“A Transnational War on Poverty: The US Peace Corps in South America during the 1960s,” Fernando Purcell

Global Scholars Hall 117
UO campus

“A Transnational War on Poverty: The US Peace Corps in South America during the 1960s”

Professor Fernando Purcell (History, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)

Instead of conceiving of the Peace Corps as the exportation of the United States’ Great Society to the world, Purcell discusses how Peace Corps volunteers embodied more than US intervention; they also connected different visions of community development and had to adapt themselves to notions and programs of development originated in their host countries. These volunteers were not only agents of the United States—they also helped create the eminently transnational process that was the global war on poverty.