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Fractured scientific subjectivities. International mobility as an option and obligation

This article collects some results of the research carried out between 2014 and 2017 about the trajectories and scientific experiences of social researchers in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico. The information was obtained through in-depth interviews with 39 researchers from the social sciences in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico. The article analyzes the biographies of the researchers interviewed, specifically in relation to the causes that motivated or forced departures from their countries of birth to continue their academic careers abroad. The focus of the analysis is on the relationship between international mobility and the biographical aspects that caused their departure, either as a training process or as an obligation during military dictatorships. The results show aspects about the configuration of the scientific subjectivities of social researchers, which is a dimension little taken into account in studies on international mobility.


Introduction
It is undeniable that within academic life, international mobility is assumed as a fact that favors the development of science and the internationalization of scientific knowledge. However, leaving the country of birth or residence to continue academic training or to make a scientific exchange is not always done voluntarily and as a necessary process in the scientific training of researchers. Beyond the benevolent horizons of internationalization, making the decision to leave can mean a biographical break, a bifurcation in the trajectories of scientists and, therefore, an impact in their subjectivities.
Since the mid-twentieth century, most countries in Latin America experienced a series of political, economic and social crises that led to civil-military dictatorships (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay); to popularly elected governments that became authoritarian through the combination of licit and illegitimate mechanisms (Mexico, Peru, Venezuela); or to long and painful civil wars (Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua). These states and levels of crisis had profound impacts on the daily lives of citizens. In the field of sciences there were also various types of effects, specifically in the social sciences. For example, academics and social researchers suffered stigmatization because they were labeled as collaborators with the communist guerrillas or were directly identified as members of them. 1 This generated threats, torture, disappearances, assassinations and exiles. These tragic experiences, from the individual point of view, had an impact on the scientific trajectories and the production of knowledge. The arguments developed in this article are (1) that international mobility can be voluntary or forced (as in the case of exiles); (2) the travel to other countries is not synonymous with a situation of total adversity for researchers because (3) new academic networks are built, which have an impact on biographies and individual trajectories and (4) new experiential territories are configured where the life of those who carry out mobility acquires an important meaning through family ties, labor ties in universities and research centers, and through the emergence of a feeling of belonging to places, cities or countries.
In the study conducted, social researchers (women and men) from Argentina, Colombia and Mexico were interviewed. Taking into account the socio-historical contexts of these countries, it is important to know the meaning of international mobility experiences and how this affects scientific practice. In the social sciences, it is common to study international mobility based on statistical approaches (how many people were mobilized), geographic descriptions (where they were mobilized to), or economic elements (material and immaterial resources obtained in the mobilization).
In Latin America an important antecedent is the work coordinated by Rosalba Casas (2001) and Matilde Luna (2003) because from them the notion of knowledge networks began to be constituted. This notion allowed tracing and understanding, from empirical cases, of how different actors intervene in the production of knowledge from the local to the regional level. The work of Pablo Kreimer (1996) on the migration of scientists in Latin America is also seminal. From there emerged several studies that asked about what at the time was called "brain drain" (Didou and Gérard 2009), other studies focused on internationalization through the mobility of academics in different countries of Latin America (Didou 2013), on its impact on the circulation of knowledge (Didou and Pascal 2015;Beigel 2017), and more recently on relations between exiles and institutions (Bialakowsky, Guglielmone, and Romo 2016). 2 However, I believe that the subjective dimension in international mobility has not been sufficiently addressed from empirical work. As Guglielmone states, "Human migratory experiences respond to many causes and satisfy decisions adopted for economic or social reasons, or are forced for reasons of political and ideological nature or can respond to subjective individual desires" (2016,17). For this reason it is important to know and understand international mobility from the political and economic aspects, but also from the subjective motivations. In other words, to understand the complexity of mobility in its contextual and individual double dimension.
Within the Scientific and Technology Studies (STS) perspective, this double analytical entry is central. However, in Latin America there is no empirical research on internationalization centered on scientific subjectivities, this can be a new area of research for the STS field. In this case, the objective is to understand the intimate causes of mobility and its effects on the configuration of scientific subjectivities. The study of mobility, centered 1 The translations of excerpts were made by the author. 2 It is not the objective of this work to establish a state of the art on internationalization in Latin America because that would mean an investigation in itself; for this the reader can consult Didou and Jaramillo (2014).
on the subjects, is relevant for STS because it broadens our knowledge about the mediation of internationalization between scientific practice and the construction of scientific facts with new methodological and conceptual tools. Given the current international division of scientific work (Kreimer 2006(Kreimer , 2013 and the asymmetries on international mobility data in Latin America (Didou 2008), it is important to find out what their characteristics are. The specific problematization that guides this article is to understand how the mobility processes of social researchers from Argentina, Colombia and Mexico influenced their trajectories and, consequently, their scientific subjectivities. The taken option seeks to go beyond the institutional framework and the historiographic tracing in order to highlight the subjective dimension of the trajectories of social researchers.
