Higher education reform and diasporic engagement in post-earthquake Haiti

Abstract

ABSTRACT In post-disaster societies, critical events intensify diasporic engagements. This article examines the diaspora as a category of practice that mobilizes energies in furtherance of revitalizing Haiti’s oft-neglected higher education sector. With rebuilding efforts dependent upon international assistance, the diaspora emerges as an important actor that engages national and international entities in shaping that agenda. Hence, the research question posed here: How has diaspora engagement in higher education influenced institutional capacity for recovery and reconstruction in post-disaster Haiti? Conceptualizing the 2010 earthquake as a threshold event that has reconfigured Haitian society and drawing on a post-structuralist notion of power, this article analyzes contexts of engagement where the diaspora negotiated their cultural understanding of higher education with local practices, within larger competing national and transnational power dynamics. These new opportunities for engagement created conditions for the diaspora to move higher education from the margins of national development to the post-disaster rebuilding agenda.