What draws people to study abroad or volunteer in far-off communities? Often the answer is romance – the romance of landscapes, people, languages, the very sense of border-crossing – and longing for liberation, attraction to the unknown, yearning to make a difference. This volume explores the complicated and often fraught desires to study and volunteer abroad. In doing so, the book sheds light on how affect is managed by educators and mobilized by students and volunteers themselves, and how these structures of feeling relate to broader social and economic forces.

What draws people to study abroad or volunteer in far-off communities? Often the answer is romance – the romance of landscapes, people, languages, the very sense of border-crossing – and longing for liberation, attraction to the unknown, yearning to make a difference. This volume explores the complicated and often fraught desires to study and volunteer abroad. In doing so, the book sheds light on how affect is managed by educators and mobilized by students and volunteers themselves, and how these structures of feeling relate to broader social and economic forces.

List of Tables

Preface
Michael Woolf

Acknowledgements

PART I: INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1. Affect and Romance in Study and Volunteer Abroad: Introducing our Project
Neriko Musha Doerr and Hannah Davis Taïeb

Chapter 2. Study Abroad and its Reasons: A Critical Overview of the Field
Hannah Davis Taïeb and Neriko Musha Doerr

PART II: STUDYING WITH(OUT) PASSION: STUDY ABROAD AND AFFECT

Chapter 3. Passionate Displacements into Other Tongues and Towns: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Shifting into a Second Language
Karen Rodriguez

Chapter 4. Sojourn to the Dark Continent: Landscape, Affect in an African Mobility Experience
Bradley Rink

Chapter 5. Thinking through the Romance
Hannah Davis Taïeb, with Emily Bihl, Mai-Linh Bui, Hyojung Kim, and Kaitlin Rosenblum

Chapter 6. Falling in/out of Love with the Place: Affective Investment, Perceptions of Difference, and Learning in Study Abroad
Neriko Musha Doerr

Chapter 7. Learning Japanese/Japan in a Year Abroad in Kyoto: Discourse of Study Abroad, Emotions, and Construction of Self
Yuri Kumagai

PART III: SERVING WITH PASSION: ROMANTIC IMAGES OF SELF AND OTHER IN VOLUNTEERING ABROAD

Chapter 8. One Smile, One Hug: Romanticizing “Making a Difference” to Oneself and Others through English-Language Voluntourism
Cori Jakubiak

Chapter 9. “People with Pants”: Self-Perceptions of WorldTeach Volunteers in the Marshall Islands
Ruochen Richard Li

Conclusion
Hannah Davis Taïeb and Neriko Musha Doerr

Student Photo Essay
Morgan Greer, Lee-Anna John, Richard Suarez, Carla Villacís

Index