UNEVEN GEOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH VOLUNTEERING IN UGANDA: MULTI-SCALAR DISCOURSES AND PRACTICES

We are excited to share the newest journal article co-authored by RYVU team members Professor Matt Baillie Smith, Dr Sarah Mills, Dr Moses Okech and Dr Bianca Fadel.  It was published open access in the Geoforum academic journal.

This academic paper explores how and why different ideas and practices of volunteering take shape and prominence in Uganda and how this impacts patterns of youth inclusion, inequality and opportunity. By analysing data from the RYVU project, the paper develops a multi-scalar geography to situate volunteering at the interface of ‘global’ volunteering policy and knowledges, aid and development architectures, youth unemployment, community institutions and local socio-economic inequalities.

The authors show how a multi-scalar geography of volunteering enables us to build richer, more nuanced conceptualisations of volunteering in the global South that address the different ways global discourses, local histories, community organisations and social inequalities come together across space and time to produce uneven geographies of volunteering in particular places.

Click here to read and download the full open access article.