The text is structured as follows: section two of the article describes the methodology used in the investigation; section three presents the findings, which focus on the conception of international mobility from a voluntary or forced experience; finally, section four introduces the conclusions and some concerns that can be the basis for future research.

Methodological aspects
Involvement in the "subjective task" (Pedraza 2010) implies a challenge in which it is necessary to assume an ethics of research that goes beyond the traditional position of the researcher who listens to and studies "others" with the sole purpose of obtaining information. In order to generate this rupture I have approached the research giving centrality to social scientists as subjects of knowledge. The perspective I propose is not novel in the epistemological sense, but it does look for an alternative to the tradition that locates scientists either as expert knowledge informants, or as experts who seek information on multiple social aspects. The ethics of the research that I propose seeks to demarcate the social researchers from scientific mysticism and, at the same time, to apprehend their status as socio-historical subjects with specific intellectual and personal interests. The aforementioned through the interpretation of as many testimonies and records as possible.
Therefore, I have specified as study units some social science researchers from three Latin American countries through in-depth interviews. This data collection technique was used in order to establish an opening space for reflections on their own practices, experiences and scientific trajectories in the field. As Jorge Chuaqui and his collaborators argue: The concept of "unit of study" refers to those parts of the processes that are not subdivided in the analysis. The unit is such to the extent that, to study a process of which said unit is a part, it is considered without introducing subsequent subdivisions in it. This does not imply that said unit in itself cannot be analyzed in its constituent parts. Even when certain parts are considered as units compared to the larger process, this does not mean that the internal properties of the units cannot be studied. (2012,87) It is important to note that, when considering social scientists as the units of study of research, my intention is to highlight the social interactions that constitute the daily scientific endeavor of social science, recognizing this endeavor as a fundamental element for the sociological understanding of the field of social research. This consideration is based on the perspective that recognizes scientific subjects as the primary element in the production of knowledge. It is argued that scientists are the epicenter of research; therefore the understanding of scientific processes must take into account their actions, practices and intentions. Such analysis is the irreducible nucleus that allows the researcher to understand the social construction of scientific knowledge.
The use of the biographies as a central methodological resource in the construction of the cases allowed a proximity with the interlocutors from which I could closely understand features of the recent social and political history of each of the countries that are part of this research. For the reconstruction of the biographies of the researchers I have opted for in-depth interviews, instead of other similar techniques such as oral history, life story, or discursive interview. 3 This is due to the fact that these information gathering techniques do not have a specific focus, allowing the story to begin, unfold and center on events and feelings that the interviewee considers important or memorable from his or her own point of view (Bray 2013;Rojas 2013). On the contrary, in-depth interviews focus on some vital aspects that are of interest to the researcher, generating a "re-immersion" effort on the part of the interviewees in collaboration with the interviewer (Vela Peón 2013, 73). In this sense, I consider that the reconstruction of biographies through in-depth interviews is the most appropriate technique for the collection of data since the core of the inquiry is specifically in the experiences lived during the scientific careers of the interviewed researchers. 4 In summary, the methodology was based on in-depth interviews with social researchers and a review of secondary sources (specialized bibliography, webpages, curriculum vitae, and official documents). In total, 39 researchers (19 men and 20 women), 5 aged between 28 and 75 years old were interviewed for a total of more than 43 hours of recording. All of them active within the national research systems of each country and connected to public or private universities, and belonging to different disciplines of the social sciences, among which anthropology and sociology were the more numerous, followed by political science.
The selection of researchers to interview was done randomly through the websites of Colciencias, Conacyt, Conicet and also through universities and research centers in social sciences based in the capital cities of each country (Bogota, Buenos Aires and Mexico City). 6 This selection criterion gives a bias to the research, given that in regions different to capital cities and large cities (knowledge production and academic niches par excellence) researchers tend to have more adverse conditions in terms of physical resources and possibilities of international mobility, opposite to those found in universities and research institutions located in centers of industrial, financial and political power.
At the time of the interviews, only two of the researchers were not linked to universities or the research system, but they still maintained connections with scientific research and the academic field through their work. On the other hand, one of the interviewees is Brazilian nationalized in one of the countries that is part of the research. Five of the interviewees are foreigners (with different nationalities to the place where they work) but with strong personal, family and academic ties with the countries where they were interviewed. Out of respect I have kept the anonymity of the interviewees and in some cases, by their explicit request, I have reserved the name of some institutions.

