ACADEMIC
COOPERATION
BETWEEN
ARGENTINA AND
INDIA
By Dr. Lía Rodriguez de la Vega*
with the social function of the search for knowledge of truth
and teaching activity. With the advent of modernity and the
industrial revolution (late 18th and early 19th century), the
function of research was incorporated. During the 20th century
the role of contributing to the solution of specifi c social
problems (Björn, 1996), or university extension. In the present,
the social functions of the university are teaching, research and
university extension. They add that during the fi rst decade of
the 21st century, there was a renewed relationship between the
university and society, given in the context of the emergence
of a diff erent productive model. In this framework, a more
territorialized university was observed, committed to the
production of applied knowledge and the implementation of
development practices.
For such considerations, they follow Carrillo López and
Mosqueda Gómez (2006, p.3), in the notion of the social
function of the university, conceived as: a social process (in)
that directly interpella the university and the social system
crossed by a series of changes, conjunctures and contingencies.
The social function is the result of direct interpellation between
the university (seen here as a social macroinstitution) and
social processes in specifi c historical contexts.
This new perspective on the role of the university in
its relationship with the community, which considers the
transmission of scientifi c knowledge and at the same time
advances a human development proposal, assigns centrality
to the process of citizenship construction (Tonon, 2012).
In this context, in the study of diversity (which in this
case involves Asia and Latin America) the notions of culture
(universe of meanings) (Geertz 1973/2003), identity (the
subjective part of the culture) (Giménez, 2007) and space are
central to such a task. In this sense, Oslender (2002), points
out that “the concept of space has always been political
and saturated with a complex network of power/knowledge
29
Introduction
The relationship between the university and the community
is currently being developed within the framework of a
reconfi guration of the public, which is no longer linked only to
the State but as a space for citizen participation, proposing in
turn a work dynamic of the university in its relations with the
community, which implies having the citizens as protagonists
(Tonon, 2012).
Associated with the above, taking into account the political
dimension, Mojica Mendieta (2011) points out that the
globalization scenario implies an epistemological challenge
for the social sciences, related to generating new analytical
categories that account for the transformations and constraints
in the agency of people.
In such a way that currently, it is observed: a) an increase
in the number of researchers in the world and as a result of the
growing centrality of scientifi c and technological knowledge
in the development of societies, in the processes of functional
interdependence, b) an increase in the speed of changes, the
abolition of the frontiers of the spaces for the production of
knowledge (Carli, 2014, refers to the erosion of the borders of
the disciplines and the appearance of modes of production of
transdisciplinary knowledge) and national borders (Kreimer,
2006, 2011), c) a competition between the hegemonic
blocks (North America, Europe, Asia) for the scientifi c and
technological predominance (Kreimer and Zukerfeld, 2014).
In this scenario, most of the countries of Latin America
and the Caribbean developed in recent years, policies aimed
at stimulating both the generation and local use of scientifi c
and technological knowledge, highlighting the discursive
centrality that science and technology occupy. in the
interventions of state agents and society itself.
Thus, Delgado and Casalis (2013) point out that since its
origins in the 12th and 13th centuries the university emerged