The Journal of International Volunteer Tourism and Social Development is a peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary and transnational journal. The journal more specifically is a social science journal, with a special emphasis on volunteer tourism. Although it will be anchored in the social sciences it would also seek to encompass contributions from related areas. The journal will provide an outlet for publication for tourism and leisure related research and encourage inter-disciplinary approaches to the relevant subject matter. 

The Journal of International Volunteer Tourism and Social Development provides a forum for debate against the backdrop of cross cultural interactions from local to global based within international volunteer tourism. The approach adopted in this journal would attempt to include all areas of discourse that relate to volunteer tourism such as economics, marketing or management. The articles that focus on volunteer tourism would form the basis of the journal. However, it would also expand the relevance by engaging with the theoretical knowledge of support experiences of the volunteer tourist and their journeys, the way NGO's engage in this form of tourism, the different elements that make up the volunteer tourism experience and the commodified forms of tourism that involve altruism (charity, peace, spiritual). It seeks to draw on the development studies area and regional development area to attract work from outside of the tourism industry. The interface of development and its related research and practice with tourism. It will also focus on the local and regional activities of volunteering and its effects, providing an outlet for those who wish to place people at the centre of this type of work.

The Journal of International Volunteer Tourism and Social Development encourages papers which investigate the impacts of volunteer tourism on the work of workers in developing countries such as women in marginal rural communities and the division of labour once tourism comes to these areas. The changes brought about by globalisation and the spread of transnational social relations in volunteer tourism such as culture shock, the influence of emergent geographies of power, cultural identities and citizenship will be examined. How the forces of globalisation contribute to social exclusion and localisation, undermining the possibility of some local communities participating in volunteer tourism.

Given the prominence of tourism and its ability to shape social orders, critical scholarship in volunteer tourism would allow us to examine travel beyond consumerism, travelling with a purpose, the right to freedom of movement versus the consumption that it entails and the possible benefits of volunteer travel.  This journal invites papers which consider the implications of the expansion of the study of tourism addressing issues such as the evaluation of travel based on the benefits to poorer destination societies who often experience tourism in the form of further despoilment of their environments and distortion of their local economies towards services. It would provide the platform to link studies of unequal participation in tourism, with literature concerned with tourism, social and ecological justice and civil society in destination areas. 

The Journal of International Volunteer Tourism and Social Development also seeks to encourage contributions related to innovations in social science research methods and their application to research on tourism.  Being tourists, recording and interviewing tourists in situ, deploying covert methods, employing radical-innovative practices, the use of digital technologies, multi-site ethnographies and research studies, linguistic considerations, RRA and PRA techniques applied to tourism. Techniques that look at the disadvantaged stakeholders and enable the impacts on them to be examined.

The Journal of International Volunteer Tourism and Social Development seeks to widen and deepen understandings of such changing relationships and stimulate critical debate by:

• Adopting a multidisciplinary approach
• Encouraging critical approaches to the study of the theory, policy and practice of volunteer tourism and social development
• Attempting to allow the voice of the ‘other' or disadvantaged stakeholder to be heard
• Focusing on how globalisation and social development through tourism can be analysised
• Encouraging multi view cross cultural perspectives