Currently, international students comprise around 2.5% of UFMG’s academic community. This population, although relatively small in comparison to other countries in the region, generates diversity in both cultural and cognitive patterns in the University. It enriches classroom discussions and promotes different learning experiences. However, if the University could offer a greater number of undergraduate-level activities with a global view and in foreign languages (mainly in English and Spanish, the most spoken among our international student body), it is assumed that this number could significantly increase. It would project UFMG’s student internationalization to the same level as the best Latin American institutions. It is from this analysis that the idea of implementing a Minor in International Studies at UFMG emerges.
Although the terminology “International Studies” can refer to specific areas of knowledge (such as International Relations, International Politics, International Law or International Economy), this proposal aims at a broader and more diverse scope. The initial plan with the Minor is to gather a group of professors and disciplines from UFMG’s 20 Academic Units that work on themes of an international or comparative nature, in order to offer to UFMG’s students – Brazilians or international – a truly plural environment in national, ethnic, evaluative or religious terms. In order to do so, UFMG will seek to systematically offer undergraduate courses taught in English and Spanish, suppressing the University’s historical gap and thus leveraging its potential for intercultural exchange.
“International Studies” is a common terminology in Anglo-Saxon universities to refer to a group of disciplines which – though not circumscribed by content – are relevant to a particular cognitive domain and share a global perspective beyond National States territorial boundaries. Therefore, considering UFMG’s objectives concerning the Minor in International Studies, instead of operating exclusively with typical disciplinary concepts of Public Law, Macroeconomics or Political Science, there is an urgent need to innovate in classroom practice, in order to be conceived on a multinational and multidisciplinary basis. Therefore, the existing diversity between human collectivities and their ways of acting and thinking should be accommodated and explored in our favor.
As explained by Thales Castro, “knowledge (international epistemology) as we know it brings specific forms of seeing the world. Moreover it brings ways of interacting with the world and with ourselves” (in: Theory of International Relations, Brasília: FUNAG, 2012, pp. 309-10). In our understanding, therefore, this internationalist epistemology, rather than a specific content or ontology, is the element that connects UFMG’s academic units, faculty and students in the purpose of organizing and giving life to this project.
The epistemological path of this Minor is to address any potentially “internationalizable” problem from the perspective of the “inter” (i.e. the “between”, the relation, the exchanges between different ones) and not of the “national” or “state” (which would probably be the more traditional path within the university). The key to understand the similarities and, above all, the differences of the world is the exchange and comparability between cases. After all, as the Historian Eugênio Vargas Garcia deliberates (in: Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2018), it is reasonable to postulate that, from the moment the hunter-gatherer homo sapiens of a tribe or grouping began to confront and relate to individuals associated with other human collectivities, based on other geographies, the “international relations” began to develop.
In this sense, a useful tool for what has been designed here is comparison. Comparison is a tool for controlling generalizations, which offers grounding for predictions, identifying regularities and exceptions within a same class of phenomena. This exercise potentially brings heuristic gains. Comparison provides a level of knowledge that other techniques do not achieve, such as:
- allowing contextual description of research objects, offering knowledge about the “other-national” in relation to the “I-national”;
- allowing the classification of a vast array of elements, making the world’s comprehension less complex and providing interpretive scripts;
- allowing the testing of hypotheses or competitive narratives, giving inputs to a wider and more open theorization in certain areas of knowledge;
- providing predictions in probabilistic terms, giving an empirical grounding to the “good prognosis” (see: Giovanni Sartori, “Comparison and comparative method”, 1991).
In our view, the wealth and reason for this Minor in International Studies lies in this sustained exercise of search for understanding and integration of the “other-national” in UFMG’s processes.