1 Introduction²

The article inserted in the field of investigation of Higher Education (HE) is one of the results of a larger project dedicated to the topic of the internationalization of higher education. The outline proposed here aims to explore the category of internationalization of higher education at home (IaH) using the ProKnow-C methodology (Knowledge Development Process- Constructivist) (^{ENSSLIN, et al., 2010}), in the Portal de Periódicos da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES).

The decolonial perspective brought the necessary epistemic bases to the analyses. For ^{Quijano (2019}), the pattern of power that was constituted - modern/colonial capitalism - forged a conception of humanity according to which the population of the world is differentiated between inferior and superior subjects, irrational and rational, primitive and civilized, traditional and modern. The decolonial perspective (^{QUIJANO, 2019}; ^{MIGNOLO, 2012}, 2017; ^{DUSSEL, 1993}), as an episteme, questions the colonial pattern of power and inserts in the debate the idea of ​​'detachment' from the modern/colonial pattern; not to become a new universal, but to build frontier thinking. ^{Dussel (1993}, p.173) refers to the need of building an "expanded rationality in which the Other's reason takes place in a community of communication in which all human beings can participate as equals, but at the same time, with respect for his being-Other, his ‘Otherness’”. According to Quijano (2019), epistemological decolonization can open the way for a new intercultural communication, an exchange of experiences and meanings as a basis for other rationalities that can legitimately claim some universality. In the context of IaH, this perspective challenges us to understand the category from the 'world sensibilities' (MIGNOLO, 2017), especially with regard to the pattern Eurocentric of power. Furthermore, it gives us the need to, beyond the criticism of the hegemonic pattern, perceive possibilities of concrete changes to other worlds, other epistemes, based on epistemic disobedience, in the deepening of democratic and inclusive places in border areas.

The theme of internationalization rose to prominence as an object of study - of Education in general and of higher education in particular - in the context of hegemonic world movements in the 1990s. Capitalist movements and countless other forces of the world/colonial system contributed to make internationalization a central theme in higher education. The Declaration of Bologna in 1999 (^{WIELEWICKI; RUBIN-OLIVEIRA, 2010}) and the establishment of University Assessment Policies (^{LEITE; GENRO, 2012}) were two important movements that resulted from the hegemonic/colonial model, which contributed to internationalization both in the context of international organizations with political influence in public policies and in the daily lives of those who research the field of higher education.

The IaH category, on the other hand, achieved greater visibility from initiatives that seek to expand access to internationalization, but also, to expand hegemonic spaces. Initiatives that require greater financial resources and more bureaucracy were added to intercultural projects within the campus/region/country. This way of internationalizing is explored by several authors (^{KNIGHT, 2004}, 2012; ^{STEIN, 2019}; ^{ALMEIDA; ROBSON; MOROSINI, 2019}) and institutions, who seek to understand and promote new possibilities of contacting other countries and cultures without leaving home. However, a careful review is needed to understand how these relations are established, since subjects are involved in the processes of internationalization, and not individuals without identity; and places are spaces that carry contradictions and possibilities (^{RUBIN-OLIVEIRA; WIELEWICKI, 2019}; RUBIN-OLIVEIRA; WIELEWICKI; PEZARICO, 2019).

Thus, in view of this issue and with the objective of exploring the IaH category, the text is organized into five sections. In the introduction, we present the contextualization of the theme, the epistemic basis and the objective. The second section covers the methodological process through the presentation and justification of the choices made and the details of the research steps. The third section brings the analytical categories in the context of the IaH. The fourth section presents a synthesis of the results obtained in the research - through the synthesis frame - and dialogues from a decolonial perspective. The final considerations seek to point out the main conclusions and bring up some questions that can lead to different studies.

Methodological Approach

This research is characterized as qualitative and exploratory. It is thus constituted by connecting the qualitative perception - accomplished by inductive analysis of the material found, questions about research subjects, information and descriptive results (^{BOGDAN; BIKLEN, 1994}) - with elements that were constituted through the exploratory process, such as the choice of the investigation topic and its problematization, the delimitation of the words that condense it, as well as the choice of techniques for searching the articles for the analysis.

