Immersed in the Dominant Global Imaginary: Reflecting on Internationalization of Higher Education Discourses in Brazil

As a result of the reconfiguration of the functions performed by higher education worldwide, efforts directed at the process conventionally called internationalization are intensified and expressed as an imperative. In this study, an extract of a doctoral research supported by the epistemological lenses of Modernity/(De)Coloniality and based on principles of the Critical Discourse Analysis, we contextualize and discuss the discourses undertaken by an organization with discursive power towards the internationalization of Brazilian universities. The analysis suggests the existence of a hegemonic narrative around the meaning of internationalization, giving the broader context that this Association is immersed. The privileged narratives end up reinforcing the idea that in Brazil internationalization is, above all, an object of external determinations. In this sense it tends to ignore the complexity-heterogeneity of the Brazilian university and the international relations that have been unequally constituted over history, and which are functional to the advance of currently ongoing global university capitalism.