CANADA AND BRAZIL: SHIFTING CONTEXTS FOR KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

This paper addresses the shifting contexts for knowledge production as they affect researchers in the humanities and social sciences working within Canada and Brazil on dimensions of Canadian studies in the twenty-first century. It argues for closer attention to the meanings that words carry within localities and when they travel, and to the contexts in which they make sense. Using a series of brief case studies, the paper suggests that interdisciplinary attention to democracy and governance questions may require a shift in focus and a widening of responsibility beyond traditional academic and institutional actors, as well as deeper attention to the role of English in politics and higher education, and a shift in focus from the nation-state alone to the sub-regional and supra-regional levels. The rise of a global higher education regime further highlights the need for researchers, teachers, and students to question not only the methodological nationalism of nation-based studies, but also the methodological cosmopolitanism that works at the global level alone, locating both of these within the frames afforded by those decolonial and postcolonial studies that value place-based knowledges and the transnational literacies they can generate. In short, globalization is creating conditions in which the development of transnational partnerships in the co-creation of knowledge seems both desirable and necessary.