Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ScholaResc (How do rescued scholars change their host academic environments?)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2025-03-31
ScholaResc is a socio-historical research project focusing on the life trajectories, international circulation, and scientific production of Brazilians who took refuge in France after the military coup of 1964. Its main sources are the asylum application files submitted to the French Office for Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA), biographical interviews, and secondary data on the professional careers and scientific production of those exiles. These materials were used to characterize the Brazilian refugees, to map their academic integration in France, and to follow the evolution of their careers in the long term. The work with biographical data and information on their professional trajectories allows observing how different social backgrounds, characteristics, and sets of capitals relate to dissimilar insertions in the host academic environment. The interviews, in turn, contribute to understanding the importance of the measures implemented by the host country to facilitate their social and academic insertion. They also detail the academic exchanges and long-lasting ties resulting from this exile. This research improved thus the methodological training of the principal investigator, notably towards the use of social network analysis and the development of mixed methods for the long-term study of international academic exchanges. Finally, the study of this historical case contributes to the research on the international circulation of knowledge, as well as to Latin American and migration studies. This research aims, more broadly, to shed light on the challenges arising from the integration of exiled academics into host societies. This topic is particularly timely and relevant given the increase in threats to academic freedom over the past decade (as reported, for instance, by the Free to Think human rights network).
The first challenge faced by the ScholaResc research was to circumscribe the population of the study. To do so, the OFPRA archives were contacted at the very beginning of the project, with a request to explore the files of the Brazilian refugees. While waiting for their authorization, secondary sources (biographies, academic literature, interviews, and other archives) were explored to broaden the researcher's knowledge about the characteristics and specificities of the Brazilian exile in France. When the OFPRA allowed the researcher to visit their archives, 5 weeks were spent on-site to consult the 266 asylum applications filled by Brazilians exiled in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on these forms, the researcher conceived a database that compiles and categorizes the data from the archives. Besides systematizing information from the archives, this database contains additional data on the professional and academic activities carried out by the refugees in the subsequent years, which were collected from public secondary sources (like dissertations, biographies, interviews, testimonies, CVs, and web searches). The database contains, therefore, information on the academic institutions they frequented in France, their written production, dissertation supervisors, and topics of study, among other pieces of evidence of the type of academic insertion they had abroad. Following the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) research principles, all metadata explaining the procedures utilized to structure the database was registered in a technical report and all secondary sources were documented and stored. Next, to produce a better understanding of the context of the Brazilian exile and the challenges and opportunities presented by the French academic environment, 10 interviews were conducted with exiled students/scholars or people who gravitated around the exiled community during those years. The articles that will result from this research will combine the data on the social backgrounds from the OFPRA with the information concerning the subsequent years of their careers to describe their academic experiences in France and to examine how different social backgrounds, characteristics, and sets of capitals relate to dissimilar insertions in the host academic environment.
To our knowledge, ScholaResc is the first research to consult OFPRA’s Brazilian archives and the first project aiming to retrace systematically the academic insertion of this population. ScholaResc database shows, for instance, that at least 47% of the 235 Brazilian adult refugees attended academic institutions in France, and that about 25% of them would work at some point as academics. It indicates, moreover, that beyond rescuing those who worked already as scholars (since only 10% taught or did professional research during their exile in France), policies favoring the insertion of these refugees in French universities helped to train a younger generation of Brazilian scholars. Besides, those who continued in France the undergraduate courses interrupted by the dictatorship (at least 15% of them), many had the opportunity to do specializations/masters (20%) and Ph.D. studies in France (15%). Our qualitative analysis shows, additionally, that the academic connections built during this period helped ensure long-term exchanges between the French and the Brazilian academic communities. These qualitative observations concerning the formation of international academic cooperation will be explored in the next research to be carried out by the principal investigator, extending its findings to a contemporary and broader setting.