Nomadisms and experiential territories
One of the moods that have deeply marked the subjectivity of the scientists refers to the trips they have made for academic purposes (voluntary or forced). A transit between a before and after, the displacement to another country requires an emotional and material readjustment (and sometimes the assimilation of a non-return). To detect the situation of foreigners is to condition everyday life to what is strange, to what is external. 7 That estrangement is undoubtedly more radical when the causes of departure from the native country are forced or untimely.
In this section I want to analyze the two forms of international mobility that I found during the interviews: in the first place, the trip abroad for academic purposes and by own will, that is, the departure as a qualification strategy; second, leaving the country as an exile, as a survival strategy. These two types of displacement experienced by the interviewees are understood from a double movement: first from the notion of nomadism because it refers to a sensation of uprooting or rupture (temporary or definitive, violent or consensual) with the country of origin. I refer to this notion to account for the continuous and general transfers that the researchers said they experienced during their academic lives. Each mobilization has a sense and an objective, it is not fortuitous for researchers to leave their countries of birth, as it is not a minor fact that all the interviewees have done this at some point in their trajectories for more or less prolonged periods or with a definitive character.
The notion of "nomads" as a particularity in scientific trajectories had already been suggested by Vessuri in the following terms: More knowledge workers are becoming "nomads" in their personal and work biographies. More people from Latin America are being recruited internationally.
[ … ] Although there is a small number of postdoctoral candidates, researchers and foreign teachers in Latin American institutions, the mobility of Latin American researchers to other countries in the region and internationally has become a more common feature. This presence abroad does not exclusively mean emigration, but also visits of variable duration, through sabbaticals, postdoctoral programs, short stays, conferences, etc. (2009,199) Thus, nomadism has become a common practice in academic and scientific life. In fact, as defined by Vessuri, nomadism can not be separated from scientific activity. The main 7 I refer to everyday life in the sense assigned by Castillejo: "What is called here everyday life does not refer to what happens every day and it becomes routine, normal, evident. This is perhaps the content that colloquially, even in social research itself, is assigned to the word: the ordinary, what happens every day, the triviality and irrelevance of life, which is not extraordinary. Everyday life has to do, rather, with the universe of face-to-face encounters that take place between people in very different social contexts. These encounters are not random or given by chance, although of course they have a high degree of fluency; on the contrary, they obey different types of rules that some communities reproduce and negotiate in common. In this everyday life there is an order that, although of smaller scale, is related to wider social structures. They are structured meetings, obey social interaction patterns with limited repertoires and define personal and collective itineraries. It is there, in that everyday life, in that immediate environment, where the ways in which human beings give meaning to the world around them are produced and reproduced, just as they give sense and meaning to the past and the future" ([2000] 2016, 46-47).
benefit of professional nomadism is the possibility of establishing networks with colleagues. To be nomadic is not just to travel from one place to another, but mainly to make sense of those trips through a complex network of interactions and ties with institutions that reconfigure the everyday life of those who experience it. Nomadism is a bifurcation in trajectories because the pathsnot previously consideredopen new possibilities for the academic career in each individual case. From an individual point of view, nomadism is the source of new experiences that display a series of emotions, feelings and signifiers in each scientist. On the other hand, from a collective point of view, nomadism constitutes a broad system of flows in academic mobility that, in most cases, contributes to the dissemination and strengthening of scientific capacities. Scientific nomadism is the possibility of new experiences, these are intertwined forming a past-present-future always active and dynamic: in nomadism the "here and now" is recombined with the past and flows into a more or less uncertain future. All implies that there is no total uprooting or irreversible emotional dismemberment. On the contrary, nomadism is the deconstruction of subjectivity because of what has already been lived. Scientific nomadism does not stop the scientific vocation (and therefore, knowledge production) but it makes it possible under new cultural coordinates. To name those coordinates I have provided the notion of experiential territories, which is understood as the multiplicity of physical and geographical spaces in which researchers have developed their training processes or academic activities generating a new meaning in their daily lives. The experiential territories are spaces from which transcendental experiences emerge in the daily lives of the subjects. In these spaces there is a deep sense of existence for researchers, whether personal, family-oriented, academic or all at the same time.
The idea of experiential territories emerged during the interviews because I found that in the midst of nomadism, a type of life experience is configured that gives new meanings to scientific practices. Some of those experiences are related to knowing and interacting with a leader in the study area, to achieve recognition abroad for the work done, to create a new family at the destination place, to internalize the cultural web of the new residence, or simply to "fall in love" with a city. The experiential territories are such when they offer the possibility of continuing to exploit the cognitive capacities and the scientific vocation under new emotional nuances, and this can be done in a laboratory, in a university, in a research center, in a city or in a whole country.

