Pedagogias de internacionalização universitária: uma etnografia institucional na Universidade Federal do Ceará

Abstract

This research is the result of collective experiences and reflections with the academic community of the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) on its ways of thinking and practicing university internationalization. Based on my position as a technical-administrative staff member within the institutional locus of the UFC, I analyze the institutional trajectories of the university’s internationalization policy, considering the discourses, practices, and experiences of administrators, professors, technical-administrative staff, and students involved in this process through an institutional ethnography. Specifically, the study seeks to: i) investigate the epistemological foundations and political dynamics that guide the internationalization of Brazilian higher education; ii) analyze how the internationalization policy is instituted in different political and institutional contexts; iii) understand how the policy of internationalization is interpreted and re-signified by actors at UFC; and iv) propose pathways for the internationalization process at UFC, including possibilities for an endogenous and decolonial internationalization. Guided by the epistemological lenses of (de)coloniality, theoretical references from the Global South, and above all, by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, I conducted an analysis of social situations in events promoted by the University Administration and by two graduate programs from different fields of knowledge that participated in the CAPES-PrInt program. This was complemented by document analysis and semi-structured interviews with participants involved in the process, which resulted in the construction of life histories. Throughout this ethnographic Journey, marked by barriers, strategies, and a range of emoticons, we identified that internationalization constitutes a field, in the Bourdieusian sense, shaped by symbolic disputes and power relations that transcend the University itself. Within this field, multiple meanings and pedagogies of internationalization coexist, stemming from distinct political and institutional trajectories, generating learning processes and new ways of understanding the university, between UFC, its subjects, and their relations with the world. The study also points to the possibility of constructing alternative pedagogies of internationalization more solidary, horizontal, plural, symmetrical, inclusive, and democratic, that affirm the social function of public education and produce science from the South, with the South, and for the world.