause to think about how life would be like at a slower, less globalized pace,” Di Giovine states. Presenting a sweeping—and scathing—review of mass tourism and the immediate aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, The Guardian asked if this was “The End of Tourism?” (de Bellaigue 2020). For this reason, much of the earliest tourism literature to be published on COVID-19 was rather speculatively utopian in nature (see, for example, Cheer 2020; Ioannides and Gyimothy 2020; Sigala 2020). Sustainability was particularly key in the tourism literature and media (Arora et al. 2020; Crossley 2020; HigginsDesboilles 2020a). Struck by images of pristine beaches filled with sea life (Liberatore 2020), clear vistas of mountains previously obscured by smog (though social media posts that the Himalayas were visible from Delhi for the first time in 30 years were a bit overblown [Evon 2020; cf. Anon 2020]), “overtouristed” cities suddenly free from throngs of tourists and cruise ships (Momigliano 2020), lions lounging on abandoned highways in South Africa (Brito 2020), and even dolphins in Venetian canals (this turned out to be “fake news” [Daly 2020]), many saw the pandemic as a vehicle for re-imagining a more environmentally sustainable and socially ethical practice (HigginsDesbiolles 2020b). This was not lost on study-abroad practitioners, many of whom who realized that the pause in international travel would help meet sustainability benchmarks that they would not have otherwise met. “People are talking about sustainability as ‘oh look, we’re being more sustainable’ as an effect of the crisis,” said one administrator. “But I haven’t heard a lot of study-abroad program providers talking in an intentional way. They talk about it more as a positive impact” or unintended consequence. Even university sustainability directors have taken an ambivalent stance; one writes “I’m sad to think that study abroad won’t happen for our students . . . Not the way any of us would have wanted study-abroad emissions to drop to zero, but it gives us a pause to consider how we can address them more effectively once study-abroad travel becomes possible again.” Indeed, it is too soon, and tourism processes are too complex and individually instantiated, to tell if radical reformulations of tourism or study abroad would be the case (Hall 2000), and Biggs in particular remains skeptical with some of the more utopian ideas that the pandemic represents a time to re-think the ethics of travel, fearing that “without sufficient financial support for and investment in the people and communities most affected by the current loss of tourism [and study abroad] income, opportunism will drive the re-opening of tourist spaces.” Where there have been debates is in pedagogy and meeting planned student outcomes. How can we replicate the study-abroad experience, predicated as it is on deep and high-impact learning experiences and embodied interactions with locals? Barkin has been an especially vocal proponent of focusing “on

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pedagogical outcomes (associated with intentionally curated experiences in culturally varied contexts) rather than going abroad for its own sake,” for quite some time (2015, 2016, 2018), and recently (in press) advocated for the virtues of virtual study abroad. Telling us how “disappointed” he was “to see the rest of our international programs simply cancelled, largely without thought as to whether any of their goals might still be salvaged,” he stated: The coronavirus experience compelled me (and, I imagine, many others involved in this field) to approach the same discussion from a juxtaposed perspective, focusing on what pedagogical goals and outcomes associated with study abroad might be achieved (or at least approached) through other means— means that remain available to us when travel is no longer an option.

In this, Barkin differentiates this “historically travel-centered approach to international education that frames all program benefits as deriving from being, to quote Bennett (2012: 110), ‘in the vicinity of events’ with an outcomes-centered approach that focuses on rich and unique international interventions” without fetishizing embodiment. Some administrators have echoed this sentiment, challenging their faculty to devise new ways to internationalize without physically going international. Thus, we have seen an increased attention to creating blended, virtual partnerships with host institutions. Much like the COIL programs in the SUNY system, this model promotes partnered teaching on a virtual platform, combining students and faculty from “away” and home campuses in both synchronous streaming classroom experiences and virtual group or partnered projects. Transitioning online can still connect people across boundaries without the hassle of visas and the cost of flights and lodging, they argue; it can still provide work-based experiences such as virtual internships that take students outside of their cultural and linguistic comfort zones; it can still allow our students to hone valuable research skills. Most importantly, as Coffman and Prazak point out, they allow institutions to not abandon our on-site partners, helping them in their time of need and continuing to provide some level of interaction and economic support on which they have come to rely. Going virtual has other benefits, too. First, it provides a continued source of revenue for the university in these pandemic times, allowing institutions to retain students. If study abroad does return to normalcy and embodied travel, it can also help further diversify offerings, appealing to students who might not have the time, funding, ability, or willingness to travel abroad. Di Giovine is particularly sensitive to what may be rising costs of travel in the post-COVID era, saying, “Many proposals for reopening tourist destinations are predicated on increasing costs for services, which would intentionally drive down tourist numbers, mitigating many of the perceived ills of mass tourism in terms of

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sustainability and ethical relations with communities.” One extreme case, for example, is Cambodia, the home of Angkor Wat and the sprawling Angkor Archaeological Park, a longtime UNESCO World Heritage site (Di Giovine 2009). As of this writing, there have been no coronavirus-related deaths in Cambodia, which made headlines for taking in a cruise ship to which all other Southeast Asian countries closed their ports (Bloom 2020). To ensure that Cambodia remains a safe option for tourists, in June 2020, the government announced that all foreigners entering the country must show that they have a health insurance package worth $50,000 and make a deposit of $3,000 in cash or by credit card to cover possible expenses if a person catches COVID-19, including healthcare, laundry services, meals, and a funeral (Calder 2020). Coupled with higher costs for flights and visa fees, as well as the cost for university credits, this would make study abroad to Cambodia exceptionally expensive, restricting participation along socio-economic lines. “If we universally embraced this model,” Di Giovine speculates, “I fear a return to more 19th century modes of study abroad and tourism where only the wealthy were privileged enough to travel.” Yet a virtual option—which might include discussions with local English-speaking students, archaeologists excavating the temple complex, dance troupes, and others—could deliver the same content and information at a fraction of the cost, could ensure that study abroad continues to be democratizes and accessible. But as Lisa Breglia discusses in her Afterword (this book), written between meetings to discuss the future of her study-abroad programs, the other camp sees study abroad as fundamentally impossible to replicate in the virtual realm. As anthropologists, we are especially keen in understanding the power of “being there” (Bradburd 1998; Borneman and Hammoudi 2009) to grasp and render (Geertz 1973: 10) the “imponderabilia of everyday life” that cannot be seen through armchair travels “or computing documents” but instead needs to be “observed in their full actuality” (Malinowski 2002[1922]: 18)—and study abroad is very much predicated on the transformative vision of having these unique, embodied experiences. Most importantly, eschewing the actual travel aspect seems to fundamentally alter the core aspects of study abroad, the mobility, and embodiment factors. As we have shown in our Introduction, for better or for worse, study abroad was modeled on tourism practices—from the transformational pilgrimages of yesteryear to the Grand Tour of the nineteenth century to the types of educational and cultural tourism of today. Furthermore, many of our contributors—anthropologists by training—have also utilized ethnographic methods and ideas to either structure their tour or pedagogically as a form of instruction. Eliminating embodiment eliminates that which makes study abroad both touristic and anti-touristic and that which makes it a unique form of higher education learning—rendering it simply another form of virtual learning. This is not