Fractures and exiles
Directly or indirectly, some of the interviewees were affected by government violence of rightwing regimes in their countries of origin. Indeed, some of them witnessed the exile, disappearance or murder of relatives, colleagues or teachers, or they themselves suffered threats against their lives during the dictatorships that took place in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Directly, to be themselves who had to flee for those same reasons.
In either case, the subjective and emotional impact is profound because everyday life is altered, is transfigured generating either a feeling of fear (the fear surrounding the question "when will it happen to me?"), or a nostalgia for what is left behind and an uncertainty for what is coming.
Below I extract from the interviews and the field diary some testimonies that, read from a distance, seem ineffable maxims of the trajectories of the researchers, of their biographies: (1) I was born in Cuba, and when I was born in Cuba my mother was exiled there because her first husband had been murdered by the army [of Colombia], then she went into exile [ … ]. (Colombian researcher) The first case, referred to a Colombian anthropologist, must be seen within the context of the war that the country has experienced since the middle of the twentieth century.
In this case, as the interviewee relates, his family -"a family of intellectuals," as he saidwas linked to politics and even to arms participating in one of the guerrillas that had been formed in the country. In the midst of this long-term armed conflict, many academics, journalists, social and political leaders connected to the left have been persecuted, disappeared or killed. 8 The history of exiles of these social sectors has been uninterrupted to this day. In the case of academia, this has meant that certain types of research always carried a risk that had to be considered. The construction of a new experiential territory (Cuba) by his mother marked the trajectory of the interviewee in the sense of defining not only his first years of life, but also the research topics that years later, after many intellectual spirals, he devoted himself to (e.g. forced displacement, construction of memory and experiences of pain in armed conflicts). His research mirrored what happened in his own life as part of the Colombian armed conflict. The transit between Cuba and Colombia is an experience that may be of little interest, but under the premises developed here it is essential to understand the scientific career of the interviewee.
(2) Here [to Mexico] we arrived in 76, here in reality what we were doing was building … building the FLACSO. We arrived with nothing, the only thing that we brought was part of the library of Santiago [of Chile]. (Chilean researcher) The case of this Chilean economist, who arrived in Mexico after the closing of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Santiago de Chile, develops in the middle of the dictatorship that Augusto Pinochet imposed in the southern country between 1973 and 1990. As in the case of the other dictatorships in the Southern Cone, in Chile the military government persecuted and repressed scientists who were critical of the policies adopted or who professed an ideology opposed to the right-wing politics of the time. In that atmosphere of hostility towards some academics, FLACSO had to close its doors and its members had to leave the country; thus, six of them arrived in Mexico to create a new FLACSO based in that country. This action was carried out, as explained by the interviewee, with some books from the old library of FLACSO in Chile and with the support of the Mexican government. The exile as a consecuence of the Chilean dictatorship marked the personal and academic life of this researcher; but even more, this is an example of how social and political fractures in one place give possibilities for scientific deployment in another thanks to the opening of doors to migrants. The experiential territories, in this case Mexico and the creation of a new FLACSO, had important repercussions at the individual and collective level.
(  (4) is from a female researcher whose parents, related to academia, had to go into exile due to the repression that the military government exerted towards certain university sectors. In this context, the interviewee spent her early childhood years in Switzerland. In the 80s, with the reestablishment of democracy, the interviewee returned to the country where she finished high school and then, in 1995, she entered a sociology program at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). The fact that she came from an academic family is directly related to her childhood being lived outside the country; but it is also a factor that influenced her training because she had the opportunity to study at the most renowned universities in the country both public (UBA) and private (she completed a Master's Degree in Administration and Public Policy at the Universidad de San Andrés). Later, she completed a Master's Degree at New York University and a doctorate in Political Science from Torcuato di Tella University, which is a renowned private university in Argentina. In both cases, nomadism occurred by force and should be understood by moving beyond individual biographies and looking at the specificities of the social time in this country. This temporal transcendence is a direct consequence of the socio-political context of Argentina during those years, but it also allows us to understand how long exiles forge experiential territories and open new paths in scientific fields.
(5) Here [in Mexico] I always felt very good, I never thought about going back to Brazil.
