Cooperation between Germany and Brazil in the social sciences has become more symmetrical

German researchers are increasingly interested in topics studied in Brazilian academia, such as indigenous and black feminist thought, said Brazilian researcher Sérgio Costa, Chair of Sociology at the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Free University of Berlin, in an interview with Agência FAPESP. He was one of the speakers at FAPESP Week Germany.

By Elton Alisson  |  Agência FAPESP – Scientific cooperation between Germany and Brazil in the social sciences and humanities has become more symmetrical. For example, the citation of Brazilian authors in fields such as literature and sociology has increased in recent years, and there is a growing interest among German researchers in topics explored in Brazil, such as indigenous and black feminist thought.

This is the assessment of Brazilian researcher Sérgio Costa, Chair of Sociology at the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Free University of Berlin.

While in São Paulo city, where he directs the Mecila Center –Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America, one of five international centers for advanced studies in the humanities and social sciences funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in cooperation with local institutions and funding agencies–Costa gave an interview to Agência FAPESP.

As one of the speakers at FAPESP Week Germany – an event held on March 25-26 by FAPESP and the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Free University of Berlin – the sociologist analyzes the most obvious inequalities in science that affect the production and circulation of scientific knowledge.

 

Agência FAPESP – Your lecture at FAPESP Week Germany tackles inequalities in science. Which ones are the most obvious and how do they affect the production and circulation of scientific knowledge?
Sérgio Costa – Inequalities within science lead to a situation where important knowledge produced in different regions of the world can be recognized as relevant in a very asymmetrical way. If a professor associated with the University of Oxford [in England] publishes an article, regardless of the quality of the study, because the author is associated with that institution, his work will have a much greater impact and diffusion than that of another researcher associated with a university in, say, Araraquara, in the interior of the state of São Paulo. He may produce something brilliant, which from the point of view of excellence of knowledge and quality of research may be much better than that of the one from Oxford, but it’ll take much longer and he may not even be able to publish his results. In addition, there’s inequality within science by field. If we analyze the levels of funding of the different sciences, some are obviously more expensive because they require more sophisticated equipment, for example, but the funding of the different scientific fields is very unequal in almost all countries. In this sense, the social sciences and humanities are less well funded than others, even though they may be much more relevant in countries like Brazil, where discussing the huge inequalities that exist from a social sciences point of view is as fundamental as developing technologies for certain areas. But obviously, in the social and political perception, technology plays a much more important role, and this is reflected in the unequal funding.
 

Agência FAPESP – How can artificial intelligence contribute to increasing inequality in science?
Costa – The use of artificial intelligence in science is already being done in a very unequal way, and this will become more pronounced. Some countries and centers of scientific production will be able to benefit much more from this technology than others. So the trend is not that artificial intelligence and new technologies will help reduce inequality. On the contrary, they will accelerate, multiply and widen existing inequalities. One of the reasons for this is that the centers that produce these new technologies, that develop the algorithms and determine what will be disseminated, are not located, for example, in countries of the Global South. The possibility of a researcher from Burundi or Ghana [in Africa] effectively influencing this process is zero. And the use of these new technologies for scientific purposes is also unevenly distributed.

Agência FAPESP – How does the process of publishing scientific articles contribute to the deepening of inequality in science?
Costa – There’s inequality in the decision-making process of transforming scientific results and academic discoveries into commodities, in other words, the commodification and commercialization of knowledge. Basically, there are five major scientific publishing houses that are able to transform academic knowledge into a commodity, which is sold at a very high price, even though the funding that generated the production of this knowledge and fostered the researchers was generally paid for with public funds. But in the end, those who benefit from the sale of the publication are a few publishers who basically form an oligopoly of academic production. And that also creates inequalities. In response to this, there’s a big movement today for open science, which I’m totally in favor of, I think it should happen, but if it isn’t handled well, it can also generate new inequalities, because open science is based on the paid publication market. So researchers or their institutions have to pay for the results of their studies to be accessible at no cost to the end reader. And what will happen – and is already happening – is that countries with stronger and more financially solid institutions will have no problem paying USD 2,000, USD 5,000 or even USD 10,000 for an article to be published in an important indexed journal. A country like Brazil, on the other hand, which doesn’t have the worst research funding, will find it difficult to pay this amount to publish scientific articles.

Agência FAPESP – What would be the alternative?
Costa – I think that in this case, the alternative would be to bet on open systems that, at the same time, aren’t profit-oriented. One of the best examples in the world today came from the state of São Paulo, which was SciELO [Scientific Electronic Library Online platform, launched in 1997 with the support of FAPESP]. This could be the model for scientific dissemination in the world. In this way, we’d really have open science.

Agência FAPESP – Based on your experience of scientific cooperation between Germany, Brazil and other Latin American countries, which mechanisms would you point to as the most promising for trying to reduce inequalities in science?
Costa – Based on my experience, but also observing successful initiatives in this area, I’d say that the big key to reducing inequalities in science is multilateral, transnational research networks. In this way, it’s possible to link circuits of diverse knowledge, such as the results of studies published by Brazilian researchers in SciELO, with papers in scientific journals of greater international prestige published by researchers from other countries, such as Germany. This would allow them to exchange publications and create mechanisms to break down these asymmetries. The idea of multilateral research networks is to give visibility to knowledge of excellence that’s currently lacking but deserves a high profile.
 

