Emerging Decolonialized Research Collaboration: The Max Planck Society and the Leibniz Association in Latin America

Abstract

Analyzing the number of publications and proportion of corresponding authors of Latin American scholars and scholars from the German Max Planck Society (MPS) and the Leibniz Association (LA; 1954-2018), this article asks if North-South partnerships continue to represent power imbalances. Our bibliometric analysis indicates that (a) in comparison with the LA, the MPS's scientists published more articles with Latin American countries, led by Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico; (b) researchers from the MPS and the LA frequently took the role of corresponding author; (c) researchers from Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico primarily controlled their region's productivity, but (d) Brazil built its own multinational research networks; and (e) countries with less productivity, such as Colombia and Uruguay, are on peripheries of research networks. Our findings indicate that the decolonial perspective needs further development to identify multipolar relationships of dominance and collaboration have developed out of a dichotomy world of North-South relations.

Internationalization, Whiteness, and Biopolitics of Higher Education

“…Yet, more non-western countries strategically invest in research and development now, catching up with their wealthy counterparts in science productivity in selected fields (Gonzales-Brambila et al, 2016), and the flows of innovation and knowledge no longer move solely southwards on the Global North-South axis. Research suggests that today international collaborations follow a multipolar model, connecting multiple locations in the Global North and South, although the unequal power distribution still privileges the wealthier northern partners in the setting of research agendas (Pineda et al, 2020). At the same time, the United States is losing its share of international student mobility to other global destinations within and outside of the Anglophone world (Johnson, 2020).…”

Global South Research Collaboration

“…Our study highlights research on these trends in Latin America, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Previous studies tended to focus on a single region in the Global South (Arunachalam and Jinandra Doss, 2000;Gueye, 2018;Gueye et al, 2019;Guzmán-Valenzuela and Gómez, 2019;Hammond, 2019;Pineda, Gregorutti, and Streitwieser, 2020). While they make unique contributions, they do not reflect the historical and economic complexity of the Global South which spans countries with divergent historical narratives, different official languages and economies, and scientific undertakings that reflect different stages of development.…”

Queer feminist interruptions to internationalising UK higher education

“…Decolonial, queer and feminist scholarship foregrounds the colonial entanglements of international HE (Chatterjee & Barber, 2020), surfaces hidden narratives of mobility for migrant academics (Morley et al, 2018) and amplifies the ethics and politics of international student mobility (Yang, 2020). Most importantly for this paper, a queer feminist intervention in the internationalisation of UK HE challenges the local–global binaries in knowledge production (Majee & Ress, 2020; Majee, 2020) and prioritises efforts to decolonise research collaborations in north–south relations (Pineda et al, 2020).…”