Higher education reform and diasporic engagement in post-earthquake Haiti

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora and education
• anthropology of disaster
• higher education and disaster reconstruction
• higher education in Haiti

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge Louis Herns Marcelin, Nicholas Van Hear and Stephen Lubkemann, the three co-PIs of this study, who provided scientific leadership for the Haiti, Sri Lanka and Liberia sites, respectively. I offer special thanks to Louis Herns Marcelin for his mentorship throughout this process. I am grateful to INURED, specifically its research team, whose hard work and integrity was critical to the data collection process, and administration, for its diligence in providing logistical support for our work in the field. Finally, I thank the reviewers for their critical feedback and April Mann for her review of the final manuscript. The comparative case study of diaspora engagement in post-crisis and post-disaster countries was funded by the International Development Research Centre (Grant #106216-004). A portion of the Haiti case study was financially supported by a 2013-2014 US Fulbright Scholar award. Write-up of the dissertation derived from the Haiti case study was funded by a 2014-2015 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Award.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See: US Congressional Bill S.1104: Assessing Progress in Haiti Act of 2014 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s1104/text

2. Participants were able to select multiple responses and reported engaging in several activities over time.

3. In Haiti, all programs in the health professions are directly overseen by the Ministry of Health which also validates these degrees.

4. Founded in 1948, the OAS is a regional organization with a mandate to maintain peace and justice, promote solidarity and defend the sovereignty of its 35 members states (http://www.oas.org/en/about/who_we_are.asp)

5. The IHRC was established in April 2020 to ensure that international assistance designated for the earthquake was aligned with the Government of Haiti’s Action Plan for Recovery and Development. The commission was co-Chaired by Haiti’s then Prime Minister, JeanMax Bellerive, and former US President, William J. Clinton.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Toni Cela

Toni Cela received her doctorate from Columbia University. Her research interests include: anthropology of disaster and recovery; adolescent and immigration processes; anthropology of education; migration and health; diaspora and development; and Haitian youth identity formation. She has received several awards including: the 2013-2014 Council on Anthropology and Education Concha Delgado Gaitan fellowship; the 2013-2014 U.S. Fulbright Scholar award in Haiti, where she served as the co-PI on a national study of the higher education sector conducted by the Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development (INURED), and the 2014-2015 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation fellowship award. In 2016, she was awarded a Spencer Foundation grant titled, The Socio-cultural Costs of Pursuing Higher Education for Women in Haiti, for which she served as co-PI alongside Louis Herns Marcelin (PI). In 2017, she co-edited Haitian Youth in the Americas, a bilingual (English/French) volume published by the Presses de l’Université du Québec and has published in major, high impact, peer-reviewed journal outlets. She currently serves as Coordinator of INURED.