Agência FAPESP – Is inequality in science a topic that you’ve been studying at the Institute for Latin American Studies in recent years?
Costa – In sociology there’s a sub-discipline called the sociology of knowledge, and I’m not a sociologist specialized in this subject. My reflections on the subject of inequality in science are based much more on my experience as a researcher who’s closely linked to both Europe and Latin America, and who therefore observes the conditions of publication and circulation of knowledge in these two regions. I wouldn’t say I’m a specialist in this field. My areas of expertise are social inequalities and the possibilities of coexistence in plural contexts. These are the original lines of research. My reflection on inequality within science is more as an actor who lives it and not as someone who specializes in studying this topic.

Agência FAPESP –When did the Free University of Berlin create the Institute and what were its motivations?
Costa – The Institute for Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin [Free University of Berlin] was created in 1970, at a time of great unrest in Europe, marked by May 1968 [in France], when there was a great mobilization of students against authoritarianism and a growing interest among Europeans to learn more about other regions of the world. Even then, there was criticism of the Eurocentric view of the world, based only on looking at Europe or the United States, and a growing interest in opening up the vision to other regions of the world. It was in this spirit that the Institute was born, bringing together six disciplines and, more recently, one on gender studies. However the original disciplines were sociology, economics, history, anthropology, literature and political science, which are still represented by chairs. I’ve been Chair of Sociology at the Institute since 2008. And our interest is in studying Latin America, not as a region disconnected from the rest of the world. All of our research programs emphasize the relationship between Latin America and the rest of the world. If you think about it, for example, the energy transition in Europe today isn’t done without links to Latin America. Much of the raw material used to produce electric cars, for example, comes from Latin America, where the environmental, economic and social costs are generated. Understanding these connections has always been on our radar – and that’s what we’re still doing today. The aim is to understand the links, the interconnections between the different regions of the world and Latin America’s place within them.

Agência FAPESP – One of the lines of research at the Institute for Latin American Studies deals with immigration. What aspects of this issue, which has emerged with the rise of ultranationalist politicians in recent years, have the researchers at the Institute dedicated themselves to studying?
Costa – The immigration specialist at our institute is anthropology professor Stephanie Schütze, who’s also a senior researcher at Mecila. She’s even studied the presence of Bolivian women immigrants in São Paulo. The emphasis in immigration studies at the Institute is not to understand it as a problem, but to open our eyes to it. What has happened today – and this was very evident in the last parliamentary elections in Germany [in February] – is that the far right has been able to take immigration only for its problematic side. Obviously, some immigrants have done the far right a great favor with the recent attacks in the country, which, in addition to the unacceptable attacks on the lives of civilians, have had a very negative impact from a political point of view. But what you see in a country like Germany is that it depends on immigrants. Without immigrants, Germany is unable to maintain basic essential services. For example, much of the care for older people in the country today is provided by immigrants, and there’s a shortage of workers. If Germany does decide to stop the migration process, it’s condemning itself to a lack of future, including through the age pyramid, because it’s a country of older people. And who’s going to take care of these older people? Without immigration, the country isn’t sustainable, and so Germany needs immigrants. Business leaders themselves say they need immigration, but the far right has managed to say that this is the big problem of Germany today and has made immigration a scapegoat. The country has greatly reduced investment in infrastructure and security in recent years, but the far right has promoted the idea that it’s immigration creating all the problems Germany has today. A very simple explanation was found for a complex set of problems, and as a result, the far right got more than 20% of the vote, which is very shocking in a country with Germany’s history.

Agência FAPESP – Immigrants have also contributed and continue to contribute greatly to the advancement of science and technology in Germany. The most recent example was the German startup BioNTech, founded by a couple of scientists of Turkish descent, which partnered with Pfizer to develop one of the first vaccines against COVID-19. In this sense, has the impact of immigration on the advancement of science in countries like Germany not been properly recognized?
Costa – This example has a lot of symbolism because at a time when the country and the world were in a health crisis, descendants of immigrants managed to develop a vaccine that brought not only academic and political prestige but also a lot of economic resources to the country. The city of Meinz [where BioNTech is based] became rich because of this startup.

Agência FAPESP – Has the impact of the new migration policies already been felt in German science?
Costa – It’s difficult to give a general answer to this question. I think there are isolated cases of people being discouraged from going to Germany – it’s much more obvious in the case of the United States – because they fear persecution, for example. The statistical or quantitative impact of this is very difficult to assess, mainly because it’s difficult in science to analyze something that hasn’t happened, that is, to know how many people have stopped going to Germany to work in universities, for example, because of this fear. It’s much easier to calculate who came, but who didn’t come is technically very difficult to know. But I think it’s easier to see the discomfort this has caused for the people who are already there. In fact, there are professors who avoid working in certain universities that are located in cities with a high level of right-wing extremism, for example. There’s also an impact on the academic agenda. For example, there’s great pressure on colleagues in the field of gender studies. The far right seeks to cancel these people, to say that what they study is ideology, whereas there’s still very strong gender inequality in Germany and it’s essential to study this and know how to overcome it. But the far right is able to turn this into an ideology that makes no sense and discredits all studies in this area. And that affects researchers on the subject. This also happens with researchers who study other topics, such as migration itself, and who’re being accused in a totally unreasonable way of favoring the invasion of Germany by immigrants, for example.

