Internationalization at home: local scientific meetings and transnational frontiers of knowledge circulation

analysis of institutional indicators at an Argentine university

Abstract

The debate on communication modalities and scientific information systems has recently been renewed in Latin America and other parts of the world, especially as a result of the open access movement and the criticism of the overweighting of the indexed publications system as a source of institutional and individual recognition. In this framework, this article investigates an aspect less explored by the specialized literature: the active role played by the “scientific meetings” in the processes of knowledge circulation. The quantity and variety of meetings (inter, transdisciplinary or specialized) has increased in recent decades in both the so-called "central" and "peripheral" countries and stimulated its geographic scales of implication, generating a kind of quality gradient that usually it is closely followed also by the policies and the scientific and university institutions themselves. Starting from drawing a conceptual approach from scientific meetings as preferred routes for the knowledge circulation and critically examine the international quality model implicitly established, this work will advance reflecting on the called “internationalization at home” from inquire the relationship-tension between the international scope of that meetings and their local/ institutional contexts of realization. The analytical lens is focused on the National University of San Martín, Argentina, examining its different formats of scientific meetings executed, their geographical scope (differentiating the local/national and regional/international), as well as their academic units of execution/organization and respective disciplinary areas, based on the implementation of a set of circulation institutional indicators derived from the so-called Cuyo Manual.