ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development of a decolonization process with scholars from different knowledge areas in Brazil. It took place in an extension course designed to tackle participants’ linguistic identity constructions and eventual discomfort felt when using English. The aim of the course was to discuss English as an international language and use it as a medium for discussion rather than a medium of instruction. In this analysis I will first describe the course context, myself being the course coordinator and one of the teachers from a team of three. I will describe how English can be a problem, and will present a post-structuralist perspective on language as a possible way to decolonize the identities of Brazilian English-speaking professors. This will be done by briefly mapping out the local scenario, looking at English in connection with the internationalization of higher education. Such link establishes tensions in the ways Brazilian professors, users of Brazilian Portuguese as a first language, relate to English and its cultural symbolic capital, and to the people believed to possess such capital. My analysis is based on the theory produced by the Latin American research group formed by Quijano, Mignolo and Escobar, to name just a few.