Agência FAPESP – Some political scientists believe that one of the reasons why ultranationalist leaders have been attacking immigrants is that since the major problems facing countries today, such as climate change, transcend national borders and therefore require coordinated action on a global scale, immigration is a domestic issue that they can fulfill their campaign promise to fight. Does the same logic apply to Germany?
Costa – That’s true. At a recent event at the Mecila Center on climate, with the participation of a German journalist, he said something very interesting. He said that politics doesn’t propose problems for which it doesn’t have an answer. This fits in very well with your point, which is that far-right politicians formulate problems that they believe can be solved. In the case of banning immigration, this would have consequences and wouldn’t be so easy to implement, because there are European and national laws that would prevent simply closing Germany’s borders, for example. But somehow, looking at what Trump is doing in the United States, with complete disregard for human rights, he’s somehow fulfilling his campaign promises. This isn’t going to solve the problems of the United States, of course, but it’s an answer to this problem that he formulated. So this mechanism does exist. And if we take the dimensions of immigration in the world, 4% of the world’s population has migrated or is a migrant. The other 96% aren’t migrants. In other words, can this 4% really be responsible for all the problems in the world today? Certainly not. I think migrants today are much more of a solution than a problem for countries like Germany with aging age pyramids.

Agência FAPESP – What was your scientific and academic career like until you settled in Germany?
Costa – I went to Germany to do my Ph.D. on a CNPq [Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development] scholarship and returned to Brazil, where I stayed for another four years. After that, I received an invitation to return to Germany for a full professorship, which I accepted with the expectation of returning to Brazil again, since the academic career in Germany is very difficult for researchers. Until the postdoctoral period, researchers there generally don’t have permanent employment contracts. They have temporary contracts. So I left a permanent contract in Brazil to do a postdoctoral fellowship, with a temporary contract. But in 2007, when I finished my post, by a good coincidence there was a competition for a permanent position at the Free University of Berlin, for which I applied and fortunately was selected. Such competitions are very competitive. But because of my academic career in Germany and my research experience in Brazil, this gave me the credentials for the chair I hold today, which, incidentally, is the only one for Latin American studies in Germany in sociology. This shows how closed the academic job market is in Germany. Of course, there are other researchers and professors in the social sciences in Germany who do research on Latin America, but not in a specific chair.

Agência FAPESP – How do you assess the scientific cooperation between Brazil and Germany in the social sciences and humanities?
Costa – In general, there’s an intense exchange, both in terms of the number of students who graduate in Germany and return to Brazil, and in terms of exchanges and joint projects. Co-authorship, on the other hand, is not a good factor to measure the density of collaboration in the social sciences and humanities, because it’s generally rarer than in the “hard” sciences. As in Brazil, economics and political science in Germany tend to be Anglophone, and I’d even say Anglophile. Even so, there’s a lot of cooperation between the two countries in these areas, which are more dominated by U.S. production. I’d also highlight literature, where there are many studies, citations of authors from both countries, and there are a significant number of researchers in Germany who study Brazilian literature. Philosophy and sociology are also traditional fields in which there’s an intense exchange. What I think is happening now, fortunately, is a little more symmetry in this exchange, because it used to be that Brazilian students went to Germany and came back to Brazil to apply the methods and theories they’d learned. That still happens to some extent, but in some areas it’s changed a lot. We have much more symmetry and cooperation. Great German authors who are often cited, such as Niklas Luhmann [1927-1998, a German sociologist considered one of the main authors of social theory in the 20th century] or Jürgen Habermas [a German sociologist and philosopher associated with critical theory, born in 1929] have died or ended their academic lives. They continue to be cited, but not as much as before. On the other hand, new fields in the social sciences and humanities are being introduced in Germany that didn’t exist before. For example, interest in indigenous thought, which was almost unknown 20 years ago, is now attracting a lot of attention. For example, the book The Fall of Heaven, written by Davi Kopenawa in partnership with Bruce Albert [a French anthropologist], has just been translated, published in an expanded German edition, and is, all things considered, a major publishing success in Germany. There are also new areas that have opened up, such as black Brazilian feminist thought. This is something that was very little known in the country 20 years ago. Today there are many people in Germany studying Lélia Gonzalez [1935-1994, a Brazilian philosopher and anthropologist] and Sueli Carneiro [a Brazilian philosopher]. These are very interesting developments that we’ve observed. This allows us to establish a two-way flow and not just a transfer of knowledge from Germany to Brazil.