Higher Education and Mobility in the Periphery: When Borders Represent Obstacles

The hereby proposed presentation aims to critically assess the process of intellectual colonialism by analyzing the Brazilian Programme called Ciência sem fronteiras (Science without borders), undertaken from 2011 to 2016. The programme's idea was to broadly contribute towards globalizing Brazilian higher education, with its focus on internationalization: it was directed towards allowing students and researchers to spent from a few months to a few years abroad, in many cases set to achieve a foreign degree. While designed as a possibly interesting manner of funding the circulation of people and thus ideas, effectively it was possible to observe a number of aspects that clearly where shaped through forms of intellectual colonialism and academic dependence as portrayed, among others, by Alatas (2003).

We shall focus more specifically on characterizing and critically discussing the circulation of post-doctoral researchers, that represented just under 5% of the over 90.000 fellowships that were awarded during the programme's existence. What we are interested in taking a deeper look at are (i) the locations to which these fellows decided to go, and (ii) the academic disciplines predominantly funded, while (iii) observing the various geopolitical/academic disputes and disparities as well as certain forms of concentrating types of fellowships and institutions of destination, that by and large tended to reproduce existing inequalities on a global higher education level. This outlook is based upon identifying certain discrepancies and convergences when comparing the total number of distributed fellowships with those specifically allocated to post-doctoral research, that is, which countries, institutions, and research areas comparatively attracted more post-docs than undergraduates or master/doctoral students. Our preliminary findings seem to indicate that the programme, thus, largely reinforces intellectual colonialism through its attempt at participating in a crescently globalized higher education.