Among the ramifications of the theme of internationalization, the IaH category is the most prolific category in studies over the last three decades (^{YEMINI; SAGIE, 2015}). One of the reasons for it is the intention to democratize the internationalization of higher education through IaH, as this category is understood as more accessible than student mobility, for example. Taking this assumption as the starting point of the research, we sought to analyze the literature and identify concepts of internationalization of higher education at home, as well as subjects and places involved in this context. Therefore, there were three categories of analysis used in the process: concepts, places and subjects.

For that reason, the basic principles of the ProKnow-C methodology were used and the Portal de Periódicos CAPES served as the data source from which all articles were searched. The methodological path starts with the choice of the investigation topic, its problematization, objects, objectives and techniques for identification; and later, it goes on to define the keywords - internationalization, higher education and at home - and their arrangement in pairs, resulting in three combinations united by the boolean expression AND:

As for the filters applied to searches on the portal, no restrictions such as scientific recognition, number of citations or the definition of databases were imposed to avoid neglecting relevant articles. The filters used were fundamentally important to keep a number between 50 and 500 articles in each combination. Thus, the filters 'articles' and 'last 10 years' we're applied on the first and second combination; in addition to a third filter, 'in the title', used for the first one.

The third combination, however, composed of the terms higher education AND at home, presented articles that mainly addressed distance education - which is not the focus of the research. Then, the last combination was replaced with a simple search of the three keywords: internationalization AND higher education AND at home. For this third combination, applying the previous filters - 'articles', 'last 10 years' - less than 50 articles were found, and so we chose to use 'articles' as the only filter. All the 715 articles resulting from the three final combinations were saved in the Mendley platform, on 10/30/2019, using the access to the Portal de Periódicos CAPES/UTFPR (Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná). Inside Mendley, the first step consisted of deleting duplicate articles and keeping only articles in English, Spanish and Portuguese. After this step, 553 articles remained in the survey.

The next steps were to read the titles and later the abstracts of each work. Again, no restrictions were applied such as geographic area, types of articles (quantitative, qualitative, narrative or theoretical), scientific recognition or the databases in which the texts were published. The criteria were the main topic discussed in the text and the field of study in which the article is inserted. When analyzing the title of each work, and later the abstract, the following criteria were assigned to each of them: relevant, irrelevant or under discussion. Texts indicated as relevant or under discussion remained in the investigation, while others were eliminated. From this stage, 90 articles, following the same criteria, underwent a complete reading, and when classified again as relevant, they were used for the analysis of the three categories (concepts, places and subjects). The search was completed with 26 articles, listed in Appendix A.

Of the three categories chosen, two of them - subjects and places - were previously explored by Rubin-Oliveira; Wielewicki (2019); Rubin-Oliveira; Wielewicki; Pezarico (2019) and proved to be fundamental to the analysis of the internationalization of Higher Education. Here, they are revisited to explore concepts of HE internationalization from the IaH category, as well as subjects and places that are part of the process. For the systematization and analysis of the articles, vertical analysis frames were built aiming to identify the categories listed in each article individually. At that time, careful and in-depth reading was necessary to search for evidence from excerpts in each category. Frame 01, shown in the fourth section, systematizes the horizontal analysis effort. At that step, the search was to identify thematic convergences of each category - in each article analyzed - and no longer extracts. This is a methodological option for the construction of analytical senses and meanings. Thus, the understanding and epistemic deepening of the category is more relevant than individual perspectives. It is noteworthy that, despite the rigor proposed by the methodology used, the analyses are full of "world sensibilities", as stated by ^{Mignolo (2017}, p. 20). The author refers to the change of perspective when we are available to sensibilities, which is different from the idea of ​​looking at the world, as this brings us only one dimension.

