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one local language and to register it in media to share with the network and
2) elaborate a proposal to include this local community online. The project of
points of culture would provide the cameras, server and computers to make
the edition of the content and to publish it online. We sent a call from the
Humaniredes network (2006) and fourteen universities sent us proposals.
In 2007 we had the approval for a UNESCO Chair Multilingualism and Local
Content Production in Digital World at the University of Campinas in São Paulo,
Brazil. However the projects sent to the Ministry of Culture were denied, for
the Brazilian Ministry of International Relations (Itamaraty) had forbidden
to send Brazilian funding abroad. So, we had the projects ready, a UNESCO
Chair, and no funding. We made some attempts to engage Brazilian research
agencies, but multilingualism was out of the scope of any national call. We also
tried to ask for funding from the European Union who understood that the
project was good, but saw no objectives in the simple construction of a southsouth
network, no possibility of and no reason for opening dialog and content
exchange among us.
Another interesting initiative in partnership with the European Research
Council in 2007 was to foresee the needs of research in multilingualism and
to produce a call for research customized for the ongoing projects. We have
worked on that possibility and as far as I know, in the ERC internal meeting
to deliberate about funding the representative from Portugal at ERC denied
the proposal and so Portuguese speaking countries were kept out of the range
of the call.
At UNICAMP University in 2008 my former laboratory understood that
multilingualism was out of the scope of the lab, and I was transferred to the
Center of Memory, and in 2011 to the Center of Logic, Epistemology and the
History of Science which is where I work now in this very project.
3.2. Border Line
Facing such difficulties was a surprise for us. In fact, it seemed natural to propose
such a network, and as every agency not only agreed but also manifested interest
to support it, none of these “failures/rejections” were expected. The Brazilian
agencies and ministries discourses were centered in the idea of an interesting
proposal that should have all institutional support, but by different reasons
wouldn’t have fund provisions, and at the university we had the recognition of
an important project that wouldn’t have institutional support by now.
Multilingualism in Digital World – although thought as a simple proposal – touched
pseudo-ethical issues, that were not in perspective at that time. The context that
I’d call postcolonial did not permit the infrastructure to enhance the emergence of
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