Fostering Internationalization of Research and its Implications for Localization Practices: A Case of an Aspiring Christian University

A Case of an Aspiring Christian University

Abstract

This article examines current practices of research and scholarship in an institution aspiring to become a research university (De La Salle University, Manila, owned by the Brothers of the Christian Schools) by viewing these against the background of globalization of research, state and market funding, research commodification, and colonial history. This informed viewing enables sight of the effects of a globalizing direction of scholarship 1) for the practice of local community-based scholarship, like BEC studies or local theologies and 2) for one’s attachment to or detachment from the local culture/society. It is explained that DLSU’s brand of localization is more of a top-down delivery of resources on the local, than a bottom-up recognition of and reliance on the local as a fountainhead of knowledge. Thus, this study offers a critical reflection on a university’s globalizing drive that 1) fosters the pursuit of the global and 2) unwittingly cultivates dispositions that tend to conform to an “application” approach to localization and miss the indigenous pools of knowledge or local community-based transformative practices as resources for the global.