Palacios 2024
Global Perspectives, Vol. 5 (1): 126764.
After Economics’ “Discovery” of Homo Socialis: Decolonial Vigilance and Interpretive Collaboration
This article examines the method of experimental economic games, critically analyzing what behavioral economists can learn from social researchers and vice versa.
It asks behavioral economists to remember that even their refined quantification of "homo economicus" is just a useful caricature and real actors are never that simple.
"Prosocial preferences may be experimentally measurable within a binary opposition between Homo economicus and Homo socialis. The argument developed here, however, is that any behavioral value or detection of crowding effects has a relative quantitative meaning that still needs to be qualitatively determined within a broader range that is “non–strictly binary.” (...) The qualitative range may broadly describe a binary polarity, but, to use a computer analogy, it accepts quantic superposition, since a quantitative “zero” does not discard a qualitative value of “one.”" (p.236)
Palacios 2010
Journal of Sustainable Tourism, vol. 18(7): 861-878.
Volunteer Tourism, Development and Education in a Postcolonial World: Conceiving global connections beyond aid
This paper counter-balances the claim of volunteer travel as "neo-colonialism" by stressing how colonial-like it is to judge young volunteers under the assumption that they should be striving to bring about development.
I wrote this paper a long time ago as part of my master's degree in applied anthropology. It has been influential in the interdisciplinary field of tourism studies as well as mentioned in a number of public forums.
"Carlos Palacios, Ph.D., of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, argues that voluntourism is the only type of travel that’s vilified as colonialistic. Programs that describe themselves as service learning, cultural exchange, or educational tourism 'have not got into this kind of trouble', he notes. I came to see myself more as an intern than a volunteer: someone who did small but necessary work—dish washing, data entry, trash collecting—while receiving an education about a place and its challenges." Kevin Budd, National Geographic." (p.236)