Internationalization and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Opportunities for the Global South

The aim of this study is to reflect on how internationalization can take place in these challenging times of the Covid-19 pandemic, from the perspective of researchers of a university in the Global South. So as to foreground the discussion, the locus of enunciation of researchers in a Brazilian university is exposed and a meta-analysis of 10 studies produced there between 2019-2020 is carried out, and contrasted with four virtual conferences held by Brazilian associations between June and July of 2020. Overall results of the study suggest that the Covid-19 pandemic brought about many disruptions for education (in general) and international education (in particular), but also opportunities, as internationalization moves away from academic mobility to virtual mobility, enabling a more active role for universities in the Global South and a more balanced internationalization panorama in the world.


Introduction
In a recent event online, Sharon Stein (2020) discussed the idea of internationalization for "the end of the world as we know it", focusing on current practices of international education and internationalization. Nine years before that, Brandenburg and De Wit (2011)  (2020), Moravec (2020), and Wotto (2020) -calling for more ethical and qualitative approaches to the study and practice of internationalization of higher education.
We can argue that more ethical approaches to internationalization will necessarily have to address the imbalance of academic mobility as it was practiced before the pandemic, whereby universities in the Global South were responsible for sending most of the students to universities in the Global North in what Lima and Maranhão (2009), referring to the Brazilian scenario, described as a "passive" internationalization process.
As we can see in the account given by internationalization researchers in the previous sections, before the pandemic, ethic concerns related to inclusion, equality, costs, benefits and the footprint involved in international travel had already called for a review of international academic mobility. Yet, it was not until the outbreak of the pandemic (with its social distancing measures to fight the spread of the virus) that universities were forced to review their internationalization plans and academic mobility programs.
Another effect of the pandemic was the migration of many academic activities to the virtual environment, with the consequence that many universities in the Global South that were not able to participate in internationalization actions and dialogues before (because of the high cost involved in academic mobility and international travel) were suddenly able to join international conversations through international virtual exchanges.
In this scenario, this paper aims to review some of the alternatives that have been put forward such as the concept of Internationalization at Home (IaH), proposed by Beelen and Jones (2015) and recently discussed by Robson (2017) and Guimarã es et al. (2019a), and Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) as suggested by Finardi (2019) and Hildeblando Junior and Finardi (2018), to readdress internationalization in the Global South and to offer more opportunities for cooperation rather than competition. Figueiredo and Martinez (2019) suggest the revelation of one's own locus of enunciation as a way to confront epistemological racism, in an attempt to decolonize scholarly knowledge, by making epistemologies of the Global South visible in what Sousa Santos (2014) calls an "ecology of knowledges", thus moving beyond abyssal lines. Thus, we accept Figueiredo and Martinez' (2019) invitation and expose our locus of enunciation in regards to the knowledge produced in a research group of a Brazilian university (the Federal University of Espirito Santo, UFES) which was analyzed in this study.
In doing so, we hope to highlight the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought not only disruption, but also opportunities for us to think about the process of internationalization and the role of universities in it. Moreover, we hope that this reflection fuels a paradigm shift from competition to cooperation, with a more active role for universities in/of the Global South as they enter international dialogues through virtual exchange as a replacement of previous international travel and academic mobility practices. Therefore, the overall goal of this study is to reflect on how internationalization can take place in these www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/jetss Journal of Education, Teaching and Social Studies Vol. 2, No. 4, 2020

