PBHA Hosts Forum On ‘Social Tourism’

While many students spent last Friday afternoon packing for a long-weekend vacation, over 30 undergraduates gathered in the parlor room of Phillips Brook House Association (PBHA) to debate the purpose of traveling to perform social service.

The fifth event this year in “The Big Question” series addressed the topic “Social Justice Tourism? What do service trips mean for us and for the places we go?”

Hamilton Simmons Jones, the director of community service at Tulane University, outlined the pros and cons of traveling abroad, using his experiences with students rebuilding homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

“10,000 students will be sent to New Orleans in the next 5 weeks,” Jones said in his brief remarks to the students, adding that the number of resources and the infrastructure needed to support such an amount of volunteers takes massive mobilization.

This past intersession, over 80 Harvard undergraduates went to New Orleans and Mississippi to aid in post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction efforts in a trip organized by PBHA.

Jones suggested that students may sometimes go on such trips for the wrong reasons, such as to take part in “disaster tourism” rather than doing the unglamorous work required to ameliorate the situation.

Jones said that he had seen friction between New Orleans natives and visiting volunteers who took photographs of decimated neighborhoods while displaced residents looked on.

“Students will be gone after one week,” he added. “We don’t even have space for our own residents.”

However, Jones also recognized the value of college students traveling to other communities to perform social services. He said that such trips provide opportunities to wrestle with the “root causes” of social problems and can be oriented to fit the local community’s needs.

“College students never know the extent of their own power,” Jones said, adding that students should always think about cultivating long-range organizational relationships in public service matters and use the resources uniquely available to them at Harvard.

After Jones’ speech, students broke into four smaller groups to discuss their own views on the topic.

Henry J. Seton ’06 came up with the idea for “The Big Question” series to connect students participating across different PBHA programs.

“Most people [in PBHA] don’t know anybody except people within their own program,” Seton said.

The inspiration for the series came after Seton, a social studies concentrator, worked with Executive Director of PBHA Gene Corbin in the Missippi Delta last spring and spent this past summer at the Paulo Freire Institute of South Africa, a center whose namesake stressed that education happens through dialogue between teacher and student, according to Seton.

“True dialogue—where you’re constructing something—doesn’t happen in section,” Seton said. “If there’s one theme in ‘The Big Question’ it’s that we’re trying to ask the big questions that relate to our role in society as college students, as Harvard students, as citizens.”

According to Steve Lin ’08, another one of “The Big Question” organizers, the most popular events in the series have attracted around 50 students each.

Previous “Big Questions” have included “What does it mean to make the most of our time at Harvard?” and “How do we reconcile our moral consciences with our shopping carts?” and have included speakers ranging from former lecturer on History and Literature Tim McCarthy ’93 to the group of visiting students from Tulane.

“We try to pick topics that people can really draw upon from their personal experience,” Lin said.

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.