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only problematic for experiential and high-impact learning (Kuh 2008) schemes, but instructors have seen that students have already experienced online learning fatigue. Thus, as one administrator points out, “You still will always and forever have people who will say it’s not the same experience as being there. You’ll always have the same two sides: creating access to global contexts without physically being there, and the importance of global opportunities.” However, even if study abroad remains fundamentally an embodied travel experience, significant changes are anticipated—especially those that have to do with safety and risk. “Logistically, our college is already moving towards a ‘new normal’ in our travel programs with added layers of preparation and assumption of risk,” including allowing travel to countries that have a CDC and State Department Advisory at level 2 or below and having students sign additional waivers, report Lampman and Schweitzer. On the program delivery side, says an administrator, “generally different program providers are looking at how to sell programs that are deemed ‘safer.’ Instead of putting students in double rooms, put them in single rooms for the same price. But also being intentional about offering programs that are safer.” Indeed, destination selection and study-abroad programming would likely mirror changing trends in the tourism sector, which is seeing a move away from populated urban centers into more rural destinations, especially to places closer to home that are perceived safe. Italians have begun calling this turismo di prossimità—proximity tourism—or even “cocoon tourism” (see Banfo 2020). Rather than visiting major centers such as Florence, Venice, and Rome, smaller towns and agritourisms are preferred. This would pedagogically change the foci of the study-abroad trip, de-emphasizing Renaissance art and architecture studies (with their museum visits) in favor of Slow Food and Slow Tourism experiences that are easily accomplished outside and in small groups. Certain destinations, too, face an uphill battle for at least U.S. students post-COVID. For example, Lampman and Schweitzer point out that their destination, Cuba, could be one of the safest places to travel, as it is “the world leader in the ratio of doctors per person” and “has also been a world leader in internationalism during the pandemic,” sending highly skilled doctors abroad, allowing cruise ships to dock, and managing to lose only eighty-two people to coronavirus (see Lampman and Schweitzer 2020). Yet one of the greatest issues our Cuba program faces is perception of risk. . . . Cuba is an interesting case study because many, if not most, Americans already perceive travel to Cuba as risky due to political rhetoric and media portrayals, even though Cuba is widely considered one of the safest countries in the world for travelers. In a time of pandemic, Americans may also be particularly wary of “3rdrd world countries” which are often perceived as dirty, disease-ridden and

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healthcare impoverished. Will students be interested in traveling to Cuba again, and if so, when?

Indeed, “Parents will likely be less enthusiastic about paying for their kids to travel to a country with an under-funded or inaccessible healthcare system. Students may be wary of encountering and bringing home to aging parents, guardians, and relatives a virus that could take their lives,” speculates Bodinger de Uriarte. Thus, the retreat into closer-to-home, trusted places may also be a boon to the domestic “study away” programs like those at Susquehanna University, in which students can continue to enjoy high-impact learning experiences, living away from home and outside of their comfort zone, yet in relative proximity to their campus. Students would not be subject to international travel bans, different visa requirements and embassy closures, the high costs of airline tickets, and the uncertainty of being far away from home during a possible reemergence of a pandemic. As Neriko Doerr suggests, such domestic programs could “provide an opportunity to refocus on ‘difference’ within the students’ home country.” And it is important to reflect on some of the goals of study abroad—a productive immersion in difference that helps students understand that the world is filled with a diversity of approaches and understandings of how to “be” in it. If an increased understanding of cultural diversity, and intercultural competence, are expected outputs for study abroad, there is much to suggest that productive, intercultural learning can also happen closer to home. Nevertheless, we should remember that study abroad is necessary for breaking boundaries and ethnocentrism, for fostering a sense of international competency, for developing intercultural awareness and communication skills. Discussing the racial protests that erupted after a series of highly publicized police killings of African Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Greer and Schweitzer point out that their program could help instruct on race in a way that is accessible, taking students outside of their own highly charged contexts but which is fundamental for understanding the historical development of racial inequality in North America: The confluence of the pandemic and the protests surrounding the brutal killing of George Floyd create a strange juxtaposition for our course. Trinidad and Tobago is a Caribbean country, which allows us to discuss the history of imperialism and colonialism that created the global system of race-based oppression we experience today. In the prep class before travel, we spend a semester exploring the intricacies and brutalities and on-going realities of the racial discourses fashioned and established by the imperialist project. For students to lose the opportunity to immerse themselves in that literature, then travel to

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a post-colonial country where forty percent of the population is black, another forty percent is East Indian, and the other twenty percent a host of many ethnicities, would be unfortunate.

Nguyen concurs, arguing that amid the crises currently gripping the United States (and the world) today—from pandemics to racism to extremism— never before has the concept of study abroad been more relevant: In light of how diseases, from Ebola to swine flu to COVID-19, originate in one location and then spread because of globalization and increased travel between nations, advocating for travel might seem foolish. However, as anti-Asian sentiments have risen in the U.S.; as science and facts have become obfuscated by politics and willful ignorance; and as we look at our own systems and question how we can improve in areas where we have failed, the need to experience other cultures and study other societies is critical. It’s important that upcoming generations see and understand that there are different ways of being and of governing so that they do not fall into the trap of thinking that change is impossible or unprecedented. . . . It is in this way that we defeat the fear that a virus or any other existential threat may bring: by having people not look at each other as threats but rather as fellow travelers with whom they can commiserate.

After all, as the truism goes, we travel to understand ourselves as much as it is to understand others (see, for example, Picard and Di Giovine 2014). CONCLUSION: WHITHER A WAY FORWARD? Deadly, costly, disruptive, and greatly impacting our sense of biological and psychological well-being, the COVID-19 crisis has nevertheless provided a further opportunity to assess study abroad for its benefits and drawbacks. In a time of economic uncertainty, further made tense by increasingly marketbased measures for higher education outputs, it is not entirely clear how programs, providers, and institutions may take this extended moment to reevaluate the promises and costs of study abroad. While this volume articulates a number of different critiques of study abroad, each of the contributors is deeply committed to many of its promises. Coupled with the return of students in mid-program and the suspension of study-abroad programs, we have all had to deal with institutional responses to the pandemic—from full-scale campus closures to different variations of online learning needs and demands. This reduction in face-to-face learning has profound effects on the fostering and support of immersive environments, at home institutions and abroad, the kind of immersion that most if not all of

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us find central to the educational experience. At the same time, we need to recognize that full-time online educational experience has been part of what colleges and universities have offered for quite a while, not only as an alternative to “regular” classes but also to accommodate the different needs of students. One of the things that this halt in study abroad has allowed many of us to do is critically reassess our programs and our understandings of pedagogical authority. The pandemic offers us an extended moment to reflect on the goals and outcomes we may have built into into our programs and consider how they might be achieved through other means. For many of the authors in this book, the primacy of cultural immersion—however successfully achieved in our variety of programs—is a hallmark of our discipline; such experience “in the field” is what transformed anthropological inquiry from the armchair to extended periods of participant observation. It is hard to imagine achieving the goals of study abroad without actually going abroad. But many of the questions raised in this book are focused on some of the taken-for-granted positive outcomes of study abroad—that studying abroad necessarily provides a unique pedagogical outcome, one that contributes to the development of their intercultural competence or global citizenship through direct experience with cultural difference. It may be that we train ourselves to seek that difference closer to home—through domestic programs that focus on our own colonial and post-colonial presents, or that we work to reimagine engaging international difference without a continued emphasis on international travel. The coming 2020–2021 academic year will be one in which study abroad, as we know it, will have to transform—we wait to see, and to shape, those transformations. NOTE 1. Unless otherwise noted and cited, all quotes attributed to contributors are taking from a written questionnaire or correspondence they submitted to us specifically for this epilogue. Similarly, quotes attributed to administrators and providers, who wished to remain anonymous, are from interviews conducted in May and June 2020.

