Iara Leite

I am a professor at the Department of Economics and International Relations, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, Brazil. My main research interests are centered on the interplay between international development cooperation, collaboration in science and technology, and the Global South. The project I am currently working on results from a Brazilian government demand taken to public universities a couple of years ago to estimate their annual expenses with international development cooperation. As part of the UFSC team established to map and classify our university’s expenses, I felt it was important to take some time to reflect upon the implications of our methodological choices. These choices matter not only because of the need to guarantee that data produced in Brazil can be compared to data produced elsewhere, but also because of the urgency of questioning traditional aid’s assumptions on hierarchies and on the supposed unidirectionality of knowledge flows.