This first full length treatment of volunteer tourism taking a longitudinal ethnographic approach offers a comprehensive and comparative study of the perspectives of Thai host community members, NGO practitioners and international volunteer tourists. The book thus shines an ethnographic lens onto the complexities and contradictions of the volunteer tourism experience. Drawing on cross-disciplinary perspectives in geography and anthropology as well as development, tourism and cultural studies, Volunteer Tourism illustrates how a focus on sentimentality in the volunteer tourism encounter obscures the structural inequalities on which the experience is based.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Sentimental Sojourns in Northern Thailand; Chapter 2 "Making a Difference One Village at a Time": Volunteer Tourism and the Peace Corps Effect; Chapter 3 The Seduction of Development: NGOs and Alternative Tourism in Northern Thailand; Chapter 4 Cosmopolitan Empathy, New Social Movements and the Moral Economy of Volunteer Tourism; Chapter 5 The Cultural Politics of Sentimentality in Volunteer Tourism; Chapter 6 Converging Interests? Cross-Cultural Authenticity in Volunteer Tourism; Chapter 7 Conclusion-Re-mapping the Movement: Popular Humanitarianism and the Geopolitics of Hope in Volunteer Tourism;