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Afterword Keeping Study Abroad Real Lisa Breglia

We were weeks into the COVID-induced lockdown, and I was in the fourth virtual meeting of the day. It was a typical morning in my new life as a teleworking university administrator. As I Iogged in, I saw the little boxes populate with the faces the other global studies faculty signaling we were gathering for our virtual meeting. We are a small group––tight knit, collaborative, and missing working together now that we were separated by stayat-home orders and the varying stresses of work and family demands. Next on the agenda was what to do about our upcoming required seminar abroad. Twice a year––each summer and winter––a faculty member takes a group of our graduate students on a study trip to an international location. These study trips are arranged with a local university partner, through which our students receive lectures from their faculty, go on site visits, and engage in an in-depth exploration of a specific topic that connects local and global issues relevant to the host city. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in Spring 2020, the students were to travel to Budapest in early summer. Our faculty member was already on site––incidentally with a group of our undergraduate students on their own internship abroad semester. Everything was already in place to receive and accommodate up to twenty of our MA students. But by Spring Break it was apparent that university-sponsored international travel in May would be impossible. Among the other “pivots” we were struggling with, now we also had to craft an alternative to the study abroad trip. The solution was right there in front of us, one of the faulty members suggested: As our colleague was already on site in eastern Europe, why don’t we have him “lead” the trip virtually? And given future uncertainties of the upcoming months, we could plan the winter break trip in the same fashion. This way, we could still add an 347

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experiential dimension to the curriculum as well as guarantee students could graduate on time. In theory, the idea offered a solid alternative to a wholesale cancellation of the seminar abroad. But––perhaps as an early indication of “pivot-fatigue”– –I reacted poorly to my colleague’s helpful suggestion. Instead of getting behind the solution to our COVID-induced problem, I madly flashed my “raised hand” icon in our meeting––the proper way to democratically participate in a group discussion on our university’s virtual classroom and meeting platform––and impatiently intervened before I was called on. Seriously, a “virtual study abroad?” No way. Not happening. I had a stake in this decision: the next trip on our schedule was my own trip with our graduate students to Havana. I have been leading this two-week winter break trip since 2013. Could this deep, immersive experience be substituted with a “virtual” equivalent? I worried that we were thinking in a fog of crisis through which every “virtual” solution seemed like an easy fix. We were months into dealing with the effects of COVID on the university’s short and long-term operations before I had to face the reality of the issue again. I received an email from our university’s study abroad office: Given global conditions and the uncertainty of travel, wouldn’t I like to try my hand at designing a virtual study abroad for my next planned faculty-led trip? I was given an array of webinars and websites to consult. They were filled with success stories from faculty and third-party providers talking about their pivots to virtual programs. Program providers and academic directors spoke of seamless transitions of academic content to the online format, of connecting students on five different continents in WhatsApp groups, and even about the virtues of the online platform in terms of expanding the abilities to host guest speakers from NGOs and corporations. People were simply more available and easier to connect with in virtual space. In sum, the virtual programs were not a poor substitute for the on-the-ground programs––especially those for more advanced students with a higher level of academic content (like my own). I did not disbelieve what I learned about pivots of other programs. In fact, I admired them. But I did not believe I could make the pivot myself. I wanted to keep mine “real.” My insistence on grounded “reality” goes beyond and cuts deeper than confronting COVID-induced circumstances. Instead, it is deeply connected to the important issues both tackled and provoked by this volume; most significantly, the transformative promises and ethical possibilities of study abroad. The work in this book is most revelatory in its explorations of not what is new but what we continue to struggle with and strive to overcome in study abroad’s latent tourism dynamics. This book’s value is in its careful attention to how the “classic” anthropological questions of the touristic encounter are shaped, shifted, and adjusted in the study abroad mise-en-scene. The authors reflexively use their ethnographic toolkit to explore the encounter with the

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Other, the lure and power of cultural difference, the creation of touristic and anti-touristic identities and subjectivities, and the possibilities of ethical rather than exploitative engagements. It is appropriate that we ask these questions very critically, without hesitation or reservation. After all, since in so many of these cases anthropologists are faculty leaders and academic directors of study abroad trips, we are ourselves at the center of the brokering and decision-making. The same is true for the current moment as we are seduced in the fog of crisis into becoming academic tour guides of virtual study abroad programs. Though far from blind or naïve about the global nature of the pandemic, the serious restrictions on travel and student mobility, and the university’s hesitancy toward risk––I was preoccupied not only with the worry over what kind of experience a virtual study abroad could offer but, even more so, what this meant for my Cuban partners. Over the past eight years I had been building the relationships and the means to work almost exclusively without third-party providers to bring up to twenty-five students each year. From my first trip in 2013 until the pandemic, my relationships in Havana had grown closer through a profound political and economic upheaval in the relationship between the Cuba and the United States. The most notable whiplash came as the incredible euphoria of Obama’s diplomatic opening in late 2016 turned to a swift re-enactment of travel and trade sanctions by the Trump administration. The U.S. tourists who had flooded Havana’s streets disappeared just as Cuban entrepreneurs found the capital to prepare for what they thought was to be their new future. COVID brought an already dire economic situation to crisis levels as the tourism sector was entirely shut down. Though I brought my students through this thick and thin, continuing a virtual partnership felt out of reach. Internet in Cuba is scarce and unreliable. “Virtual delivery” of classes for Cuban students was not a reality during the COVID lockdown. Instead, students watch classes on state-run TV stations. As much as I wanted to keep my commitments to my Cuban partners (as we are their major foreign partner and annual source of hard currency), a virtual exchange under the terms and models offered by my university and my U.S. counterparts was not possible. In this case, “virtual” was neither a solution nor even an option. Virtual study abroad will become more and more attractive as a go-to “fix” in a post-COVID world––one in which decisions about the importance of global travel will weigh the reality of risk against the perception of threat. Let’s be sure to not blindly join in the rush to replace the “real” experience with its virtual substitute. Instead, let’s remember the lessons about foregrounding the ethical relationships created through the promises and the politics of study abroad: not just with our students but especially with our partners on the ground. This way we can keep study abroad “real” and maintain its transformative potentials.

Index

adventure, xi, 10, 18, 20–21, 90–91, 108, 113, 149, 162, 177–94, 250, 254, 274, 298 Africa, 10, 12, 41–63, 135–36, 140, 163, 292, 294, 317, 328, 331, 335 AirBnB, 14, 281, 326 alumni, 157, 285, 299; of study abroad programs, 260; and travel, 9, 20 American Anthropological Association (AAA), 295, 308 American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS), 13 anthropology, ii, xiii, 4–5, 12, 17, 30– 31, 43, 124, 126, 137, 153, 237–38, 252, 254, 293, 295, 302, 304–5, 307, 309, 315 anthropology of food, 237–38, 252, 254 Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group (ATIG), 295–96 anti-tourism, 281–323; movements, 29, 283, 285; protests. See protests, anti-tourism. See also study abroad, as anti-tourism; study abroad as, 3, 13–16, 21, 30–31, 150, 171, 179, 284–85, 299, 314–15, 326 Ascione, Elisa, 11–12, 21, 183–84, 215, 290, 294, 311–12, 328, 330–31 Association of American Colleges and Universities, 303

