‘It’s my challenge. It’s my love.’: Diaspora working transnationally to rebuild education after conflict

• In Event: Diasporic Perspectives on Resettled Refugees

Proposal

Fragile and conflict-affected settings are defined by weak governance and extreme inequality, which negatively affect students’ access to education as well as the quality of the education students can access (Davies, 2011). Although fragile settings make up only 9% of the world’s population, they account for over 50% of out-of-school children globally (Bird, 2009). The characteristics of fragile and conflict-affected settings that limit the provision of equitably distributed, high-quality education through the public sector also make work to improve educational provision particularly difficult.
Given these constraints and their existing and enduring connections to their countries of origin, diaspora may be important actors in education development work. The central role that diaspora play in development work broadly, through remittances, business creation and political engagement has been well-documented. It is likely that, in fragile and conflict-affected settings, diasporas’ simultaneous insider/outsider status can also facilitate education development work. Existing research highlights the fact that diaspora engagement in places affected by conflict “tends to be privately oriented on family and community [rather] than concerned with broad societal renewal” (Van Hear, 2014, p. 181).

This research, however, focuses on diaspora who are in fact engaging with broader education development work, as well as in education work within and through family and community spheres. We seek to explain why diaspora actors engage in education development work in their countries of origin, what activities they employ to do so, and what factors enable or constrain their work. We analyze an original dataset of 29 semi-structured and in-depth interviews with individuals who left four fragile and conflict-affected countries of origin and settled in the United States, and who remain engaged in education development in their countries of origin. The sample includes individuals from Afghanistan, Haiti, South Sudan and Zimbabwe, all of which have been affected by conflict and instability and are listed among ‘fragile contexts’ (OECD, 2013; Save the Children, 2015).

We identify ways in which diaspora from four focal countries draw on a transnational social field (Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007) to initiate and sustain education reconstruction work in their countries of origin. We find a central role for relationships in the education work that diaspora do, connected to the motivations that guide their work, the processes that enable their work, and their perceived outcomes of the work. In particular, we find that diaspora both embrace transnationalism as an enduring personal reconciliation of their displacement and as a collectively-oriented strategy for reconstruction and long-term stability in their countries of origin. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the kinds of education development that can disrupt post-colonial power differentials that are endemic education development work and form a bridge between actors in the global north and those in the global south. Our findings have implications for institution-building and long-term stability in settings of extreme educational marginalization.

Authors

• Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Celia Reddick, Harvard Graduate School of Education