(Re)conceptualizing higher education in post-disaster contexts: A processual analysis of diaspora engagement in Haiti's reconstruction

In post-disaster and post-conflict societies, critical threshold events trigger or intensify diaspora mobilization and engagement in their homelands. Taking the 2010 earthquake as a "critical event" that has transformed the course of Haitian society, this study builds on existing research on diaspora influence on homeland development by examining how diaspora engagement in higher education is shaping Haiti's capacity for recovery and reconstruction. With national rebuilding efforts in Haiti largely dependent upon international assistance, the diaspora emerges as an important but complex actor that engages national and international entities in rebuilding efforts in a way that requires serious examination and analysis. This study answers the following research question: How is diaspora engagement in higher education influencing institutional capacity for recovery and reconstruction in post-disaster Haiti? While higher education has been largely marginalized within the international educational development agenda and excluded from national rebuilding plans of post-disaster societies, the post-disaster context in Haiti has created conditions to reconceptualize the role of higher education in Haiti's development. This study employed a transdisciplinary and mixed-methods approach, with ethnography at the core, including document analysis, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observations over a 22-month period in Haiti and the United States. This study contends that diaspora engagement in Haiti's national recovery and reconstruction is embedded in larger transnational processes that involve multiple agents with competing agendas acting from different institutional power positions. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice and a post-structuralist notion of power, this study generates an analysis of sites and contexts of engagement in which the Haitian diaspora negotiated a cultural understanding of higher education with local practices, within larger competing transnational paradigms that defined higher education.