By Antonia Caicedo Marquez, Anya Gilfoyle, Elsa Hopkins, Katharine O’Hearn, Elise Wilcock

Our project connects ethnographic insights and theoretical reflections on aid work from the course to the practical realities of ‘professions of doing good’. Our exhibit, An Aid Worker’s Desk, examines the motivations and biases that may shape participation in international volunteering programmes. We have created a model of what an aid worker who is responsible for hiring new volunteers’ desk may look like, including four fictional CVs of applicants to an international volunteering role with a range of motivations, alongside a toolkit for analysing – through an anthropological lens – the motivations seen in applicants’ CVs. We have used the university’s Team Rwanda (data-gathering team) as the position being advertised, grounding our exhibition in the specific institutional context shared by our visitors. 

The exhibit invites viewers to embody the role of a hiring committee, reflecting on each applicant’s approach to aid work and using the toolkit as a prompt for critical engagement. The four CVs reflect a range of motivations: religion, compassion, personal growth and a conscious engagement with the limits of voluntourism. We hope viewers will consider how tensions may emerge between these motivations and realities and responsibilities of aid work, which was a theme encountered throughout this course. 

This toolkit draws on ideas of moral labour, the gift, affect, and neoliberalism, not simply to contextualise aid work, but to reframe how it is evaluated. We argue that anthropological theory is useful in enhancing the effectiveness of aid work, and that conventional hiring processes that focus on skills and experience risk overlooking the ideological assumptions volunteers bring with them.

The first point on the toolkit draws on Fechter’s (2016) writing on ‘moral labour’. Aid workers navigate tensions between their aims to do good and the limits of their abilities to do so, acquiring responsibilities through their status as international volunteers. Bringing discussions of moral labour into hiring processes would encourage volunteers to reflect on the contradictions of their ‘doing good’ from the start, rather than through encountering them only once in the field. 

Mauss’ (1925) interpretation of the gift informs our second point of the toolkit. Mauss uses the idea of hau, the ‘spirit’ of the gift, to argue that gifts are inalienable, carrying obligations to reciprocate. Considering this encourages a shift in volunteers’ mindsets from simply helping, to recognising the pressures ‘help’ places on a community to respond in a certain way. Awareness of reciprocity promotes more balanced power relations and greater respect between volunteers and host communities. 

Ahmed’s (2004) work on collective feelings underpins point three of the toolkit. Ahmed argues that emotions do not simply reside within individuals, they circulate, attaching themselves to particular bodies and producing ‘others’ as objects of feeling (Ahmed, 2004: 34). When an applicant describes communities through pity or a desire to ‘rescue’, it reveals assumptions shaped by colonial thinking and white saviourism, which anthropological approaches show to harm communities or undermine organisational effectiveness. Ahmed’s work therefore highlights the importance of reflexivity to interrogate their own assumptions rather than project feeling onto communities. 

These points of the toolkit can be expected to interact when analysing different motivations for volunteering. As an example, we can analyse religious motivations for volunteering, drawn from Mittermaier (2014). This discusses Islamic voluntarism in Egypt, using this to challenge compassion-based models of aid intentions (such as Ahmed (2004)). Here, volunteers discuss their acts of benevolence as not driven by empathy, but instead as a duty of reciprocal exchange with God- this reflects Mauss’ (1925) discussion of the gift. Mittermaier’s work therefore complicates the notion that identifying with others’ suffering drives action, instead presenting obligation-based aid as avoiding the hierarchies and paternalism that compassion can foster (Mittermaier, 2014).  Building on Ahmed (2004) and Mittermaier’s (2014) insights, the concept of moral labour illustrates how the motivations of aid workers are not fixed emotional states, but continuous negotiation of what is deemed ‘correct’ in complicated aid contexts (Fechter, 2016). This includes reflection on how compassion can inadvertently reinforce colonial dynamics, a challenge outlined in criteria three of our toolkit, the Politics of Emotion.  

Point four in the toolkit draws on critiques from the development industry, including Ferguson (2015) and Escobar (1994). These critiques demonstrate how volunteering posts abroad can create dependency and disruption, taking away local jobs and disturbing local economies, as highlighted by the UK Student Volunteering Network (2021) discussion of voluntourism ethics. Critiques of neoliberalism and discussions of the temporalities of religious aid can also be used to address the disruption caused by international aid. Both religious and secular international aid can act as vehicles for imposing one group’s values onto another, through the spread of Western neoliberal ideals or religious ideology, as illustrated in the Beyond Good Intentions (2009) video on Christian faith-based aid in Mozambique and Klein’s (2005) discussion of disaster capitalism. Applicants should therefore reflect both on their personal intentions and on the structures they operate within, as good intentions are insufficient without an understanding of the wider inequalities international volunteering operates within and can reproduce.

Didier Fassin (2012) highlights empathy and compassion, while vital in aid work,  must be understood within a political framework marked by inequalities and an asymmetrical relationship between aid workers and recipients. Fassin notes that humanitarian reason has become a pervasive moral economy that intersects with neoliberal political ideas. He argues the paradox between solidarity and inequality captures concerns that volunteering can reproduce these relations. Within our project, this insight helps to inform the criteria of our toolkit, pushing viewers to question whether applicants’ motivations acknowledge or obscure the structural inequalities that shape their ability to help. 

Bibliography

Ahmed, S., 2004. Collective Feelings: Or, The Impressions Left by Others. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(2), pp. 25-42.

Beyond Good Intentions (2009) Episode 8: Faith-based Aid (Mozambique) — Beyond Good Intentions Series. 5 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8kUsIQq3xl (Accessed: 20 April 2026).

Escobar, A., 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. s.l.:Princeton University Press.

Fassin, D. (2012) Humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present. pp. 1-18. Translated by R. Gomme. Berkeley: University of California Press. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pptmk

Fechter, A.-M., 2016. Aid Work as Moral Labour. Critique of Anthropology, 36(3), pp. 228-243.

Ferguson, J., 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Developement,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. s.l.:University of Minnesota Press.

Klein, N., (2005) ‘The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: Rebuilding is no longer the primary purpose of the reconstruction industry’, The Nation 2/05. Available at: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/rise-disaster-capitalism/ (Accessed: 15 April 2026).

Mauss, M., 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge.

Mittermaier, A., 2014. Beyond Compassion: Islamic Voluntarism in Egypt. American Ethnologist, 41(3), pp. 518-531.

UK Student Volunteering Network (2021) Is Voluntourism Ethical? [UK SVN event]. 9 February. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E3BEVWreZs (Accessed: 20 April 2026).

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