Reshaping ‘Maps of Compassion’ through International Volunteering. Learning from Global South

In academia, the development of international volunteerism is definitely an interesting phenomenon that raises multiple debates around its relational impact and its ability to cultivate critical perspectives in development studies. Scholars have noticed that with their crisscross movements, international volunteers are inevitably influenced by theories of geography (Henry, 2021). Specifically, the established North-South geographical imaginary of international volunteering has been brought into close examination to see to which extent it is manifested in volunteers’ experience and volunteering research in relation to contemporary international development. It has been pointed out, the mobility of international volunteers is bind by the dichotomies of ‘here’ and ‘there’, spaces of home and spaces of development. Mostafanezhad (2013) has coined the “maps of compassion”, which she argued to be the main component of the international volunteers’ spatial imaginaries. However, in such North-South binary spatial dimension, the majority of the studies was conducted by researchers from the Global South that mainly examined the North-South direction while international volunteering is also a growing phenomenon in the Global South both within the South-South and South-North direction. Therefore, the general purpose of the research is to explore and understand the geographical imaginaries of international volunteers from the Global South that might contribute to the so-called “maps of compassion” (Mostafanezhad, 2013). In order to do so, the study was conducted with nine international volunteers from the Global South using two photo elicited focus group discussions.