authenticity, xiii, 24, 120, 141, 159, 196, 204, 216, 249–50, 253, 255, 326; staged-, 12, 15–16, 31, 244, 287, 300 backstage, 12, 16, 21–22, 30–31, 150, 164, 219–20, 249, 299, 309 Banksy, 282 Barbie Savior, 23, 316n2 Barkin, Gareth, 12, 16, 21, 45, 48, 55, 120–21, 125–26, 131, 136, 142n4, 153–54, 180, 196, 237, 297–98, 303, 328–29, 331–32, 334–36 bars, 105, 108, 216, 295 Barth, Fredrik, 11 Biggs, Melissa, 12, 21, 218, 298, 316, 330–31, 335 Bodinger de Uriarte, John, xii, 10–12, 16, 20–22, 24–25, 55, 59, 90, 127, 139, 161, 246, 296–98, 303, 316– 17n2, 329, 334, 339 Bologna Cooperative Studies Program (BCSP), 315 border-crossing, 6, 27, 89–93, 105, 110–12, 152, 154, 180 border-making, 89–91, 107–13, 180 borderzone, 12, 17, 23 boundaries, xiii, 2, 9–11, 22, 27, 30, 81, 133, 152, 157, 181, 189, 191n1, 252, 351

352

Index

336, 339; ethnic, 108; geopolitical, 26. See also Barth, Fredrik Breglia, Lisa, 330, 337 Bruner, Edward M., 12, 154, 199, 205, 210–11, 302 Butcher, Jim, 27–28, 283–84 campus, xii, 5–7, 9–10, 12–13, 19, 25, 30, 123–24, 131, 136, 260, 298–99, 329, 332–33, 336, 339, 340 Caribbean, 71, 74, 83, 85–86, 329, 339–40 Catholicism, 197–204, 208, 289–90, 313–14 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 127, 338 Christianity, 197–201, 204, 208, 212n5, 290. See also Catholicism; Protestantism Christou, Anastasia, 267–68 Chronicle of Higher Education, 4–5 class: economic, 2, 11, 18, 20–21, 52, 67–69, 92–94, 99, 101, 104–5, 110–12, 137, 150, 157–58, 171, 197, 247, 283, 295, 303, 316; study abroad, 10, 19, 30, 58, 70–83, 85, 106, 135, 142n4, 149, 155–56, 161, 163–68, 171, 178–79, 181, 186–90, 215–23, 229n1, 230n4, 235, 237–39, 241–42, 245–46, 248–49, 252, 254, 256, 260, 275–76, 293, 298–99, 304, 306–7, 310–11, 315, 316–17n2, 328, 332–33, 339, 341, 348–49 cleansing, 95–97, 110–11, 295 Coffman, Jennifer, 12, 16, 52–53, 290, 293, 316, 329–31, 336 Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI), 306–7 colonial history, 71, 85, 151, 339 colonialism, 13, 339 comfort zone, 2–3, 10, 12, 21, 24–25, 81, 90, 92, 110, 125, 137, 150–52, 154, 157, 165, 171, 177–79, 184–92, 198, 201–3, 222, 226–27, 240, 303– 4, 336, 339. See also discomfort

commodification, 19–20, 225. See also study abroad, commodification of communication, 51–52, 89, 121, 130– 33, 137, 243, 304, 339; intercultural, 1, 5, 42, 246 communitas, 92–93, 289, 310–11. See also ritual cooking classes, 215–22, 237, 248–49, 252, 297, 328, 330 cosmopolitanism, 14, 283–84, 295, 300, 315–16 COVID–19, 325–27; impacts on study abroad, xv, 325–41, 347 crime, 75–76, 78, 84, 86n2, 135, 245 cruises, 29, 281–82, 295–96, 326–28, 335–38 Cuba, 11, 149–73, 303, 327, 338–39, 349 cultural competence, 11–12, 188 culture, ii, xii, 3–6, 10–12, 14–18, 25–28, 31, 44–45, 67–70, 77–78, 80–81, 92–93, 97, 105, 111, 122, 124–25, 136–39, 149–60, 162–63, 169–70, 172, 180, 196–98, 201, 203, 206, 216–18, 223, 228, 235–56, 260, 263, 266–68, 271, 274–75, 277–79, 289–90, 292–300, 303, 305–6, 308, 314–17, 340 culture shock, 162 Dance, 21, 75, 101, 134, 149–51, 155– 56, 163–72, 196, 267, 274, 303, 337 danger, xv, 10–11, 13, 57, 89–90, 97– 98, 127, 161–62, 171, 181, 190, 191, 200–202, 204–6, 241; managed-, 25, 177–79 data analysis, 75, 77, 79, 151 dating, 24, 297–98 Department of Defense, 263–64 Department of State, 2, 45, 259–60, 263–64 Dewey, John, 17–18, 155 diaspora, 260, 266–68, 276, 316 Didion, Joan, 266

Index

difference, 3, 6, 11–13, 17, 20–21, 23– 24, 27, 48, 60, 62, 73, 89–93, 101–5, 110–13, 119–28, 133, 136–37, 139– 41, 152, 154, 156, 158–59, 161, 178, 180–81, 183, 186–89, 191n2, 206–9, 211–12, 225–26, 235, 238–39, 242– 43, 247–48, 252, 254, 277, 286, 289, 291–92, 300–301, 307, 310, 339, 341, 348–49 Di Giovine, Michael, xii, 1–2, 9, 11–12, 15–16, 20–24, 27, 89–90, 92–93, 107, 111, 120, 134, 157–57, 168–69, 197–202, 206, 236, 240, 253, 282, 285–89, 291, 294–96, 299, 302, 310– 11, 315, 329–32, 334–37, 340 discomfort, 12, 24–25, 55, 59, 119–20, 122–24, 126–27, 129–30, 133–34, 136, 141, 152, 163–65, 171, 185, 187–88, 190–92, 195, 200–204, 226–27, 236, 266, 268, 291, 298, 311; -zone, 177–81. See also comfort zone Disney, Walt, 23–24 doctors, 113, 338–39 Doerr, Neriko, 10–12, 21–22, 55, 90– 92, 105–7, 109, 126–27, 141, 154, 180–81, 186–87, 240, 298, 300–301, 310–11, 339 drugs, 212n6; medical use. See medicine; use among students, 297 Dubrovnik, 281, 295 economics, 4, 13, 20, 25, 54, 123, 140– 41: profit, 13–15, 24, 41, 90, 121–22, 123, 127–34, 137, 139, 140–41, 178, 286, 288–89, 291; costs to hosts, 204–5, 218–19 246–47, 330–31; costs to students, 90–91, 94, 99, 108; leakage, 291; losses, 330 education: as central component in study abroad, 12–13, 122–24, 134–35, 149–54; experiential, xii, 6–7, 196, 246; high-impact, 15–19, 25, 31, 42. See also Kuh, George; international-, 5–6, 9, 42, 45, 119,