Internationalization in Brazil
Brazil is an important player in the process of internationalization of higher education in the Global South with a population of more than 200 million people, almost 10 million of whom are enrolled in higher education. Its complex educational system (Note 1) is comprised of more than 2,500 higher education institutions (HEIs) made up of private higher education institutions (88%) and public ones (12%). Public HEIs (mostly federal universities) produce almost 90% of all research in Brazil, and are responsible for the inclusion of the majority of low-income students (70.2%). Finardi and Ortiz (2015) compared the internationalization process of two universities in Brazil, one public (Note 2) and one private. Based on the observed trends of universities in Europe seeking to internationalize after the Bologna Process (as a means to finance the institutions with the revenues coming from international students), Finardi and Ortiz (2015) hypothesized that the private university investigated would be more prone to internationalize than the public one, given that public universities in Brazil are free of charge and so, would not have economic motivations to internationalize. Results of the study showed quite the opposite scenario, that is, the public university investigated (the same one where the present study was carried out) was more motivated to internationalize than the private one.
So as to explain this unexpected result, the authors (Finardi & Ortiz, 2015) suggested that, given the size of the Brazilian "market" and the fact that there are not enough seats in public universities for all, private universities did not have to look outside Brazil for revenue in the form of fees from international students, given that the "domestic market" was very large and comfortable for private institutions.
Of course, a lot has changed since then, especially in 2020 with the pandemic, which disrupted education worldwide yielding very different reactions in what concerns public and private universities in Brazil. The pandemic revealed social gaps and inequalities, highlighting the important role that (public) universities have in the offer of solutions to problems experienced by their communities and by society at large. While Brazilian private universities offered remote teaching (as soon as social distancing measures were adopted, and as a way to maintain the payment of fees by their students), public universities that do not depend on students' fees suspended the offer of classes until the academic community was prepared to migrate to remote teaching/learning mode of education.
In doing so, Brazilian public universities focused instead in the offer of research and outreach activities aimed to alleviate the negative impacts of the pandemic in their communities. So, while public universities continued their research, administrative and outreach activities online, suspending teaching until it was possible to guarantee the minimum conditions for online education, private universities switched to online teaching as early as possible during the lockdown and peak of the pandemic, despite the difficult conditions of teachers, staff and students to carry on teaching and learning in the remote mode during the quarantine period.
In June 2020, Brazil became an epicenter of the pandemic, because of the political crisis that resulted in the resignation of two Health Ministers, during the worst period of pandemic. In the midst of the pandemic crisis, public universities had to fight yet another war (Note 3), declared by the former Minister of Education (Note 4), known for his fierce attacks on public universities, claiming that instead of making science and producing knowledge, public universities were "racketeering". As the pandemic worsened and the population started to doubt such discourses (turning to science to fight the epidemic), the attacks to public universities backfired, as these institutions resisted and showed their relevance to society during the pandemic, by offering solutions and mitigation measures through research and outreach initiatives.
As such, the pandemic was somehow a "wake-up call" for Brazilian public universities (Note 5), and an opportunity to "think outside the box", in terms of academic mobility not being the main activity of internationalization, and to consider the possibility of international virtual education instead (Note 6).
Thus, the pandemic changed the landscape of the internationalization of Brazilian institutions, due to travel restrictions, forcing universities to rethink their internationalization plans in terms of alternatives such as virtual mobility.
Before the pandemic, the internationalization process of most universities in Brazil was focused on academic mobility programs, such as the "Science Without Borders" (SwB), the largest and most expensive academic mobility program in Brazil, aimed to send Brazilian undergraduate students abroad, and the "Capes PrInt" for graduate students and academics, both of which aimed to send Brazilians to universities of the Global North. The problem with these programs is that they benefit only a small percentage of elite students, financing universities of the Global North, instead of looking South and investing in South-South cooperation and IaH activities.
The pandemic has also highlighted the potential of virtual mobility as an alternative to physical mobility, and as an alternative to redesign the internationalization patterns and directions. However, according to Stallivieri (2020)  Indeed, in a study that looked at the Brazilian academic production of the Linguistics field Finardi and Franç a (2016) highlighted the fact that though Brazil had the 13 th largest scientific production in the world then, it was not ranked accordingly in measures and rankings of academic production. The authors explained this result in terms of lack of recognition of the internal community in the form of citations, but also in relation to the language of publication considering that most of that academic production was made in Portuguese and so circulated, mostly in the Global South. Having outlined this panorama, revealing our locus of enunciation, we now turn to the method used to analyze how internationalization can take place in these challenging times of the Covid-19 pandemic, from the perspective of researchers from a university of the Global South.

Method
In order to support our discussions and reflections on the role of universities and its contributions to  In addition, some virtual conferences held by the Brazilian associations ALAB (Note 10), REBRALINT (Note 11) and ABRALIN (Note 12), which took place between June and July of 2020, were analyzed, with the aid of note taking, to support our discussions, as shown in Table 2 with the links to the virtual conferences analyzed. Content analysis tools (Bardin, 2011) were used to analyzed the corpus of the study, composed of ten studies (Table 1) and four virtual conferences (Table 2). Content analysis is frequently used in social sciences to systematically analyze contents quantitatively, in terms of frequency of occurrence, and qualitatively, in terms of the constructs and references found in the data.

Results
This section summarizes the findings from the selected studies and virtual conferences. First, we describe the results of the meta-analysis of the ten studies produced by the research group at UFES, as shown in Table 3. The use of English as an academic lingua franca, along with the promotion of multilingualism in higher education can support intercultural academic relations.

