Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience

Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience examines the intersections and contradictions of study abroad and tourism, investigating how current study abroad practices engage with the promises of global citizenship. Contributors draw from their substantial experience in designing and running study abroad programs.

What sets study abroad apart from tourism? Both study abroad and mass tourism are experiencing rapid growth in the international market—with study abroad increasingly serving as an integral component of the “university experience”—and both call on the same sorts of processes and infrastructures. Yet study abroad promoters often promise that student travel will not be a tourist experience but something deeper, more educational and engaging—an antidote to typical tourism. But as study abroad becomes both democratized and bureaucratized in the modern neoliberal university, what was once considered a cosmopolitan “anti-tourism” experience has progressively taken on the trappings of modern mass tourism: shorter, pre-programed, standardized and heavily-marketed. With contributions from anthropologists and cultural theorists who have deep ties to study abroad programs,  Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience  examines the culture and cultural implications of student travel. Drawing on rich case studies from the Arctic to Africa, Asia to the Americas, this impressive array of experts focuses on challenges and ethical implications of student engagement, service and volunteering, immersion, student-faculty research collaborations in the field, local community impacts, and the impetus to craft a new generation of active, engaged global citizens. This volume is a must-read for students interested in study abroad, practitioners designing high-impact educational experiences away from their host institutions, and scholars who wish to explore the interrelationship between study abroad, tourism and anti-tourism movements.