Internationalization and university outreach in dialogue: Current knowledge and future perspectives

Abstract

The dominant conception of the internationalization of higher education rationalizes and naturalizes the perpetuated expansion of capitalism and the radical hierarchization of humanity. Thus, it is important to seek international university relations aligned with broader social justice efforts or epistemologically opposed to the privileging of the global over the local. Given the potential of outreach in terms of establishing an organic relation between the university and the society, we seek to understand, from a panoramic and exploratory perspective, Brazilian and international scientific production on the dialogue between internationalization and university outreach. We carried out a literature review on the subject in the leading national and international databases. From this corpus, we studied the 10 publications that most directly emphasized the nuances of this dialogue. The results of this analysis point out, among other aspects: 1. The fragile interaction between internationalization and university outreach; 2. The understanding of the university-society relationship as synonymous to university-industry collaboration, with internationalization understood as a means to intensify such partnerships; and 3. The possibility that Latin American studies are less reductionist when discussing university outreach/extension and the relationship between internationalization and outreach.