No Good Deed Goes Unrewarded: The Values/Virtues of Transnational Volunteerism in Neoliberal Capital

This paper focuses on the value of volunteering in producing, sustaining, and legitimising forms of subjectivity and social relations congruent with the ethos of neoliberal capital. Rather than treat it as a spontaneous act of virtue, we insist that volunteerism is a carefully designed technology of government the purpose of which is to align individual conduct with neoliberal capital’s double injunction of market rationality and social responsibility. To this end we investigate two complementary case studies of transnational volunteerism, one dealing with Chinese international students volunteering in Vancouver seeking to obtain Canadian citizenship, the other looking at Western university students and graduates volunteering in Ghana to gather relevant professional skills and experience. In both cases we find that transnational volunteerism helps participating individuals assume cultural skills, affective competencies, and citizenship prerogatives they could otherwise not have claimed through nationality or employment.