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Experiences involving vulnerable children are among the most popular volunteer tourism practices. Celebrity humanitarianism and aid campaigns promote images of vulnerable children receiving love and care from international celebrities and humanitarian actors (mainly women), normalising intimacy within popular humanitarianism, or “hug‐an‐orphan” vacations – vacations where tourists crave direct contact with children in global South countries (Schimmelpfennig, 2011, http://goodintents.org/orphanages/hug-an-orphan-vacations-3). Through accounts given by orphanage directors, volunteers, and commentaries on orphanage tourism, this paper describes the layered emotional entanglements within orphanage tourism. Volunteer tourism literature increasingly recognises the importance of affect in such experiences, principally concentrating on how it leads to its growing popularity. Indeed, many volunteer tourists are motivated from a distance to volunteer at orphanages, being drawn to the possibility of engaging with children. However, their emotions within these encounters are far less examined, and the reality of the lifestyle these children live in is often far more upsetting than expected. Regarding the orphans themselves, the argument I make within this paper is that the commodification of children through orphanage tourism experiences has resulted in an expectation that they will interact with tourists in particular forms. Children are expected to be “poor‐but‐happy” and to engage intimately with volunteers and visitors to engender tourist satisfaction and encourage sympathy and donations. The performance of this behaviour is mediated and controlled by their emotional supervisors, orphanage directors. Through volunteer tourism, children are now a tourist commodity, utilising their love and emotions and creating space for exploitation.

We explored the processes adopted by university teachers who engage with communities with a focus on asking how and why they became community-engaged, and an interest in what promotes and limits their engagement and how limitations may be addressed. As part of year-long research project we interviewed 25 community-engaged colleagues and used a general inductive approach to identify recurring themes within interview transcripts. We found three coexisting and re-occurring themes within our interviews. Community-engaged scholars in our institution tended to emphasise the importance of building enduring relationships between our institution and the wider community; have personal ambitions to change aspects of our institution, our communities, or the interactions between them and identified community engagement as a fruitful process to achieve these changes; and identified the powerful nature of the learning that comes from community engagement in comparison with other more traditional means of teaching. Underlying these themes was a sense that community engagement requires those involved to take risks. Our three themes and this underlying sense of risk-taking suggest potential support processes for the professional development of community-engaged colleagues institutionally.