Internationalization of Higher Education

Internationalization activities have always been present in university life (^{NEVES; BARBOSA, 2020}). However, it was in the early 1980s, especially, that the popularity of the term internationalization had greater impacts on higher education, in the context of globalization phenomena (^{KNIGHT, 2004}). Therefore, the internationalization of higher education and globalization often appear as closely related processes, and like all categories associated with modernity, both are not constituted accidentally or without consequences.

Similarly, ^{Leme (2010}) states that globalization was intensified by the state, through governments such as Margaret Thatcher’s, in England, and Ronald Reagan’s, in the United States, when leaders began to evaluate the role of the state in the economy and to redefine the relations between State and Capital. In these new relations, the State submits to transnational interests, the interests of capital overlap with the interests of labor, production happens on a world scale and hegemonic companies lead large global competitions around capital. In this way, globalization disseminates neoliberal ideas and contributes to the imbalance of power between central and peripheral States. As a result, despite the presence of different interactions in a globalized world, only one of the models becomes truly hegemonic - the neoliberal capitalist (^{LEME, 2010}; ^{LEITE; GENRO, 2012}). Due to the presence of this logic inside hegemonic globalization, the process of commodifying education is accelerated (LEITE; GENRO, 2012). Globalization policies also affect subsets of the global context, such as higher education.. The concepts of internationalization of higher education are consolidated in this scenario, from actions and strategies of international organizations with political strength and of governments and institutions inserted in the logic of rationality/modernity/coloniality.

The so-called Bologna Process³(1999) was configured as an important movement towards the (re)foundation of a European pattern to be reflected across the globe. This pattern established the expansion of relations between countries, a direction of educational policies, the prioritization of cooperation among the signatory countries towards student mobility and the free movement of citizens (^{WIELEWICKI; RUBIN-OLIVEIRA, 2010}). It is important to point out that such processes influenced university dynamics across the globe, mainly in peripheral places. However these processes are generated in one place: north-Euro-centered hegemonic centers. The concepts of internationalization of higher education are forged in practices that come from central places for the maintenance and expansion of 'the pattern of world power' (^{QUIJANO, 2019}).

There are many implications of this pattern of world power to higher education. However, the most evident is the system of assessment, accreditation and classification (rankings) (^{LEITE; GENRO, 2012}), which imposed corporate logics, dynamics and principles to the HE institutions. The authors claim that the rankings have become tools to determine the performance of different higher education institutions, which privilege professional preparation over citizenship education and support the terms 'assessment, accreditation and quality' as natural and indispensable factors for the proper functioning of educational systems. Reaching the top positions requires the adoption of these models exported by hegemonic nations, which must be followed by all educational systems and accreditation agencies around the globe. As a result, in addition to placing Latin American Higher Education on the path of neoliberal globalization processes, the rankings reinforce values ​​that delegitimize local practices and, even so, keep most universities from the Global South away from the top positions.

^{Neves and Barbosa (2020}) explain that not only in Latin America, but also in colonial countries in general, the educational system has always reflected their metropolises’. In Brazil, the constitution of the HE system relied on foreign professors - mostly European - who participated in structuring the first universities. Thus, from the beginning , Brazilian HE institutions are influenced by movements of coloniality; and the internationalization of higher education is yet another movement that seems to reinforce colonial patterns in Brazilian public policies, in institutional projects and in development agencies such as those maintained by CAPES and by the Conselho Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (CNPq). These modern impositions, on peripheral places, act to maintain and reinforce the North-Euro-centered paradigm, and are part of movements that started in 1492, with what ^{Dussel (1993}) called the concealment of Latin America and the Latin American people, followed by the constitution, according to ^{Quijano (2019}), of a new world pattern: the modern/colonial North-Euro-centered capitalism.

