Discourses of volunteer/service work and their discontents: Border crossing, construction of hierarchy, and paying dues

Abstract

This article examines four discourses of volunteer/service work—charity, leisure, citizenship, and border crossing—in terms of how they construct relationships between those who serve and those who are served. Specifically, it analyzes the discourse of border crossing, which assumes White middle-class students crossing a border to work in underprivileged minority communities. Reanalyzing three case studies that show meaningful service work done without crossing borders, this article argues that the discourse reinforces the stereotype of those who serve and those served and privileges White middle-class people’s work while erasing others’. By arguing that all four discourses reproduce hierarchical relationships between those who serve and those served, this article also suggests a new discourse—of paying dues—that frames all of us as participating in systems that create unequal distribution of resources and thus as responsible for ameliorating these systems’ effects through volunteer/service work and ultimately stopping their reproduction.