(Brazilian nationalized Mexican researcher, taken from the field diary) The last exerpt contains the testimony of a Brazilian sociologist from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, who in 1968, during the military dictatorship that began with the 1964 coup d'état, went to FLACSO in Chile to pursue a Master's degree. Later, she joined El Colegio de México (COLMEX) as a researcher where she collaborated with the creation of the Center for Sociological Studies of that institution. In 1972 she obtained Mexican nationality and since then she has remained connected with the COLMEX where she is an emeritus professor, and is also a visiting professor and consultant in various universities around the world. The forcefulness with which she mentioned her wishes of not wanting to return to Brazil has as a background: the fact that from a very young age she had the chance to be related academically and work with institutions of great prestige that offered her the opportunity to develop free and autonomous research, a situation that was very different during the dictatorial period in Brazil, which was characterized by being closed not only politically but also culturally. As she herself mentions: Brazil is a very self-referred country, now it has opened a little, but in my time, imagine, when I was studying there in the late sixties: 64, 67, 68 … So, to begin with, Chile was a discovery of Latin America, it was my great awakening that Latin America existed.
This isolation to which the interviewee refers deeply marked her relationship and identity with the country, her exile is in the midst of that social and political crisis that, as she says, did not allow her to know the world beyond national borders. Literally or figuratively, the feeling of isolation generated a sense of rupture with Brazil when she leaves and discovers other countries. Added to this, the opportunity to make contacts with researchers from other latitudes, "some who later came to Mexico as refugees," allowed her to create a network of academic and social support that decisively influenced her scientific career. Uprooted from the context of the conversation in which they were uttered, these affirmations/sentences seem sensationalist excerpts from ill-fated periods lived by their protagonists. However, I place these excerpts here because they are concrete examples of some of the circumstances experienced by the subjects in reflection with their trajectories. They are factspainful and difficult, without a doubtthat traced paths in the configuration of their scientific subjectivities and that I have tried to explain to understand the relationship between biographical experiences and social contexts.
In that sense, the previous testimonies are just some examples of the subjective and experiential fractures that mark the lives of scientists. Here they stand out as an essential point to take into account in the study of international mobility because such breaks have indirectly produced relevant events for the social sciences, such as the creation of FLACSO-Mexico or the Center for Sociological Studies of El Colegio de México. Less obvious, but equally important, is the fact that the exiles generated support networks, academic networks and convergences between colleagues from which research works emerged with diverse academic experiences, through the participation of researchers of different nationalities in particular academic nodes. In different ways, these people who leave their countries for reasons of violence make an experiential restoration generating or rebuilding social bonds, giving sense to that time of fracture. The decomposition is never total, that is why new experiential territories are generated as synonymous with an existential transformation through new relationships, social circles, studies, research, jobs, etc. At this point I follow Castillejo ([2000] 2016) when, analyzing the situation of displacement due to violence, he mentions that the fact of suffering a deterritorialization (loss of territory) does not mean that there is a loss of identity as is usually believed in certain circles of the social sciences. Drawing from Marc Augé's notion of "anthropological places," Castillejo proposes that displaced subjects affirm themselves in inhabited spaces, reelaborating their sense in the face of new circumstances. The situation of displacement, Castillejo argues, generates an absence, a discontinuity in relation to inhabited space, but the fact "that [this relationship] suddenly breaks down does not mean that the subject disappears, because to say that the displaced person loses his identity is practically to make him disappear" ([2000] 2016, 236). Through the experiential territories the subjects rework the relational, symbolic and material senses; his subjectivityas Castillejo saysdoes not disappear. In the indicated cases, the experiential territories refer to an institution as in the case of the experienced Argentinian researcher, or to a country as in the case of the Brazilian teacher, nationalized Mexican.

Travels with or without return
Leaving the country of birth to undertake training studies or to support academic programs through courses and seminars is a common and highly valued practice within the academia of Latin America because it refers to a sign of internationalization and exchange among scientists. 9 This practice, contrary to the situation described in the previous section, is done by own will and is seen as a positive and enriching experience in personal and academic terms. In fact, some of the most internationally recognized scientists could be considered true academic nomads in the sense that most of the year they move from one institution to another, from one country to another, giving conferences, seminars or courses. Invited by various institutions to participate in their activities due to their knowledge in thematic specialties, these nomads reinforce their prestige and expertise with each trip, thereby generating a stronger ownership and appropriation within the scientific elites.
To reach that peak you have to travel a long journey of 20, 30 or 40 years, depending on the circumstances. The first requirement (but not the only one) that currently seems to be essential to acquire scientific recognition is to obtain academic degrees. One of the issues that I addressed with my interlocutors during the interviews was academic mobility, since it is true that the place (institution, city, country) of formation generates an indefectible identity in the subjectivity of researchers. The reasons for choosing these places of mobility, most of the time, have an intimate and profound meaning; other times it is decided by necessity or comfort; and others more by chance. Therefore, I focus on analyzing the conditions and motivations of the interviewees to make those trips in search of academic qualification, trips that had a point of return or, on the contrary, still continue.
