Local Volunteering, Adult Learning and Social Change in the Philippines

Everyday Learning, Everyday Literacies

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

Av Chris Millora, UK) Millora, Dr Chris (University of London, Anna Robinson-Pant

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Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this book explores the learning and literacy dimensions of local volunteering for social change in the Philippines. It tells the story of youth and adult volunteers who experience vulnerabilities yet play central roles in local development efforts in housing and sexual health. Why do people who themselves experience vulnerability volunteer to help others? And what are their learning experiences in the process? In its unique application of a literacy lens to the study of volunteering, the book unravels how marginalised groups, often seen as ‘thankful receivers’, (re)use texts, words and labels to (re)define their roles in shaping social change and for whose benefit. Chris Millora provides an in-depth look into the volunteers’ everyday activities such as delivering community health classes, filling out donor forms and applying for government approvals. In doing so, this book reveals how volunteers’ voices and agency were constrained to fit a certain bureaucratic way of working. It offers powerful case studies on how global development agendas such as value-for-money, upskilling and professionalisation – through bureaucratic literacies – impact the experiences of volunteers at the grassroots level. Arguing that literacy and volunteering could enhance inequalities within groups, this book calls for a renewed focus on the role that power and identities play both in adult/youth literacy and volunteering research.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-08-07
Mått164 x 236 x 20 mm
Vikt500 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieAdult Learning, Literacy and Social Change
Antal sidor224
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN9781350345614

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List of FiguresList of TablesSeries Editor ForewordPreface AcknowledgementsNote on the TextAbbreviations1. What Slips through the Net? Volunteering, Learning and Literacies2. A Country Built by Volunteers: Volunteering in the Philippines3. Volunteering, Learning and Literacies as Social Practices: Conceptual Starting Points4. Encountering Volunteering and Learning: A Research Journey5. ‘We Probably Know but We Can’t Explain’: Hidden Motivations for Volunteering6. Learning in/through Volunteering: Discourses and Practices7. Bureaucratic Literacies: Texts, Participation and Inequalities8. Challenging, Maintaining and Reimagining Identities through Volunteering9. Volunteering, Learning and Literacies: Conceptual and Practical Lessons from Local VolunteersReferencesIndex

In this elegant study of the entanglement of literacy practices with volunteering in vulnerable communities in the Philippines, Millora reveals striking contradictions in the work of development agencies. Millora’s vivid account leaves little doubt that, to grasp the role of literacy practices in the continued reproduction of processes of social stratification, literacy learning needs to be studied in social practice rather than as the imparting of a neutral technology or set of skills. Based on the idea of insider-outsider epistemologies and rendered through fine scale ethnographic detail and reflections, this book is an important contribution to studies on adult learning, literacy and social change.