This process strips subjects of their place and cultural diversity; disregarding their histories, education and daily life often, they are (dis)constituted as political subjects capable of arguing, thinking and building new possibilities of educational quality for the Latin American reality as argued by ^{Leite and Genro (2012}). Thus, despite the resistance and distancing of the Global South in relation to the predominant order, especially in the classifications exposed by the rankings, the hegemonic pattern is preponderant. However, as proposed by ^{Mignolo (2017}, p. 18), it is not possible to “resign yourself to a game that is not yours, but which was imposed on you”. Here, the author highlights what has been called “frontier thoughts or frontier epistemologies”. To Mignolo (2017, p. 23), “there is no other way of knowing, doing and being decolonial, except through a commitment to epistemic disobedience”. In other words, it is necessary, in this perspective, to think about the internationalization of HE from the place, from the epistemic borders, to critique hegemonic models, and insert concrete possibilities for other epistemologies in the debate on higher education.

Movements based on the context of the modern/colonial pattern not only strengthen and make internationalization a central theme in the field of higher education, but they also drive the search for definitions and concepts. The concept most frequently addressed in the literature spans three levels: sectoral/national/institutional. This concept expresses that internationalization “is a process that leads to the integration of the international, intercultural and global dimension to the goals, functions and implementation of higher education” (^{KNIGHT, 2004}, p.64). To clarify, ^{Knight (2004}) explains the terms that compose internationalization. The term process is used to convey that internationalization is an ongoing process and implies that internationalization is constantly developing. The terms international, intercultural and global dimension appear as a triad to reflect the breadth of internationalization. The term international is used in the sense of relationships between nations, cultures or countries. Intercultural addresses the aspects of the IaH, as it refers to the cultural diversity existing in countries, communities and institutions. Global provides the sense of global reach. The concept of integration is used to denote the process of infusing or incorporating the international and intercultural dimension into policies and programs to ensure that the international dimension remains central. Goal refers to the role, general objectives or mission that higher education or an institution has for a country or region. Function refers to the main elements or tasks that characterize a national organization. Finally, implementation refers to the provision of education courses and programs, both internally and in other countries.

The ramifications of internationalization were developed in order to differentiate internationalization practices. The IaH concept emerged from the increased emphasis on student mobility and cross-border education. Internationalization practices at home were introduced at the same time as internationalization abroad began to rise (^{KNIGHT, 2004}). The concepts for IaH define this process as the creation of a culture that promotes exchange and support to the international/intercultural experience focusing on activities at home, or within the learning environment itself (KNIGHT, 2004). ^{Stein (2019}), in a research on critical studies of the internationalization of higher education, highlights that the most prevalent approach to internationalization seeks the global public good. This tends to be based on liberal theories of changes that address inequality through expanded opportunities and access, and address prejudice through increased awareness, representation and intercultural understanding. With this narrative, the emphasis is on development and empowerment in the Global South. To the author, this approach tends to emphasize abstract notions of (in)equalities and exchanges, and to minimize issues of injustice and exploitation.

Thus, it is important to pursue the debate around concepts, places and subjects in the context of the internationalization of higher education, if we are committed to expanding democratic spaces and confronting inequalities. Committing to dialogues in border areas seems to be a way to build concepts in peripheral places, with subjects committed to these places, an epistemic disobedience necessary to the field of study.

Internationalization at Home: Exploring the Category

Exploring the IaH category brought, among many challenges, electing analytical categories to, at first, build a general framework with the research results based on the proposed methodology. Of the three categories listed, two of them - subjects and places - were categories studied by Rubin-Oliveira; Wielewicki (2019); Rubin-Oliveira; Wielewicki; Pezarico (2019) and that proved to be powerful for studies on the internationalization of higher education. For the outline proposed here, the category Subject is constituted through the 'who', who is and who is not part of the IaH; the category Places is constructed by 'where' the movement appears evident; and the third category is constituted by 'what', and refers to the concept attributed to the process. Thus, the three categories of analysis - the Subject who is part of the process, who appears to be a participant in some IaH movement; the place investigated in order to understand the space occupied by internationalization activities; and finally, concepts of IaH in which actions and practices support and insert subjects and places - are presented in Frame 1 as summaries of the analyzed articles that help to understand internationalization movements at home. As a methodological option, the form of presentation highlights key points in the articles to deepen the analysis of the three categories.