Economic and social conditions are an important influence on the decision to study abroad. Within these conditions, in the case of Colombia, the majority of those interviewed did a degree (undergraduate in Colombia) in the country but went abroad to do graduate studies. This is because the scholarship system offered by governments and institutions in other countries is the greatest incentive for Colombian researchers to continue their graduate training abroad. Of the interviewees, only one researcher has made all his academic training (undergraduate, masters and doctorate studies) in Colombia. Likewise, only one researcher did undergraduate and graduate studies outside of Colombia (in the United States). In the other cases, undergraduate training has occurred in Colombian public and private universities and graduate studies (specializations, masters and doctorates) have been carried out outside the country, with high preference in France, the United States and Mexico. 10 These countries have a scholarship system that allowed interviewees to travel there for a more or less extended period of time (between three and six years) with financial support for studies and sustenance. In some cases, they were allowed to work inside or outside the universities in which they did their studies.
As I mentioned earlier, the main motivation for studying abroad was the existence or the possibility of accessing financial support. This particularity of researchers in Colombia is explained by the high cost of education in the country and the few financing programs that exist, both institutionally and governmentally. In the absence of a consolidated system of scholarships (as in the cases of Argentina and Mexico), those people who do not have the possibility of paying high costs for master's or doctoral programs in Colombian universities, choose to seek programs outside the country. This difference between Colombia on the one hand, and Mexico and Argentina on the other, is reinforced by other structural aspects such as spending on research and development, patent applications and the number of researchers per million inhabitants (for a comparative analysis of this data among the three countries see Guzmán Tovar 2015). It can be said that, regarding science and technology, Colombia lives a policy of scarcity and this leads to a general perception of the researchers that it is very difficult to carry out graduate studies there; that is why the tendency (at least among the interviewees) is to look for options outside the country. Another reason to leave the country (which does not exclude the previous one) is the affinity with the research topics found in foreign programs and the international recognition they have acquired through a concentration of knowledge production modes and its distribution. 11 Although this could be seen as a reproduction of the international division of scientific work (where European countries and the United States are dominant), the fact is that given the scarcity of academic offers researchers legitimize the possibility of going to study in those regions. And they do it because they recognize the tradition and the importance that certain programs have developed regarding the research lines of interest. In terms of Bourdieu, doing a doctorate abroad is based on (a) the high cost of doing it within the country versus the little economic capital of the interested parties, and (b) the need to increase cultural and scientific capital through degrees in prestigious institutions and programs. In this sense, what is sought is the continuous rise of the scientific trajectory both in academic terms (degrees) and in symbolic terms (prestige), which is nothing more than seeking prestigious degrees.
In the cases of the social scientists interviewed in Mexico and Argentina, the situation is different because in those countries the researchers make their academic trips motivated by other logics and circumstances. In Argentina, for example, the prominence of the UBA in the certification of doctors among the junior interviewees is remarkable. Among the senior researchers, the trajectories, most of the time, go through doctoral training 10 It is clear that the sample that I use here is not representative but it could be indicative of a hypothesis to check: the undergraduates in Colombia that want to continue with graduate studies choose to do them abroad because of the weakness of the scholarship system, financial support and incentives for the completion of master's and doctoral studies in the country. According to information provided by Colciencias on 13 December 2016 through email at my request, the High Level Training Program, created in 1992, has supported up to 2015 a total of 15,510 masters and doctorate beneficiaries with forgivable credits; of these, 70% requested support for studies abroad and 30% for programs in the country. 11 Whitley ([1984] 2012]) referred to this when he spoke of the existence of a high domain of a country in the priorities and facilities necessary to carry out research; in such situation the scientists of that country have the capacity to establish the criteria of relevance and performance for the international research system in general. He called this phenomenon an international concentration of control over access to the means of intellectual production and distribution (320 et seq.).
abroad. Taking into account that these researchers initiated such studies between the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, it could be said that the country's economic conditions during this period (the Menem and the 2001 crisis) influencedin juxtaposition with the motivations of personal naturethe decision to leave the country. Both the period of Menem's government (1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999) and the economic crisis that followed a couple of years later affected the purchasing power of some sectors of the population, including those who were forming at the time as social researchers. In this context, there was also a direct impact on the research career; this is remembered by one of the interviewees who did the doctorate abroad when he mentioned that during the Menemism the Conicet entered into a "paralysis" in which for six or seven years it did not admit new researchers, it closed directly the entrance to the career of investigator [ … ]. We were earning very badly; if I remember correctly at that time I already had a full time dedication [at the UBA] but I still had to keep accumulating work because I did not have enough to live. 12 This distressing situation of lack of money is repeated by another Argentinian researcher: I resisted because of my political ideology to go to work for the State, but I did not have a cent, so they called me [from the Ministry of Labor] one day in the middle of summer; I had no money, I was teaching summer classes [at the UBA] to cover my … a bit my life, my personal life with my family.
