Suchergebnisse

The Agency for Volunteer Service administers volunteer-orinted programs in the United States and in developing countries abroad. ACTION's international programs are coordinated and administered by the Peace Corps, which is currently situated in twenty-three African countries. The aim of ACTION International Programs "is to promote world peace and friendship through the Peace Corps and to provide technical assistance and encouragement to the development of volunteer activities in less developed countries and internationally."

To tens of thousands of volunteers in its first decade, the Peace Corps was "the toughest job you'll ever love." In the United States' popular imagination to this day, it is a symbol of selfless altruism and the most successful program of John F. Kennedy's presidency. But in her provocative new cultural history of the 1960s Peace Corps, Molly Geidel argues that the agency's representative development ventures also legitimated the violent exercise of American power around the world and the destruction of indigenous ways of life.In the 1960s, the practice of development work, embodied by iconic Peace Corps volunteers, allowed U.S. policy makers to manage global inequality while assuaging their own gendered anxieties about postwar affluence. Geidel traces how modernization theorists used the Peace Corps to craft the archetype of the heroic development worker: a ruggedly masculine figure who would inspire individuals and communities to abandon traditional lifestyles and seek integration into the global capitalist system.Drawing on original archival and ethnographic research, Geidel analyzes how Peace Corps volunteers struggled to apply these ideals. The book focuses on the case of Bolivia, where indigenous nationalist movements dramatically expelled the Peace Corps in 1971. She also shows how Peace Corps development ideology shaped domestic and transnational social protest, including U.S. civil rights, black nationalist, and antiwar movements.

From President Kennedy's first announcement of a non-military US volunteer corps in 1961, the Peace Corps has been one of the preeminent government grassroots volunteer development agency. This study explores the history of the ambiguities inherent in this contention, pressure primarily stemming from the organization's role as both a governmental diplomatic and a popular grassroots development agency. The genealogy of conflict stems from three ill-defined and considered elements: the grassroots volunteer, development, and the discourses of grassroots programming. In bracketing these terms, this study illustrates the ways organizational epistemology is fractured among political actors, staff, and volunteers. Though the Peace Corps organizational rhetoric has shifted these categories over the years, the organization's political face has remained dominant in organizational attitudes and expressions. This dissertation underscores the disproportionate weight of this side of the discourse, which is simultaneously most at odds with the idea of the horizontal, grassroots rhetoric of the organization. In demonstrating the paradox of the Peace Corps' simultaneous rhetorical role as a grassroots development organization and US political theater, I combed archival resources such as pamphlets, reports, internal memos, and posters produced by the organization to better understand the particular messages contained in these documents. While the images and narratives concerning the grassroots volunteer, development, and programming are varied, the overwhelming message is one of unexamined US benevolence. For comparison with volunteers with actual experience with these concepts, I conducted ethnographic interviews of volunteers and staff in one Peace Corps country, Outer Mongolia. In order to contextualize the Peace Corps' struggle with other similar governmental agencies, I also interviewed volunteers of the Japanese Overseas Cooperation Volunteers working in similar projects in Mongolia. Through an ethnographic semi-structured interview model of volunteers working in education, health, community economic development, and youth development sectors, I assessed volunteers' 1.) motivations and awareness of development, 2.) understandings of "empowerment" and "participation" among current development constituents, 3.) perceptions of host-country partners culture and history and 4.) visions for re-constituting the Peace Corps. Findings suggest that while some of the volunteers reiterated the Peace Corps' rhetorical perspectives of volunteer roles, development, and programming, many had either not considered these important aspects of their development experience or expressed views starkly opposite to that of the organization. The resulting investigation reveals not a splintered, failed program, but one internally odds with stated participatory, democratic ideals. Far from condemning this notable organization, this dissertation argues for greater organizational imagination through self-reflection among volunteers and staff about the horizon of possibilities of grassroots cooperation untethered from political rhetoric.

Shipping list no.: 2012-0171-P ; Includes bibliographical references ; Mode of access: Internet.