Vicky Koski-Karell discusses three elements of Haiti's contemporary history—water, cholera, and rice—and traces the ways that their interrelated narratives impinge on one another. Humanitarian efforts to ameliorate water, health, and food insecurity in Haiti often rely on top-down strategies—themselves constrained by funding mechanisms, internal mission and bureaucracy, and implicit bias—that, while sometimes effecting improvements, may perpetuate colonial dynamics.

Many elements considered essential for life, such as water, health care, and food, become readily appropriated through neoliberal market logics as commodities available only to those who can afford them, leading to vast and ever expanding disparities across the globe—the consequences of which bear most heavily on historically marginalized communities. Despite a successful anti-slavery revolution that resulted in liberation from French colonial rule in 1804, Haiti has suffered tremendously at the hands of transnational structural racism, foreign military occupation, and mandated austerity measures.

With generous support from the U-M Library, and inspired by the radical potential of collective solidarity and mutual aid embodied in libraries and information services, Koski-Karell is embarking on a documentary film project about water access in a rural Haitian community still plagued by the cholera epidemic (Haiti's first) that started nearby in October 2010. In an attempt to decolonize the traditional aid model deployed in Haiti, the film also serves as a tool for extending Haitian voices and raising funds to support a community-directed water project where it has been locally identified as most needed.

Emergent Research events are aimed at better understanding the various types of research undertaken across campus, particularly as they relate to library services and support, opportunities for collaboration, data management and preservation, and beyond.