ABSTRACT
Argentine political scientists use foreign ideas in strategic ways to structure their own academic careers. They are taught that foreign knowledge has pre-eminence over local ideas, even though local knowledge is publically debated in Argentina. This predominance is based on, and at the same time reproduces, the international division of the academic world that has produced centres and peripheries of knowledge production and consumption. Throughout their careers, Argentine political scientists translate foreign knowledge into syllabi, research articles, conference presentations, and other scholarly works in order to reach dominant positions in the field. At the same time, the local institutional constraints, as well as the lack of material and symbolic resources, affect the process of introducing, using, and circulating foreign knowledge. Thus, both foreign knowledge and local academic labour conditions seem to be mutually influential.
