Monumentalizing disaster and wreak-construction: a case study of Haiti to rethink the privatization of public education

Abstract

This paper is a theoretical effort to support but complicate critiques of disaster capitalism and neoliberal strategies to profit from public education. We put into conversation a discursive analysis following Michel Foucault and a spatial analysis following Henri Lefebvre that focus on monumentalized disasters. We argue that neoliberalism carries out its agenda of privatization through public spaces that are never fully dismantled. We draw on empirical research into spaces that exemplify the usefulness of our reading of neoliberal privatization, including aspects of post-Katrina New Orleans and a more thorough case study of a preand post-earthquake Haiti and its highly privatized education system. IntroductionWe agree with the stand many scholars are taking against what they see as a broad movement to profit from education in spaces like the US by making public education appear to be an inevitable and monumental failure, a space of disaster that needs to be reformed or reconstructed through 'free'-market policy. We agree that educators should not allow this neoliberal discourse to dominate our debates because its material effects will intensify racial and class-based inequalities in the educational system and the economy. But we want to complicate what we see as the prevailing view of privatization in this scholarly conversation: that advocates of discourses and practices captured by the term neoliberalism seek to privatize the public sphere to the point of depletion. Our research indicates that this is too unidirectional a view and we put forward the thesis that neoliberalism is a claim -both a rhetoric and a mechanism of possessing -whose practices continually re-create or maintain some version of a public (though destined for a continual process of privatization) as a means of spreading neoliberalism's logics in spite of the material failures of its promises. We elaborate this thesis through a playful conversation between Klein's (2007) concept of disaster capitalism and Lefebvre's (1991) concept of monumental space, and we then apply it to a case study of how disastereducational and otherwise -is monumentalized for neoliberal ends in Haiti from 2004 to 2010. We choose Haiti because its largely private education system is an integral example of the inadequacy of a unidirectional view of privatization. Our

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