353

121–24, 131, 133, 137–38, 255, 334, 336; and siloing, 20 education abroad. See study abroad educational tourism. See tourism, educational edutainment, 23–24 edutourism, 14,152–54 embodied learning, 150–52, 166–67, 303–4 ethics, 284–85, 305–7, 325, 335; difference from morals, 314–15 ethnocentrism, 25–26, 31, 69, 121, 136–37, 284, 293–94, 339–40 ethnography, 15, 17, 21, 67, 75, 79, 90–91, 119, 121–25, 129, 133–34, 139, 151, 155–57, 249–50, 285, 302, 304, 313–14, 337, 348; difference between tourism and, 4–5; of restaurants, 254; teaching, 73–76, 78–79, 82–83, 86; use in study abroad, 3, 12, 17, 31, 70–72, 93–94, 142, 252–54, 303, 305–7, 310 ethnomusicology, 161, 303 expatriates, 271, 297, 301–2 experiential learning, 19, 48, 155, 157, 171, 186, 196, 252, 296, 337–38 farming, 218, 245 festivals, 108, 216, 218–19, 265, 312 field methods, 67, 70–71, 83 field notes, 305–6 fiestas. See festivals food, 11, 21, 56, 79, 95, 100, 103, 157–59, 170–71, 179, 185, 187, 191, 200–201, 215–30, 235–56, 267, 269–70, 294, 306–7, 312, 315, 328, 332, 338; local, 72, 86, 158, 215–16, 229, 301; photography of, 243–43; producers, 215–16, 229–30, 236–37, 249, 251–52 food studies programs, 11, 235, 238–40 Forum for Education Abroad, 7, 129 freedom, 30, 138, 161, 170, 261, 266, 271, 276, 309

354

Index

Fulbright Program, 4, 9, 13, 226, 262– 64, 277, 301. See also Institute of International Education (IIE) Fussell, Paul, 283 Game of Thrones, 275–76 gap year, 14, 17, 44, 120, 198, 289, 296–97 Geertz, Clifford, 71, 79, 300 gender, 4, 47–48, 75, 94, 125, 135, 137, 149–51, 155–56, 163, 185, 303, 316 general education requirements, 298–99 Global Attitudes, Survey, 25–26 global citizenship, xv, 1, 12, 14–16, 18, 25–31, 48, 67–72, 78, 84, 86, 152– 54, 177–78, 180–81, 186–89, 191, 240, 278, 284–85, 289, 298, 315–16, 325, 341 globalization, 7–8, 26–28, 68–70, 92– 93, 140, 149, 180, 340 Goffman, Erving, 12, 22, 183 Graburn, Nelson, 17, 110, 151, 205, 236, 286, 288 Grand Tour, 15, 17–18, 20, 31, 124, 296–99, 337 Greer, Aaron, 12, 15–16, 21, 25, 77, 188, 303–4, 307, 315, 329, 334 guests. See hosts, and guests guide, 21, 23, 30, 98, 100–101, 104, 125–26, 134, 138–39, 142, 150, 154, 171, 184–85, 198, 204, 220, 235, 239, 251, 263, 304–5, 308–17, 326, 331, 333, 349 guidebook, 91, 283 guilt, 197, 203, 266, 270–71, 275, 278, 295, 301 Hajj, 288–89 Handler, Richard, 14, 24, 45, 48, 57 HBO, 295–96 health, 4, 10–11, 53–56, 94–95, 97–99, 121, 123–24, 126–32, 138–39, 170, 205–6, 208, 211, 215–16, 225, 229– 30, 242, 246, 284, 288, 290, 307, 312 healthcare, 337–39. See also medicine

heritage, 9–10, 24, 29, 84, 98, 100, 104, 134, 217, 223, 244, 250, 252–53, 259–61, 263–64, 266–68, 277–79, 282–83, 306, 315, 337 high-impact learning experiences, 1, 15–16, 19, 25, 31, 42–43, 52, 61–62, 304, 308–10, 335–36, 339. See also education, high impact; Kuh, George holiday, 22, 71, 202, 242–43, 265, 281, 284. See also vacation homestay, 6, 12, 21, 52–54, 58, 105, 120, 135–36, 150, 157–59, 163–64, 171, 216, 227–30, 270, 300–302, 314, 330 hostels, 271 hosts, 5, 9, 11–17, 29–31, 42, 46–49, 52–54, 57–58, 60–62, 91–94, 105– 12, 135–36, 142, 150–51, 171, 179, 181, 204–5, 207, 215–19, 236–37, 244, 246–47, 250, 263, 270, 278, 290–97, 301; and guests, 58–60, 157–59, 205, 207–9, 219, 225, 227– 29, 230n3, 252, 286, 300, 311–12, 326–28, 330, 336, 347–48 hotel, 11, 20–21, 90, 95, 103–4, 157–58, 224, 288, 300, 312, 326 humanitarianism, 22, 45, 208, 211, 247, 292; popular-, 247, 294. See also Jolie, Angelina hyphenated identity, 9, 260, 262, 266– 67, 276, 278, 279n1 Iceland, 6, 178, 187–88, 191n3 imaginaries, 3, 10, 15, 23, 43, 62, 98, 110, 153–54, 168, 170, 173, 192, 205, 223, 236, 255, 286–87, 293, 297, 299, 302, 325–26; student, 91, 108, 162, 168, 171, 185, 227–28, 294; tourist, 90, 149–51, 161, 168, 171, 172, 182, 185, 227, 237, 256, 284, 288, 294, 309, 311 immersion, xv, 4, 6–7, 30, 52–53, 62, 67, 70, 90–92, 94, 105–13, 132, 141, 150–52, 155, 157–58, 171, 173, 177– 78, 186, 238, 242, 297, 339–41

Index

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 333 inequality, 2, 6, 15–16, 26–27, 29, 55, 152, 155, 170, 208, 247–48, 284, 287, 295, 315–16, 339–40 Institute of International Education (IIE), 2, 4, 8, 13, 42, 45–52, 54, 62n1, 70, 120–21, 128, 142, 152, 179, 224, 263–64, 327–28, 333 Institutional Review Board (IRB), 305–6 intercultural competence, 43, 52–53, 58–59, 62, 123, 125, 133–37, 141, 339, 341 interdisciplinary, 29, 31, 238–39, 282, 285–86, 334 internationalization, 3–5, 25, 29–30, 298–99, 325, 332. See also universities, internationalization missions of interview skills, 73–75 Italy, 10, 229–30, 235–56, 292–93, 296, 301, 303, 307, 326–28, 330 Jolie, Angelina, 294–95 Journal for Sustainable Tourism, 29 Kenya, 49–50, 52–54, 58–60, 221, 329 Kok, Ilja, 17 Kuh, George, 18–19, 155, 303, 305, 310 Lampman, Aaron, 10, 12, 16, 21, 300, 303, 309, 329, 338–39 language, xii, 4, 26; ability, 42, 46–47, 67–68, 70, 70, 89, 155, 158, 183, 185, 187, 191, 197, 235, 238, 240, 242, 246, 247, 252, 263, 267, 274– 75, 277, 281, 293, 296, 307, 309, 316; acquisition, 216, 228–29, 297, 300–301; translation, 273 learning outcomes. See study abroad, learning outcomes of Levi-Strauss, Claude, 4–5, 302 liability, 10, 128–29, 179, 185–86, 309 localism, 223 Lonely Planet, 217, 230, 283