Guimarã es &
Finardi 2020 Intercultural and multicultural approaches to education can be seen as opportunities to deal with the challenges of diversity in higher education.
In relation to the findings of the publications we can summarize them by saying that (in general) they point to the following conclusions: 1) languages are very important for internationalization; 2) more participation and agency is needed, especially from local agents, in the design/implementation of internationalization policies; 3) cooperation among universities in the Global South is needed, so as to promote education as a public good; 4) information and communication technologies (ICTs) used in virtual exchanges, along with approaches such as IaH, COIL, CLIL and the intercomprehension approach, can foster multilingualism and represent an alternative to physical academic mobility.
Concerning the virtual conferences which occurred in June and July 2020, their key ideas are discussed in Table 4.  Source: Authors' www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/jetss Journal of Education, Teaching and Social Studies Vol. 2, No. 4, 2020 10 Published by SCHOLINK INC.
The summary of the results of the conferences shows that: 1) language practice happens in social networks and it is localized; 2) language does not reflect, but rather creates reality and experience; 3) language and local experience are relevant in the construction, recognition and distribution of knowledge and, as such, they are important in the process of internationalization; 4) the pandemic changed patterns of interaction in and with the world and fostered the reflection about individual versus common good; 5) the social inequalities highlighted by the pandemic may be an indication that internationalization, as it was practiced before the pandemic, may be understood as a system hospicing through decolonial lens.

Discussion
Taken together, the present findings suggest an urgent need to rethink internationalization and the roles of universities, in the challenging times of the Covid-19 pandemic. No longer can internationalization be equated with mobility for elite students only (due to travel restrictions and social justice factors), demanding new approaches and alternatives for universities to develop teaching/learning, research and outreach activities for everyone in a more cooperative and less competitive orientation. Therefore, internationalization can become a comprehensive process (Hudzik, 2011), to meet the needs of the multiple agents and stakeholders in higher education and we add, in an ecology of knowledges from the Global North/South through the use of virtual exchange to include more players in international exchanges and dialogues.
Our results cast a new light on alternative views (critical and decolonial ones) and approaches that may support new practices in higher education in the years to come, such as Internationalization at Home, CLIL, COIL and the Intercomprehension approaches, supported by information and communication technologies (ICTs) to foster virtual exchanges and dialogues. So as to do that, Brazilians must overcome the digital, language and collaboration gaps discussed by Stallivieri (2020) moving from a focus on academic mobility/competition to a focus on virtual exchange/cooperation.
We acknowledge that there are considerable discussions among researchers as to how higher education institutions (HEIs) may deal with the challenges brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, but the findings of this study may provide a good starting point for universities to review their practices and to become environments that are more democratic and socially just fostering the provision of relevant solutions to society during challenging times. Moreover, we think that these suggestions point to an ecology of knowledges coming both from the Global North and from the Global South.

Conclusion and Future Research
This paper aimed at reflecting on how internationalization could take place in these challenging times of the Covid-19 pandemic, from the perspective of researchers in a university of the Global South. So as to foreground the discussion, the locus of enunciation of researchers of a Brazilian university was exposed and a meta-analysis of 10 studies produced there between 2019-2020 was carried out, and contrasted with four virtual conferences held by Brazilian associations between June and July of 2020.
The meta-analysis of the ten selected papers suggested that: 1) languages are very important for internationalization; 2) more participation and agency is needed, especially from local agents, in the design/implementation of internationalization policies; 3) cooperation among universities in the Global South is needed so as to promote education as a public good; 4) information and communication technologies (ICTs) used in virtual exchanges along with approaches such as IaH, COIL, CLIL and the intercomprehension approach can foster multilingualism and represent an alternative to physical academic mobility.
The analysis of conferences showed that: 1) language practice happens in social networks and it is localized; 2) language does not reflect, but rather creates reality and experience; 3) language and local experience are relevant in the construction, recognition and distribution of knowledge and, as such, they are important in the process of internationalization; 4) the pandemic changed patterns of interaction in and with the world and fostered the reflection about individual versus common good, 5) the social inequalities highlighted by the pandemic may be an indication that internationalization, as it was practiced before the pandemic, may be understood as a system hospicing through decolonial lens.
Taken together, results of the study suggest that the Covid-19 pandemic brought about many disruptions for education (in general) and international education (in particular), but also opportunities as internationalization had to move away from a competitive orientation geared towards academic mobility to consider alternatives for virtual mobility, thus enabling more cooperation and active roles for universities in the Global South. The orientation shift afforded by the pandemic, from a competition/academic mobility orientation to a cooperation/virtual mobility orientation may be inducive of a more balanced internationalization panorama in the world based on an ecology of knowledges.
As we have argued elsewhere, the critical use of technologies and alternative approaches in higher education may be a promising aspect in the transition period after the end of pandemic and beyond.
Therefore, further research on the role of universities might extend the discussions and reflections presented here, in order to disentangle the complexities of alternative practices to be used at universities, in order to promote social justice, democratic practices and an ecology of knowledges.