As internacionalizações da educação superior e a mobilidade acadêmica : discursos e experiências em diálogo

Abstract

The internationalization of higher education institutions acquires different meanings depending on their context and interactions with other texts. However, international academic mobility occupies a central role in most approaches. This research, informed by the Bakhtin Circle’s view of language as an ideological phenomenon and the contributions of decolonial studies, examines the meanings attributed to the internationalization of higher education and academic mobility. The analysis focuses on official documents and institutional practices of a Brazilian federal university. The main objective is to understand how the institutional vision of internationalization and mobility—expressed in formal documents—relates to everyday experiences and perceptions of these processes. To achieve this goal, the discourses in the documents were put in dialogue with the autoethnographic contributions of the researcher, who is a PhD cotutelle candidate in Brazil and Spain and works in the outgoing mobility sector of the international office of the Brazilian university. The data indicate that the vision of internationalization and the practice of academic mobility in Brazil are strongly influenced by guidelines from national funding agencies and global governance, often in exchange for funding and international recognition. Consequently, the flows and relationships established in international mobility predominantly favor the global North, reinforcing its economic, cultural, and epistemic hegemony over the global South. Nonetheless, alternative perspectives emerge from everyday life that advocate for institutional actions focused on local needs and interests. In light of this, it is proposed that the internationalization of higher education be redefined to value subordinate relationships prioritizing strategies that promote fairer and more balanced internationalization