In the analysis of the concepts category, it is evident that the IaH modality promotes other international/intercultural activities aiming at the insertion in the world of intercultural and international subjects, close to the characteristics of what is defined as global citizens. IaH practices take place in loco. Thus, there is an interest in local culture and the internationalization movement seems to find its power in the strengthened cultural exchanges between different regions, ethnic groups, homes and institutions. However, it is worth asking how activities have been organized so that exchanges, interactions and dialogues can be expanded towards democratization and access to different non-hegemonic knowledge and cultures, how these interactions are building formal and informal curricula, and how other epistemologies dialogue in this context. In this sense, ^{Stein's reflections (2019}) contribute to the questions proposed here. The author, looking at the current state of critical studies on the internationalization of higher education, states that this is an area with positive and depoliticized approaches. It concludes that, despite the growing interest in critical approaches, there is a risk that criticisms will result in more of the same if they cannot address the complexities, uncertainties and complicity involved in transforming internationalization.

The IaH modality seems to expand the concepts of internationalization of higher education, with actions that may be able to serve a much larger number of students, especially those with limited mobility and financial resources. In this case, experiences can be adapted to the contexts of students, teachers, administrative technicians so that local institutions may be able to promote actions that go beyond local or regional experiences. The places from such experiences can be expanded to a perspective no longer of a university, but of pluriversity. The universal is the infinite dimension of human experiences and diversities in the search for self-knowledge, but also for the recognition of the universe in its different dimensions. ^{Escobar (2012}) explains that the pluriverse world is an incessant movement, a network of exchanges and interrelationships between human and non-human beings. In other words, the pluriverse is the connection and communication of the multiplicity between various cultures in the world, to form a network of knowledge and interrelate them, in order to guarantee the participation and freedom of autonomy for all. A pluriverse world requires the inclusion of ontological and epistemic dimensions, to tension models of domination and inequalities. ^{Mignolo (2012}) recalls that planetary communal 'orders' are based on pluriversality as a universal project rather than a 'communal global order'. Taking pluriversality as a universal project is to accept all rival options. "It's that simple, and that difficult. To move in that direction, we need to change the terms of the conversation. Changing the terms of the conversation, and not just the content, means thinking and acting decolonially" (^{MIGNOLO, 2017}, p.14). What is important to highlight in this category is that the selected articles bring concepts that can be applied in diverse contexts, thus, it is necessary that practices expand dialogues and epistemologies, and not just contribute to maintaining the relations of the hegemonic power pattern.

In the analysis of the second category (subjects) we highlight characteristics attributed to the subjects that can become obstacles or impediments to internationalization. Despite its greater inclusivity, the IaH modality requires contact with people/intercultural experiences, internet connection, access to internationalized libraries and internationalization initiatives, knowledge of other languages, and, above all, access to an institution of HE. These characteristics, by themselves, limit the alleged role of democratization of the IaH, as they are markedly characteristics of hegemonic universes, which even in peripheral places, find their interface mainly with regard to access to digital media, the domain of languages, and the institutional structures that allow internationalization initiatives. The supposed formation of the global citizen can once again be restricted to access, no longer to mobility, but to other means that are obstacles to the possibilities of a pluriverse. ^{Stein (2019}) identifies another critical approach in which internationalization can serve as a means of empowering marginalized individuals and communities to make systemic changes if available resources are strategically mobilized. Thus, once again, it is worth examining the inclusion and access strategies of subjects to this type of internationalization to avoid reproducing the same inequalities and exclusions of other modalities.

Similarly, in the places category we highlight one of the central ideas that appears, intercultural and internationalized places are all learning environments within higher education, between institutions, professors and members of the academic community. In other words, as much as the places category seeks to broaden the idea of ​​internationalization, connecting institutions, teachers, students, travel, experiences, visits, formal and informal curricula, distance study tools and other extracurricular activities, these always come from HE. Therefore, taking into account that higher education institutions, in their structures, are historically unequal and forged in a modern/colonial project, they do not meet the demands of peripheral subjects and frontier knowledge. This is a structural defect of higher education; thus, a change is needed in "the terms of the conversation and not just its content" (^{MIGNOLO, 2017}, p. 17) if the objective is really democratization.

