LE3 .A278 2013

2013

Brittain, James

Acadia University

Bachelor of Arts

Honours

Sociology

Sociology

Under neoliberalism, consequential impoverishment, exploitation, and environmental degradation perpetually guarantee the demand for the development enterprise. The timely emergence of neoliberal doctrine with various trajectories of a new development was anything but coincidental, as the formation of a capitalist hegemon reinforced the need for a development counterpart. Thereby, the development enterprise is presently circular, recurring, and thus quite profitable. As a growing humanitarian consciousness materializes, a disregard for relations of power and privilege remains pertinent. Within the focus on contemporary development, characterized by a fashionable civil society, professionalized Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and online activism, students are recruited into Student Volunteer Abroad Programs (SVAPs). Effectively, these altruistic and esteemed volunteer programs focus on the false binary, the North-South divide. Poverty in the Third World is sensationalized while poverty within North America appears non-existent. As a result, volunteerism has become an international and exotic phenomenon, which is arguably characterized by volunteer self-betterment, and more seriously, the depoliticization and pacification of social movements pushing for substantive change. This work utilizes secondary source analysis to examine the perhaps ineffectual nature of SVAPs, suggesting that fragmented apolitical identities are informed by the imperial capitalist development fantasy that works within—not against—the predominant system of exploitation.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:949