355

MacCannell, Dean, 12, 22, 157–58, 183, 204 markets, 94–95, 101–3, 158–59, 215, 221– 22, 225–26, 238, 265, 286, 300, 305–6 McDonald’s, 229n2, 301 medicine, 98–99, 195, 199, 201–2, 205–7, 209–10, 248 Medlife, 291, 293 Mexico, 102, 195–97, 199–201, 208–9, 211–12, 212n6, 216–30, 330–31 missions, 5, 15, 195, 198–99, 203; medical, 207, 209, 211 mobility, xv, 1, 3, 7, 10, 15, 27–28, 31, 60, 223, 284, 286–87, 295, 299–300, 302, 316n1, 325–27, 337, 349; degree-, 9 Mormonism, 289–90 Morocco, 10, 178, 184, 191n3 music, 149–57, 160–61, 163–73, 218, 266–67, 298, 303 nation-state, 27, 30, 68, 92–93, 284; ideology, 110 negotiation, 5, 11–12, 17, 23, 27, 43, 54, 74, 78–79, 119, 120, 134, 136, 141, 188, 204, 237, 240, 260, 286, 288– 89, 295, 308, 311, 313, 315, 326 neoliberalism, xi, 15, 19–20, 22–23, 26, 28–29, 31, 44, 119, 121, 123, 137– 41, 179–81, 183, 187–88, 246, 247, 253, 283, 294–95; and universities, 13–14, 18, 22, 304 networked hospitality, 300 Nguyen, Annie, 9–10, 12, 300–301, 308, 316, 329, 340 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 22, 45, 52, 55–56, 58, 61, 221–22, 348 nostalgia, 150–51, 172–73; imperialist-, 151–52, 169, 172 nutrition, 200–201, 304, 307, 312 Ogden, Anthony, 20, 24, 91, 123, 177, 186, 248 Open Doors Report on International Education Exchange, 2, 48–49, 224.

356

Index

See also Institute of International Education (IIE) O’Rourke, Dennis, 17 othering, 10, 54, 89–90, 93, 97–98, 109, 183 otherness, 17, 23, 74, 151, 158, 160–61, 191n1, 226, 286, 288, 301, 326 overtourism, 14, 29, 282 pandemic, xii, 327, 330, 334, 338–41, 347; reopening of tourism after, 333, 335, 349; and shift to virtual delivery, 336; study abroad uncertainty and, xv–xvi, 326–27, 329. See also COVID–19 participant observation, 21, 95, 150, 155, 216, 252, 254, 303, 313, 341. See also ethnography pedagogy, 20, 123–24, 134, 139–42, 185–86, 304, 308. 334–36 Peru, 90–91, 93, 99–105, 108, 111–12 Perugia, 235–42, 249, 252–56, 293–94, 297, 311–13, 315, 328, 330–31 Pew Research Center, 25–26 photography, 182–84, 187, 189, 190, 192, 217–18, 223, 243–44, 302. See also food, photography of pilgrimage, 15, 120, 124–26, 195–202, 210–12, 287–89, 301–2, 309–17, 337–38 political science, 62–63, 74, 224 postcolonialism, 339–41 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 308 Prazak, Miroslava, 12, 16, 290, 293, 316, 330–31, 336 prep class, 30, 71–78, 82, 85, 339–40 pricing, 11, 20–21, 44, 89–91, 94, 99–102, 104, 108–9, 111–13, 226, 229–30, 281–82, 228. See also study abroad, pricing private visits, 20–21, 299 professor, 3, 63, 236–37, 259, 277, 285, 331, 333; as concierge, 30, 309; as guide, 13–14, 16, 20, 30, 68, 94–100,

298–300; as mentor, 235, 303, 305, 307–16; as promoter, 153 Program development, 25–29, 263. See also study abroad protestantism, 197–98 protests: anti-tourism, 15–16, 282; racial, 339; student, xi–xii race, 94, 125, 149–51, 316; and racism, 104, 136–37; teaching, 28, 155, 339. See also Protests, racial Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA), 304–5 Ratner, Vaddey, 266 refugee, 9, 262–64, 267–68, 276–79, 292 research, 25–26, 68–69, 80, 83–85, 105, 138–39, 198, 206–7, 217, 219, 225, 252, 262, 264, 268, 303–4, 307–8, 311–13, 315, 316n1, 336; in choosing a study abroad program, 240; component of study abroad program, 21, 30, 43, 72, 74–76, 78, 83, 135, 262–63, 275–76, 303; ethnographic. See ethnography; planning a program, 82–83; studentfaculty, 303, 305, 310, 315, 328. See also study abroad, as a highimpact educational practice; on study abroad, 3–5, 17, 30–31, 52, 91–96, 99–100, 105, 119–24, 137, 151, 191n3, 216, 227, 229n1, 305–6, 325; on tourism, 14–15; Universities, xi risk, xii, 10–11, 21, 24, 55, 61, 92, 95, 97, 99, 120–21, 127–28, 130–31, 135–36, 177, 181, 184–92, 201, 204, 208, 226, 275, 292–93, 309, 325, 338, 349; -management, vx, 119, 123–24, 132, 139, 177–78, 185–86 rite of passage, 302; study abroad, as, 124, 153, 186, 199–220, 296 ritual, 10, 17, 70, 90–99, 110–11, 120, 124–27, 137, 149–52, 155–57, 163– 73, 183, 198, 230, 244, 252, 286, 303, 310; collective, 90–91, 94–99, 110–11

Index

romance, 12, 20, 43, 152–53, 164, 241, 255, 282, 300, 309 Romanticism (movement), 296–97 safety, 10, 86n1, 104, 120, 123, 162, 165, 215–16, 248, 262, 282; and pandemic, 325–26, 333–34, 337–38; protocols on tour, 8, 24–25, 44, 58–59, 76–77, 86n1, 89–91, 94–95, 97–98, 111, 126–35, 138–39, 153, 185–87, 201, 203, 240–41, 250, 297–98 Saigon, 264, 268–69, 273–74, 276, 279n2 Salazar, Noel, 23, 27, 110, 151, 182, 205, 223, 229, 236–37, 309 sanctions, social, 11 Santería, 150, 155–56, 163, 166–68, 172 Schweitzer, Don, 12, 15–16, 21, 25, 188, 303–4, 307, 315, 329, 334 Schweitzer, Kenneth, 10, 12, 16, 21, 300, 303, 309, 329, 338–39 seducation, 309 seduction, 23–24, 149–50, 236–37, 309–10, 349 selfies, 182–84, 236–37, 242–43 Semester at Sea, 328 Serio, Katharine, 9, 12, 22, 126, 289– 90, 294, 329 service-learning, 13–14, 21–25, 41–44, 48–49, 52–54, 57, 60–62, 67, 70, 125, 139, 185–86, 198, 244–46, 248, 290–95, 325. See also study abroad, service; volunteerism; voluntourism short-term study abroad. See study abroad, short-term short-term travel class, 67, 72, 83–84 Sierra Leone, 90–91, 93–100, 102, 105, 110–12 Slow Food, 218–19, 229n2, 253, 338 slow tourism, 338 social media, 8, 23–24, 54, 159–60, 208, 237, 242–45, 330–31, 335 sociology, 4, 31, 84–85, 209