In situations of family economic crisis, researcherslike any other personhave to balance their conditions and act within their possibilities, leaving aside their own convictions, as was evident in the previous passage. Then the exit to the outside in this case, rather than a flight of force, is the construction of a possibility, a search for emotional and material stability, an option to face the present and dispose of the future. It is, without a doubt, a journey with a return that must be done by multiple desires and circumstances: the first of them the family, then there is learning, qualification, internationalization, networks. It is a situation that does not exclusively concern Latin American researchers: Dubet (2015) mentions how at the beginning of his career he had the urge to find a job because he was a young father of a family; in the midst of the need to earn money he accepted a job in a crime prevention association on the outskirts of the city of Bordeaux, "the need to work was so great" (96), recalls the French sociologist.
During the project I had the opportunity to interview five foreign researchers 13 with different scientific trajectories and migration times. For each one of them the exit to the outside had become a journey without defined return to their native countries for 12 Assessments such as this should be contrasted with systematic studies on the influence of economic crises on the development of scientific research in Argentina. For example, Duarte (2015) argues that a single moment of crisis should not be assigned, specifically to Menemism, but rather that it should be analyzed in a comprehensive manner taking into account the cycles of these crises, which also appear in the periods after Menem. In the same line, Isturiz (2015) poses that although there was a rebound in funding for research during Kirchnerism, it also had shortcomings and weaknesses to consider. On the other hand, Unzué (2011) highlights the growth in the number of graduate students and professors since the mid-nineties and the post-2001-2002 crisis period as a strategy of the hierarchization policy of the area of science and technology. 13 Indeed, as Auriol points out (cited by Didou and Gérard 2010, 12), the definition of the status of foreigners for social analysis presents difficulties since it can be referred to the country of origin or current citizenship. Contrary to the decision made by Didou and Gérard in their study, in this work I refer to foreign researchers as those people who have a different nationality from the country where they currently work. The objective is to avoid invisibilizing the circumstances and emotions that led to nationalization. In this case, the researcher who was born in Brazil and who subsequently became a Mexican national does not enter the category indicated here. reasons of rational or circumstantial nature. Among the main motivations with an explicitly rational dimension is the planning of making a research career through, for example, an academic job or entry into the national research system. On the other hand, the main circumstantial reasons are marriage and the birth of a son or daughter, that is, the formation of a family. The rational and circumstantial reasons are sometimes correlatedthat is, one can be corollary of the otherand in others they are independent. There is a variation case to case in the intensity of the motivations (the level of planning or the interest to stay or not, for example), and the intervention of external variables for the subjects is also influential. However, the fact of not returning, of prolonging the situation of immigration status and estrangement has an important connotation in the construction of networks with colleagues, in social and institutional relations, in the definition of scientific interests and in cognitive strategies during an extended period of time that can take decades (Didou 2016).
In short, the sociological importance of international mobility is that it can be translated into the qualification of a population that, in some cases, could not have been formed within the country of birth. It constitutes a process of socialization in which practical and cognitive skills for the production of scientific knowledge are acquired (or increased). For this reason, the formal and informal networks that during this period the researchers weave with colleagues of other nationalities are valued and, according to themselves, they remain active to this day in a more or less intense way. Mobility opens possibilities for professional qualification, network training and a prestigious degree for researchers. But beyond these objective benefits, this type of travel also generates subjective advantages that can be exploited during the scientific career. In one of the interviews, a senior researcher from Mexico told me that the experience of having done his doctorate abroad (and having done it very young) gave him an advantage because it gave him the opportunity to relate in a different environment to the context in which he lived and, taking advantage of that, he found the "ideal mechanisms of interaction" with his colleagues and with the institutions. The experience abroadas happened to the researcher who discovered that Latin America existed when she left Brazilis the literal possibility of encountering an unknown world, of knowing other scientific cultures, of apprehending other ways of relating and, as a consequence, to elaborate different social and cognitive processes.
Despite the absence of research on academic mobility from an individual and subjective perspective (Jung 2016, 225), some studies have been advanced that argue that international mobility is a transition stage where scientists are trained as such and shapes aspects of their personality that, in the long run, help to define the charisma or character as researchers. Through multiple experiences with researchers from other countries and cultures, the subjectivities of those who travel are reconfigured in the light of cognitive, social and cultural exchanges. For example, Jung (2016) mentions that mobility and residencies outside the country of origin are becoming more common among young researchers and postdocs, are part of their lives and become a practice that is sought for an immediate future job, even if it does not always happen.
In the same perspective, Góngora (2016) analyzes the issue of accommodation abroad in the processes of international mobility of Mexican students to France. The author emphasizes that the place of accommodation during international mobility "has effects on the socialization and the construction of predispositions that guide the action of individuals, which affects their academic and social formation" (304).
