Academic Discourses Across Epistemologies, Languages and Cultures: A View from the South

This paper will introduce different conceptual frameworks on ‘interculturalid(e)/interculturalism’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘transculturalidad(e)/transculturalism’, available to international research group members, and call for the need of international researchers to develop ‘intercultural critical awareness’ on epistemological negotiation and power relations. It will have in mind dynamic  and dialectical North-South and South-North philosophical perspectives and postcolonial pressures. It will also offer and discuss new concepts such as ‘glocal languages’ and ‘intercultural responsibility’ as moving beyond the corresponding commonly used terms, ‘lingua franca’ and ‘intercultural competence’, and address the controversy surrounding these terminologies. It deals with the attempt to define the idea of ‘citizenship’, at different levels, namely global, national and local, among international researchers and it will challenge them to build their professional and personal identities aaround such a multi-level horizon as well as to question their epistemological grounds against their plurilingual and intercultural backdrops. This paper is based on research carried out in a few Brazilian universities under the umbrella of the EU-funded project GLOCADEMICS (Marie Curie Research Fellowship, http://www.ces.uc.pt/projectos/glocademics/ ) and will therefore put forward a definition of the concept of ‘Glocademics’ within the scope of the research fields of Intercultural Communication and Internationalization of Higher Education.