Hickel, Jason. 2013. The ‘Real Experience’ Industry: Student Development Projects and the Depoliticization of Poverty. Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, 6(2), pp. 11-32. ISSN 1755-2273 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Participation in development projects in the Global South has become one of the most sought-after activities among American and British high school graduates and college students. In the United States this often takes the form of Alternative Spring Break trips, while in Britain students typically pursue development work during their 'gap years'. Development projects offer students a way to craft themselves in an alternative mould, to have a 'real experience' that marks them off from the cultural mainstream as 'authentic' individuals. The student development craze represents an impulse to resist consumerist individualism, but this impulse has been appropriated and neutralised by a new logic of consumption, transforming a profoundly political urge for change into a form of 'resistance' compatible with neoliberal capitalism. In the end, students' pursuit of self-realisation through development has a profoundly depoliticising effect, shifting their attention away from substantive problems of extraction and exploitation to the state of the inner self.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2013.060202
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Anthropology
Dates:	Date Event 1 June 2013 Published
Item ID:	22352
Date Deposited:	17 Nov 2017 14:50
Last Modified:	17 Nov 2017 14:50
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/22352

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