A third example is the research of Agulhon (2009) who, through interviews with Brazilian and Argentine graduate students in France, noted the difficulties and challenges that international mobility entails in aspects such as the feeling of cultural alienation, the interaction with the national students, the bureaucratic obstacles (governmental and institutional), that they have to establish themselves in the country as well as the economic conditions.
Taking up the cases in question, Figure 1 shows the international mobility carried out by the interviewees. As can be seen, Colombia is the country with the greatest number of people trained abroad for the reasons mentioned above. At both the master's and the doctorate level, the majority of interviewees in Colombia decided to study outside the country, an opposite situation found in Argentina, where most of the interviewees were trained (at all levels) in higher education institutions in the country. Mexico can be classified as an intermediate country in the sense that it receives and exports people to carry out studies at all levels. That traditional function of the Mexican academic system can be clearly observed in the case that concerns us.
The map shows what I have called the mobility triangle, in which Latin America, the United States and Europe form its vertices. Taking this triangle as a reference for a constituent part of the international division of scientific work, confirms that, indeed, Europe (especially France) and the United States remain the most common destinations for the training of scientists. 14 The triangle of mobility can be considered as an example of what is commonly known as the internationalization of science, where the social sciences of Latin America have been involved in international activities since their beginnings through residencies, seminars, internships, conferences, postdocs, etc. (Vessuri 2009;. This notion is linked to other debates regarding the relations between "center-periphery" or central science and science in the periphery (Altbach 2001;Kreimer 2000;Vessuri 2007). It is important to mention that, in reference to the trajectories of the interviewees, they have been built in relation to academic programs from other countries, which is an important (but not sufficient) input to establish international and bilateral cooperation and collaborative relationships between different countries (Kleiche-Dray and Villavicencio 2014). In this sense, the training processes of the interviewees have been energized by national and international institutions that, concomitantly, defined their scientific interests, helped to weave academic networks and shaped the praxeological and epistemological bases of the scientific practices they are currently developing.

Conclusions
Experiential guidelines that define, from the biographical point of view, the meaning of international mobility in the trajectories of social researchers have been investigated and described. They correspond to subjective and objective constructions that go through the processes of internationalization and the investigative work of the social scientists interviewed. In this sense, the experiences described here help us to understand some characteristics of the production of knowledge that takes place in the countries of our region.
As it became evident in the research, international mobility is often not carried out as a programmed objective within the scientific trajectory, but as a counterbalance to different types of external violence. In these cases, international mobility becomes a vital strategy rather than an academic one. Then international mobility must be understood, also, as a bifurcation in the crisis, a high point in the biographies of researchers, untimely ruptures that led to the creation of new experiential territories in which professional training and the production of knowledge were developed. The latter is noteworthy because, in spite of the deterritorialization experienced, the researchers continued with their vocation as scientists and were able to establish new academic networks and forge new personal and collective paths in social research.
On the other hand, it was understood that international mobility that does become a programmed academic objective has different causes in each country due to its economic contexts, specifically the financial structure of its research systems and public and private support for scientific training (scholarship system and structure of national science and technology organizations). In that sense, an in-depth study should be done of how these organizational differences have impacted on the strengthening of internationalization in each country and what the future challenges are. 14 Suárez and Pirker consider that in the Mexican case "there is no longer a particularly dominant pole, as was France in the sixties; Mexican institutions offer high-level training opportunities and train professionals with outstanding skills" (2014,13). At this point, quantitative-qualitative research should be carried out to establish the number of people in Latin America who are trained abroad, complementing these statistics with the views of those who are trained in Europe and the United States on the quality of programs and the competences acquired.
Beyond the anecdotes and completely unique situations, the experiences escape the biographies of the subjects and configure a complex network of interactions and subjective exchanges in specific institutional spaces. In this way, the set of experiences and the relationships that derive from them are positioned in the cultural heritage of the academia of each country. It is in this sense that the experiences regarding international mobility should be understood as a social construction whose seed is the biographical experience of each researcher. Recognizing and studying the microsocial levels from which the internationalization of knowledge is built is important for a deep understanding of its effect and its contributions in the development of Latin American social sciences in the spectrum of the international division of scientific work.
The study of these aspects with the support of concepts such as "nomadism" and "experiential territories" can be a contribution to STS because it broadens the analysis on the causes and personal consequences of leaving the country of birth, as well as the relationship of these subjective breaks with scientific work. These aspects of scientific subjectivity are highly determinant in knowledge production practices and, however, have not been sufficiently explored in the STS field. This investigation can be considered as a first exploration in this regard.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología.