Day 54, Year of #Mygration: Insights from South America

Dr Alexander Borda-Rodriguez on a recent research trip to Ecuador, surrounded by a group of workers weaving

In this podcast, Dr Alexander Borda-Rodriguez, Research Fellow at The Open University, highlights his reasons for choosing the UK for postgraduate study, and explores why critical South American expertise and research are still failing to be properly embraced by the West.

After moving to the UK to pursue his Master's and then PhD, Dr Borda-Rodriguez discusses the 'highly misleading' but widely used term, 'Latin America'. He touches on how this generalisation, and the West's reluctance to consider research findings that are not produced in English, leads to valuable insights from South American researchers getting overlooked.

He also offers a comparison between the higher education system in South America and the UK, and some of the key cultural differences he noticed when moving here.

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