Deslocamentos estudantis: juventudes, trajetórias e a geopolítica do conhecimento nos intercâmbios acadêmicos

Abstract

Migration, in the contemporary world, has intensified and got significantly more complex. People, objects and ideas circulate among different places and different ways, resizing notions of space and time and configurations of belonging and identity. This research, in this context, aimed at investigating the student’s migration through academic exchanges. This type of migration, growing in recent years, has singularities that greatly affect the trajectories and perceptions of those who practice them. Based on the experience of the graduate students from the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), which had exchanged students in the years 2013 and 2014, as well as the experience of the researcher, who was himself an exchange student on his undergraduation in 2011, there came an attempt to understand and describe this phenomenon. Through interviews and participant observation, it was noticed that this type of migration has a direct correlation to the generational cut. The idea of "being young" presupposes being available for new experiences and incorporating cosmopolitan ideal. However, these students who go to a foreign country face many integration difficulties to hang on with the locals, restricting their interactions to the universe of their peers, or, in other words, with other exchange students. Despite of this "foreign" condition, the exchange student acts as a differentiating and distinctive element for the network of these students in Brazil. In addition, the exchange student contributes to the construction of life projects and the expansion of the "field of possibilities" of these subjects, extending significantly their perceptions and perspectives on their own lives and on the world. The living out and the experience of the strangeness promote the redefinition of a Brazilian identity, used as a differentiation strategy in relation to foreigners. Finally, we highlight this phenomenon as part of government development projects, by inserting in the global arena of geopolitical dispute for scientific knowledge.