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Combining leisure, travel, and voluntary work, volunteer tourism's popularity as an alternative travel option is undeniable. Yet postcolonial critiques plague the marketplace and those involved in these aiding efforts. In this article, which is based on consumer interviews involving a photo-elicitation component, we reveal increased presence of consumer reflexivity over neo-colonial aspects of the marketplace in comparison with the findings of past studies. However, great variability marks these consumer responses and the majority attempt to justify the potential harm of their activities abroad to cope with the ambivalence felt about such contradictory outcomes. We suggest closer attention be paid to decolonization theory as an approach to delivering these volunteering interventions in a more holistic and sensitive manner.

Abstract
Countervailing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation are fueling a tension between the ethnic consumer subject, who views the consumption of cultural difference as a valorized identity project, and the responsibilized consumer subject, who is tasked with considering the societal impacts of such consumption. Drawing on an extended qualitative investigation of international K-pop consumers, this study illustrates that this tension spurs consumers to pursue self-authorization—the reflexive reconfiguration of the self in relation to the social world—through which consumers grant themselves permission to continue consuming cultural difference. Four consumer self-authorization strategies are identified: reforming, restraining, recontextualizing, and rationalizing. Each strategy relies upon an amalgam of countervailing moral interpretations about acts of consuming difference, informing ideologies about the power relationships between cultures, and emergent subject positions that situate the consuming self in relation to others whose differences are packaged for consumption. Findings show notable conditions under which each self-authorization strategy is deployed, alongside consumers' capacity to adjust and recombine different strategies as they navigate changing sociocultural and idiographic conditions. Overall, this study advances understanding of how consumers navigate the resurgent politics of marketized cultural diversity in an era of woke capitalism.