357

Spain, 70–73, 76–77, 90–91, 93, 105–6, 109, 111–12, 169–70, 227, 240, 296, 299, 301, 327 staged authenticity. See authenticity, staged stereotypes, 10–11, 22, 105, 112–14, 153–54, 161, 205, 251, 254, 292, 295, 299–300; ethnic, 152; of mass tourism, 15–16, 98, 287 strategic essentialisms, 159–60 Strauss, Virginia, 17, 25–26, 302 stress, 4, 164–65, 197, 331, 347. See also health student: graduate, 4, 216, 224, 262–63, 304, 347–48. See also Fulbright Program; international, 109, 178, 216, 237–38, 332–33; pre-medical, 291–93; undergraduate, 4–5, 41–42, 46–55, 85, 119–20, 133–34, 152–53, 179, 235, 262–63, 291–93, 299, 303, 305–8, 315, 326, 347 Student and Youth Travel Association (SYTA), 8 Student Travel Association (STA), 8 study abroad, xvi; as anti-tourism, 3, 13–17, 21, 29–31, 150–51, 171, 179, 284–87, 290–91, 295, 299, 302–3, 308, 314–17, 326–27. See also antitourism; assessment and, 13–14, 18, 61, 91, 126, 141, 190, 228–29, 305– 6; carbon footprint of, 6, 23, 29–30; as career preparation, 18, 20, 26, 28, 62, 125, 222, 262–63, 290, 298–99, 304; commodification of, 19–20, 255–56; cost of, 14, 42, 45, 52–53, 101–2, 110–12, 130–31, 153–54, 291, 293–94, 299, 329, 336–37, 339– 40; and cross-cultural understanding, 6, 8–10, 18–19, 42, 90–92, 112, 126, 135–38, 149, 152, 154, 168, 180, 189, 316, 335–36; decrease after COVID–19, 325–41, 347–49. See also pandemic; definition of, 5–7, 13; domestic, 6–7, 10, 12, 289–90,

358

Index

298, 339, 341. See also study away; and embodiment, xv, 24, 167, 183, 228, 251, 297, 300, 316, 325–26, 328, 335–38; as a high-impact educational practice, 1–2, 15–16, 19, 25, 42–43, 52, 62, 132, 297–98, 308–10, 335–39; historical increase of, 2, 29–30, 41–42, 49, 51–52, 62, 70, 121–22, 133, 152–54; learning outcomes of, 1, 3, 15, 18–23, 26–29, 43, 51, 58, 60, 62, 68, 70, 74, 78, 82, 91, 121–23, 125, 127, 139–40, 150, 167, 177–78, 181, 183, 186–88, 191, 196, 228, 240, 244, 246–48, 250, 265, 283, 288, 310, 328, 335–36, 341; length of, 3, 7–9, 17–18, 305, 334. See also study abroad, shortterm; marketing and, xii, 12, 18, 22, 24, 26, 48, 54, 69, 119, 128, 151–53, 236–37, 240, 255, 284–85, 307, 309, 316; and neoliberalism, xi–xiii, 13–15, 18–20, 22–23, 26, 28–29, 31, 119–21, 123, 137–41, 179–81, 187–88, 295; origins of, 20. See also Grand Tour; and pricing, 90–91, 94, 99, 108. See also study abroad, cost of; as a product, 18–20, 127, 179; promotion of, 12, 124–25, 130, 132, 177, 182, 186–88, 192, 229, 236; providers, xv, 4, 11–13, 18–19, 30–31, 44–46, 48–49, 52–53, 100–102, 119–24, 127, 128–39, 141n2, 142n4, 178–81, 185, 237, 250–51, 294, 295–96, 308–9, 311– 13, 326, 330–31, 334–35, 338, 340, 348–49; recovery from pandemic, 326, 334–41. See also pandemic; as rite of passage, 199–20, 124, 153, 186, 296; and service, xii, 12, 14–17, 20–25, 41–45, 48–49, 52–53, 57, 60–63, 70, 121–22, 125, 139, 179–80, 185–86, 198–99, 229, 246– 48, 261, 287, 289–300, 310, 314, 325, 328. See also service-learning; volunteerism; voluntourism; short-

term, 19, 119–27, 125, 136–37, 153–54, 196, 299; similarities to tourism, 2, 4, 7–9, 14–17, 110, 134, 289, 297; and status, 27–28, 90–91, 111–12, 124–26, 169–70, 243, 289; Student Learning Paradigm of, 18; as supplemental education, 5–7, 9–10, 12–13, 17–18, 166, 172, 296; theories of, xi, 3, 124, 128, 154, 183, 191–92, 285; as transformative, 8, 10, 13–14, 19, 27, 30–31, 62, 119– 20, 124, 127, 155, 195, 240, 326–27, 348–49; universities and, xi–xii, 1–3, 6, 9, 13–14, 18, 20–22, 29–31, 44–46, 62, 69–70, 93, 121–26, 141, 142n5, 178–80, 188, 191–92, 196, 235, 237–38, 260, 262, 285, 289, 298–99, 331–33, 336–37, 347–49; and university administration, 196; virtual, 30, 328–32, 336–37, 348–49 study away, 23–24, 27, 178–79, 230, 260, 339; and differences with study abroad, 5–7, 9 Susquehanna University, 6–7, 10, 18, 339 sustainability, 14–15, 52, 68, 216–17, 235, 237–39, 244–46, 281–83, 285, 287, 291, 294–96, 314; COVID’s effects on, 335–37; of study abroad, xv, 28–30, 315–16; teaching, 245–47, 312. See also study abroad, carbon footprint of Swahili, 60, 331 Tanzania, 49–50, 54–55, 329 taste, 21, 67, 100, 158, 196, 205, 215– 29, 254, 312; and distaste, 254 Thomas Cook, 283 tourism, xii–xiii, xv, 1–4, 7–9, 11–17, 20, 28–31, 43–44, 52, 55, 57, 60, 62, 67, 70, 81, 85, 90, 92–93, 98, 101–2, 110, 112, 120–26, 128, 132, 134, 150–51, 157, 161–62, 169–72, 177, 179, 190–91, 195–99, 202, 204–6, 208, 212n3, 216–17, 222, 223, 229,

Index

236, 238–39, 243–44, 247–51, 255– 56, 268, 281–317, 325–31, 334–38, 348–49; culinary, 215–17, 221, 229; domestic, 7, 12, 298, 327, 300; educational, 9, 14, 17, 20–25, 152– 54, 156–57, 198, 295–300, 302, 307, 337; Visiting Friends and Relatives (VFR), 15, 300–302, 311, 316n1; volunteer. See voluntourism tourismphilia, 282 tourismphobia, 282 Tourism Research Information Network (TRINET), 334 tourist bubble, 150–51, 157–59, 171, 284–86, 299–300 tourist gaze, 23, 57, 150, 196 tourist gentrification, 14–15, 281 touristification, 14–15 tourist imaginaries. See imaginaries, tourist tour operator, 8, 291. See also study abroad, provider travel confidence, 74, 78, 92 Trinidad and Tobago, 70–74, 78, 80, 83, 334, 339 Turin, 313 Uganda, 49–51, 55–61, 95 Umbra Institute, 315 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 25, 217, 223, 282, 337 United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), 2, 282–83, 327 universities, xi–xii, 1–6, 9–10, 13–14, 16, 18–24, 29–31, 44–46, 48–50, 54, 59, 62, 93, 106, 121–24, 126–29, 131, 134, 139–42, 178–80, 189, 191,

