Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Dr Chris Millora (University of London, UK)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions:   Width: 16.40cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 23.60cm
Weight:   0.500kg
ISBN:  

9781350345614

ISBN 10:   135034561
Pages:   224
Publication Date:   07 August 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Series Editor Foreword Preface Acknowledgements Note on the Text Abbreviations 1. What Slips through the Net? Volunteering, Learning and Literacies 2. A Country Built by Volunteers: Volunteering in the Philippines 3. Volunteering, Learning and Literacies as Social Practices: Conceptual Starting Points 4. Encountering Volunteering and Learning: A Research Journey 5. ‘We Probably Know but We Can’t Explain’: Hidden Motivations for Volunteering 6. Learning in/through Volunteering: Discourses and Practices 7. Bureaucratic Literacies: Texts, Participation and Inequalities 8. Challenging, Maintaining and Reimagining Identities through Volunteering 9. Volunteering, Learning and Literacies: Conceptual and Practical Lessons from Local Volunteers References Index

Reviews

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. * Catherine Kell, Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town, South Africa *

Author Information

Chris Millora is Lecturer in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and Academic Associate with the UNESCO Chair in Adult Literacy and Learning for Social Transformation at the University of East Anglia, UK.

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