title: Humanitarians of Instagram: The Western Gaze in a Digital Age
abstract: &lt;p&gt;This thesis calls for a pictorial critique of pre-packaged overseas volunteering under the pretense of humanitarianism—voluntourism. By using a mixed-method approach of visual content analysis and semiotics, it endeavors to investigate the visual culture of voluntourism on social media. Through the overrepresentation of racialized children in voluntourism imagery on Instagram, the visual culture of voluntourism reinforces paternalistic narratives about the Global South, objectifies suba