359

237–38, 246–47, 260, 262–63, 269, 289, 304, 307–8, 310, 314–15, 329, 341, 347–49; internationalization missions of, 25–26, 67–70, 152–53, 235, 278–79, 284–85, 298–99, 331–34, 336–37. See also internationalization. See also study abroad, universities and Urry, John, 7, 57, 151, 157, 165, 237, 243–44, 255–56, 286, 295 Utooni Development Organization, 58–60 vacation, 22, 44, 74, 196–98, 201–2, 212, 239, 328. See also holiday Vietnam, 9, 259–69, 271, 273–77, 294–95, 301 Vietnam War, 261–65, 276–77 volunteerism, 42–44, 52, 153, 295 voluntourism, 12, 14, 22–23, 42–45, 57, 196, 208–9, 247, 290–95, 302, 307–8 Vrasti, Wanda, 19, 26, 290 weekending, 191n1 West Chester University, 6, 10, 29–30, 331–32 witnessing, 212n5 Wong, Ali, 267 World Heritage sites, 24, 282 writing, 52, 71, 73–74, 89, 91, 109, 134, 138, 142, 155, 170, 178, 218, 249, 317; creative, 259–61, 263, 271, 275–77; ethnography, 83, 302 Young Southeast Asian Leaders’ Initiative (YSALI), 332 Zemach-Bersin, Tayla, 18, 20, 25, 69, 188–89

About the Contributors

Elisa Ascione is the coordinator of the Center for Food and Sustainability Studies at the Umbra Institute, a U.S. study abroad program in Perugia, Italy. A cultural anthropologist, she teaches courses on sustainability and food production in Italy, anthropology of food, and history and culture of food in Italy. She has conducted research and published on heritagization processes of foods in Central Italy, and on the intersection of migration, work, and gender relations in Italy. Gareth Barkin is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research is focused on practices surrounding the representation of culture in and of Southeast Asia. His current project explores short-term study abroad at U.S. universities, focusing on the representation of Southeast Asian culture and place in an increasingly market-driven pedagogical arena. He has led numerous shortand long-term study-abroad programs and works to develop collaborative approaches that focus on mutual, productive engagement between Indonesian and American college students. He is a professor of anthropology at the University of Puget Sound. Lisa Breglia is senior associate dean and associate professor of global affairs at George Mason University. Her research examines the struggles between the public good and private sector development in the cases of natural and cultural resources. She is a specialist in Latin America and has conducted ethnographic research in the Yucatán Peninsula for more than twenty years. She has been bringing students to Havana, Cuba, every winter break since 2013. Melissa S. Biggs is a cultural anthropologist with research interests in cultural politics and representation, critical heritage studies, food culture studies, and 361

362

About the Contributors

nationalism and indigenous rights. She was a 2016–2017 Fulbright–García Robles Scholar in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. John J. Bodinger de Uriarte is a cultural anthropologist with research interests in national and small museums; discourses of study abroad, adventure, and self-transformation; and tourism. He serves as chair of the sociology and anthropology department and directs both the Museum Studies Program and the Diversity Studies Program at Susquehanna. He has led multiple short-term study-abroad programs to the Galápagos, Iceland, and Morocco. His publications include Casino and Museum: Representing Mashantucket Pequot Identity. Jennifer Coffman is a cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching focuses on human–environment interactions and issues of development from a political ecology perspective. She studies land and wildlife resource management and sociocultural change, participatory development and ethnic politicking, and local land and food production issues in East Africa, and she established and directs James Madison University’s East Africa Field School, an intensive summer program. Coffman is professor of integrated science and technology and associate executive director at the Center for Global Engagement at James Madison University. Michael A. Di Giovine is associate professor of anthropology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and honorary fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Michael is also the director of the West Chester University Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, the convener of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group, a member of ICOMOS and its International Cultural Tourism Committee (ICTC), and a consultant for museums and heritage sites. Michael has been involved in study-abroad and educational travel his whole life—participating first at a young age and then through college, as director of operations for an educational tour operator, and currently as the director of a successful ethnographic field school in Perugia, Italy. Michael’s research spans Europe and Southeast Asia and focuses on tourism, pilgrimage, heritage, foodways, and religion. Among other venues, he has been featured on National Public Radio, The Boston Globe, Atlas Obscura, La Cucina Italiana, and The Economist. Michael is the author of The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage, and Tourism (2009). With Ronda Brulotte, he is the coeditor of Edible Identities: Food and Foodways as Cultural Heritage (2014); with David Picard Tourism and the Power of Otherness: Seductions of Difference (2014) and The Seductions of Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious

About the Contributors

363

Tradition (2015); and with Jaeyeon Choe Pilgrimage Beyond the Officially Sacred (2020). He sits on the academic board of The International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage and is the book reviews editor for both Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing and the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. Michael is the editor of Lexington Books’ series, The Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility and Society. Neriko Musha Doerr received a PhD in cultural anthropology from Cornell University and currently teaches at Ramapo College in New Jersey, United States, as assistant professor of anthropology and international studies. Her research interests include politics of difference, language and power, and education in Japan, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the United States, as well as study-abroad and alternative break abroad experiences. Her publications include  Meaningful Inconsistencies: Bicultural Nationhood, Free Market, and Schooling in Aotearoa/New Zealand,  Transforming Study Abroad: A Handbook, and The Global Education Effect and Japan: Constructing New Borders and Identification Practices. Aaron Andrew Greer is currently assistant professor of anthropology at Pacific University in Oregon. His dissertation focused on the role of Hindu religious education in alleviating economic anxieties among East Indian communities in Trinidad and Tobago in the Southern Caribbean. His current research explores the problem of law and the relationship between the polis and the State in Trinidad and Tobago. Richard Handler is professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia; he was the founding director of the Global Studies program, in which role he served for eleven years. Handler has written on nationalism and cultural politics and is currently completing a book on the national iconography of U.S. postage stamps. Aaron Lampman is associate professor of anthropology and international studies at Washington College. He received his PhD in environmental anthropology from the University of Georgia. His research, funded by NSF and NIH, has focused on ethnoecology and sustainable development in Mexico and Panama. He also conducts disaster mitigation research focused on culturally influenced perceptions of risk associated with climate change and sea-level rise. Annie Nguyen is a lecturer of writing studies at the University of Washington–Tacoma. She completed a Fulbright in Creative Writing in Vietnam in 2001and began independent travels in Southeast Asia. She led

364

About the Contributors

students in global leadership programs in China and Europe from 2005 to 2007, promoted and oversaw the study-abroad program as the director of global studies at the Community College of Baltimore County from 2010 to 2012, and has designed and executed short-term study-away/study-abroad programs in England, Thailand, Vietnam, and Hawaii. Miroslava Prazak teaches anthropology at Bennington College, focusing her longitudinal research in East Africa on gender, age, social, economy-based inequalities, and particularly the impact of economic development on various cultural institutions, including family, education, and healthcare systems. In addition, her interests include ways of knowing, gender ideologies, rites of passage, and historical change. Don D. Schweitzer has worked extensively with young people as a practitioner, an educator, and a researcher. His dissertation work incorporated the tenets of Positive Youth Development and resulted in invitations to national social work symposiums at the University of Houston and the Ohio State University. He is the director of the Bachelors Program in Social Work, and the Chair of the Department of Social Work and Public Health at Pacific University. Kenneth Schweitzer has spent almost two decades studying Afro-Cuban musical culture, with a focus on African-rooted religious forms (Santería, Palo, and Abaku). Schweitzer returns to Cuba annually to continue learning more about the unique musical, cultural, and political landscape of this Caribbean island nation. An associate professor of music at Washington College, Dr. Schweitzer has expertise as both a drummer and an ethnomusicologist; since 2014, Ken has created educational adventures in Cuba for both students and private groups. His publications include The Artistry of Afro-Cuban Batá: Aesthetics, Transmission, Bonding and Creativity (2013). Katharine Serio completed her PhD in anthropology from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, in spring 2020. For her dissertation Born-Again on Sundays, she worked in Belize examining religious performances and narratives of a Methodist Church.