An important step towards democratizing higher education is to define the institutional mission. That is, it is necessary to align the practices with the interests of the local academic community, and not just with the transmission of knowledge, since course content and practices often stem from a modern-colonial model and promote exclusion and domination. Positioning itself in relation to dominant epistemologies and how they influence practices and curricula to promote hegemonic perspectives allows institutions to build movements and practices of resistance and, in this way, to open up possibilities for internationalization based on dialogues with local/regional contexts. Knowing how to listen is essential when the mission is to deepen inclusive and democratic processes. The IaH can build paths to reduce inequality of opportunity, to allow social mobility, and to promote intercultural dialogues as a tool for knowing how to listen. Furthermore, it is necessary to correct the misconception that IaH is restricted to subjects and places directly related to higher education institutions. On the contrary, initiatives and policies must, in fact, come from institutions - as well as the State - with a view to providing, in addition to being open, places with conditions for permanence and support for the external community involved in projects within and outside the institutional space. Such policies and projects need to act beyond borders in order to reach a greater number of subjects. In this way, institutions can make access to the production and dissemination of knowledge more democratic and inclusive, while simultaneously expanding dialogues beyond established borders, thereby building a path to the pluriverse.

These and other actions would be fundamental to inaugurate or maintain more democratic international/intercultural experiences, epistemologically committed to local realities and adequate to the context, inserted in a pluriverse. As ^{Knight (2012}) proposes, it is important to remember the real intentions of internationalization, which must essentially include national and regional policies and practices. The attention given to the international dimension must not overlap with the local context, nor erode it. Internationalization aims to complement, harmonize and extend the local dimension without dominating it. If this fundamental truth is not respected, internationalization will act as a homogenizing or hegemonic agent.

Finally, the analysis of the IaH, from the categories concepts, places, and subjects, makes us reflect on the need to question hegemonic models which emphasize competition between institutions, reinforce social inequalities and focus on North-Euro-centered models of reality. The IaH also presents possibilities for students, professors, technicians and the external community to broaden perspectives by living in an intercultural and pluriverse world. By expanding world sensibilities, in the words of ^{Mignolo (2012}), people expand possibilities for learning, for producing knowledge and for (re)thinking the world and (re)positioning themselves in other possible worlds.

Conclusion

The objective outlined by the research aimed to explore the internationalization of higher education with a focus on the IaH category, from the use of the ProKnow-C methodology, using the CAPES journal platform as a database. Three categories were selected- concepts, subjects and places - for the analysis of the literature.The categories provided a deeper understanding of the IaH and showed that the concepts present in the analyzed articles promote the idea of ​​opening to other worldviews, whether global or local; with interculturalized and internationalized subjects, similar to the characteristics of what is currently identified as global citizens. However, it is also possible to state that the subject category consists of prerequisites that impede or prevent the participation of diverse and distinct subjects in the internationalization process, especially when they impose characteristics such as language mastery and access to higher education, as a condition not always accessible to the vast majority. The places category situates internationalization within formal learning environments, specifically higher education, thereby restricting exchanges and dialogues beyond institutional limits.

The IaH concepts identified in the articles do not seem to attain the diverse possibilities within the very idea of ​​internationalization of higher education that has gained strength in the last 20 years, as possibilities for democratization and interculturality. Subjects still comprise a small portion of the higher education community. And the places, identified as international and intercultural, are limited; they do not seem to be at the heart of most institutions, nor do they reach the external community. However, it is important that the category is revisited by different perspectives, other world sensibilities in other contexts, to further the dialogues about the internationalization of higher education and the IaH category.

Finally, it is noteworthy that throughout the research, other questions were raised and point to other possibilities for investigation, in order to further deepen the debate on the subject. It seems essential to question how activities have been organized so that exchanges, interactions and dialogues can be expanded towards democratization and access to different knowledge and non-hegemonic cultures? How are these interactions building formal and informal curricula? Finally, how do other epistemologies dialogue in this context?