Higher Education Research (HER) is a relatively small field of inquiry in which researchers do not readily identify themselves as higher education researchers (Teichler, 2015). Relatively diffuse thematic borders paired with national/local foci have made it challenging to consider HER a ‘unified’ field. Still, researchers like Teichler (2015) or Tight (2018; 2019) have successfully built a case for conducting research with the goal of understanding the field as a whole; showcasing the value of such an endeavor when considering the European and international landscapes.

From these foundational insights, this paper takes as its focus the unequally distributed epistemic representation of global research cultures in the field of higher education studies (Guzmán-Valenzuela & Gómez, 2018), a perspective which remains underdeveloped. Drawing on critiques that the centre periphery model of scientific knowledge production fails to recognise the richness and autonomy of epistemic traditions beyond the Global North (Maginson & Xu, 2023), we examine how Latin American (LA) scholarship is represented within global higher education research – a field which has considerable emancipatory power (Marginson, 2022). LA has a rich tradition of educational research and theorising across its diverse national contexts, with multiple well-developed and emerging strands of scholarship, making it a particularly apposite case for this research (Ordorika & Rodríguez-Gómez, 2018).

A growing body of research has focussed on the region over the past few decades, intending to shine a light on ‘peripheral’ education systems, for example De Wit’s (2005) volume examining the process of internationalisation across seven national LA systems. Such work has been important in placing a focus on a historically overlooked geographical region, and highlighting the diversity and complexity of LA higher education. Despite this scholarly attention on LA as an object of study (e.g. in terms of its development, or its internationalisation), comparatively little attention has been paid to how LA research is situated within the field of global higher education and its associated knowledge structures.

First, we argue that this type of meta research is central to understanding the challenges still persisting in regional HER. With broader research it becomes possible to examine the development of the field, highlighting the opportunities and research gaps that remain. For example, taking research conducted with a European focus (Teichler, 2015), salient issues in the continent refer to: power, market and structures; teaching, learning, evaluation, and diversity; academic development, doctoral education and research; and policy, governance, and HE function within the  European landscape. In contrast, the few attempts made in the context of LA have been far less than systematic or encompassing

Looking at Mexico, Argentina, and Brasil, Carengato et al. (2020) posit that the broad research themes in those countries relate to access and inequality, internationalisation and cooperation, and social justice. Another broad effort for examining LA HER shows that research can be organised as focussing on teach(ers/ing) and learn(ers/ing), quality, policy and change, and management, social justice and access (Ordorika & Rodríguez-Gómez, 2018).

In this context, the present research focuses on the epistemic positioning of LA scholarship within global higher education research. Moving beyond treating the region as only an object of study, we examine how research produced in LA is integrated into international knowledge structures. Although these more comprehensive efforts are important, methodologically speaking they lack the robustness and breadth that large-scale quantitative methods allow. Our research questions are therefore:

RQ1: How is LA scholarship represented within global higher education research?

RQ2: Which topics characterise Latin American HER published in international higher education journals?

To address this lack of scholarly attention, we focus explicitly on the representation of LA HER in ‘global’ HE - that is, of research produced by scholars based in LA. As a unit of analysis, we take affiliation as the signal of regional research infrastructures that unify the scientific interests and endeavors rooted in LA. Specifically, we build and analyse a corpus of all research published over the past 20 years in 26 leading international HE journals (taken to represent ‘global higher education’), where at least one author is associated with a LA university. This corpus therefore reflects the representation of LA HE scholarship at the regional/institutional level within the global stage. Building on earlier work by Tight (2018), Daenekindt and Huisman (2020) identify journals which are commonly viewed as ‘international’ HE journals. We use this useful typology, which separates journals into ‘generalist’, ‘topic-specific’, and ‘discipline-oriented’ to create our LA HER corpus which consists of 467 article abstracts published over the past 20 years. Each article is tagged with information about the article and authors, including: author(s) name(s); title of article; year; journal title; journal ‘type’; number cited by; author(s) affiliation(s); key-words; funding. In order to analyse the LA HER corpus, we use topic modelling - specifically, a correlated topic model. This is an unsupervised machine learning technique which allows for the identification of latent topics within a text corpus. The model is Bayesian, where “each item of the collection is modelled as a finite mixture over an underlying set of topics. Each topic is, in turn, modelled as an infinite mixture over an underlying set of topic probabilities” (Blei, Ng, Jordan, 2003, p. 993). The output of a correlated topic model includes lists of words which represent a latent semantic structure, or topic, evident within a chosen corpus, it is the researcher’s role to make meaning from these words. Using a correlated topic model thus means that the results are inductively derived, but that the researcher plays a key role in the interpretation of topics. Using a correlated topic model to explore the thematic organisation of HE research from LA allows for an analysis of the substantive content of this literature, as well as observing the ways in which research is distributed across different types of journals and over time. We therefore capture the representation of LA HER both in terms of volume and epistemic positioning.

Our analysis of 467 articles finds that Latin American HER has a high level of thematic diversity and country-specific differentiation, encompassing well developed strands of research relating to, for example: policy and governance; socioeconomic inequalities; teaching and pedagogy; internationalisation; sustainability; and the political economy of higher education. These topics are clustered in different journal types, with generalist higher education journals focussing on research relating to inequalities and systems, discipline-oriented journals placing an emphasis on student health and sustainability, and topic specific journals acting as an intermediary between the two. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that Latin American higher education research has expanded substantially over the last two decades with an increasing volume of publications from the mid-2010s onwards across all journal types. This growth occurred alongside meaningful thematic differentiation rather than a convergence towards some unified research agenda. These patterns underscore the importance of national context, with clear country-level variation evident across profiles. These findings challenge overly homogenising portrayals of Global South scholarship and highlight the importance of geographically distinct research traditions within global knowledge structures. Further, we elevate research in LA not as lacking or being underdeveloped in contrast with global higher education research, but in fact very much in line with current global trends. All in all, it would be fair to preliminarily state that LA scholarship is closely following the concerns and research developments of Europe and the world, yet more research is needed to unpack such similarities and potential internal differences in LA. What are properly LA scholarly concerns would open new avenues for research. Specifically, we see possibilities in expanding on the identified research strands could allow for a fine grained outlook on the LA HER, just as analyzing other journals that showcase local representation (like those indexed in SciELO).

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