Emotional encounters during fieldwork: Researching Brazilian women migrants as a Brazilian women researcher

This paper addresses the ethical implications of doing qualitative research among migrant women while being a migrant woman researcher myself. Brennan (2014)'s affective turn shows us how affect (both positive and negative) irradiates powerfully between one subject and another; while Ahmed (2010) reminds us that our affective situation may shape what/how we will feel. Based on experiences and reflections, since my PhD in 2008, on Brazilian migrants' experiences in Portugal, I borrow Teresa Brennan's concepts of affect and Sara Ahmed's notion of emotion to look at how our encounters throughout our fieldwork with migrant women affect our bodies and vice versa. Moving away from the insider/outsider dichotomy, I argue that our knowledge production practice with migrant women is a reciprocal emotional reaction, surrounded by inequality power dynamics, which entails a set of ethical implications when translating these emotional reactions as research outputs.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

On curvature coupling and quintessence fine-tuning

We discuss the phenomenological model in which the potential energy of the quintessence field depends linearly on the energy density of the spatial curvature. We find that the pressure of the scalar field takes a different form when the potential of the scalar field also depends on the scale factor and the energy momentum tensor of the scalar field can be expressed as the form of a perfect fluid. A general coupling was proposed to explain the current accelerating expansion of the Universe and solve the fine-tuning problem.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, v2: correct the comment on astro-ph/0509177, v3: significant changes are made to better present the paper;v4: use epl style, add new contents, conclusion remains, accepted for publication by Europhys. Let

Universal and deterministic manipulation of the quantum state of harmonic oscillators: a route to unitary gates for Fock State qubits

We present a simple quantum circuit that allows for the universal and deterministic manipulation of the quantum state of confined harmonic oscillators. The scheme is based on the selective interactions of the referred oscillator with an auxiliary three-level system and a classical external driving source, and enables any unitary operations on Fock states, two-by-two. One circuit is equivalent to a single qubit unitary logical gate on Fock states qubits. Sequences of similar protocols allow for complete, deterministic and state-independent manipulation of the harmonic oscillator quantum state.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Feasibility of approximating spatial and local entanglement in long-range interacting systems using the extended Hubbard model

We investigate the extended Hubbard model as an approximation to the local and spatial entanglement of a one-dimensional chain of nanostructures where the particles interact via a long range interaction represented by a `soft' Coulomb potential. In the process we design a protocol to calculate the particle-particle spatial entanglement for the Hubbard model and show that, in striking contrast with the loss of spatial degrees of freedom, the predictions are reasonably accurate. We also compare results for the local entanglement with previous results found using a contact interaction (PRA, 81 (2010) 052321) and show that while the extended Hubbard model recovers a better agreement with the entanglement of a long-range interacting system, there remain realistic parameter regions where it fails to predict the quantitative and qualitative behaviour of the entanglement in the nanostructure system.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures and 1 table; added results with correlated hopping term; accepted by EP

South–South student mobility: International students from Portuguese-speaking Africa in Brazil

As a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon, student mobility involves diverse actors, interests and rationalities. With the globalization of education, universities and other higher education providers have implemented strategies to recruit and attract international students, not least to increase their revenues and levels of internationalization (Findlay et al. 2017). Likewise, destination countries have acknowledged the advantages of hosting international students: financial benefits, an increase in the skilled worker pool and improvements in diplomatic relations (Riaño et al. 2018). Origin countries meanwhile identify student mobility as a means through which talented individuals can become qualified via moving to countries with well-developed higher education system (Findlay 2010). And students themselves, and their families, recognize the potential impact of an international diploma on employability, making them instrumental in establishing educational mobility imperatives at tertiary level (Alberts and Hazen 2005; Holloway et al. 2012).info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Institutionalized mobility inside and outside Erasmus

Having looked at various aspects of free movement in tertiary education in the previous section of this book, we now direct our attention towards young people’s participation in student mobility programmes, the most prominent example being the European Commission supported Erasmus programme. The popularity of Erasmus as a research topic is equally evident, to the point where the study of student mobility is largely equated with Erasmus, although many other less well documented institutionally hosted platforms can be found throughout the globalized world of tertiary education. Given that Erasmus is so familiar, this section of the book will move beyond describing the programme and consider what other exchange mechanisms contribute to our understanding of youth migration.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Managing student mobility during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An immobility turn in internationalized learning?

This article looked at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the management of internationalized learning, and the disruption to the transitions to adulthood among students reliant upon the freedom to move within and between countries. We started by outlining the place of mobility in transitions, connected to debates about the ‘Mobility Turn,’ with particular relevance to developments in the European context, including the expansion of successive Erasmus student mobility programmes. Following the start of the pandemic, we hypothesize that we are now experiencing an ‘Immobility Turn’ in youth transitions, which, even if temporary, has the potential to disrupt personal and professional development of many young people in problematizing stays abroad at foreign universities. To explore this issue, we drew on evidence from Portugal, discussing issues including the measures taken by host institutions to maintain a safe environment and secure the integrity of educational courses for their international students, thus keeping open their mobile transition pathways. This research also enables us to illustrate the changes in the materiality of internationalized higher education that took place during the pandemic, and the challenges facing academic staff members. In conclusion, we look towards the future of mobile transitions, recognizing the important role played by staff members, and look towards future developments, including the heightened use of virtual mobility platforms for students with the potential to further transform the meaning of internationalized tertiary education.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Black hole binaries in cubic Horndeski theories

We study black hole binary mergers in certain cubic Horndeski theories of gravity, treating them fully nonlinearly. In the regime of validity of effective field theory, the mismatch of the gravitational wave strain between Horndeski and general relativity (coupled to a scalar field) can be as large as 10%-13% in the Advanced LIGO mass range. The initial data and coupling constants are chosen such the theory remains in the weakly coupled regime throughout the evolution. In all cases that we have explored, we observe that the waveform in the Horndeski theory is shifted by an amount much larger than the smallness parameter that controls the initial data. This effect is generic and may be present in other theories of gravity involving higher derivatives

South-South student migration: Socially integrating students from Portuguese-speaking Africa at UNILAB, Brazil

The Brazilian University for International Integration of the Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (UNILAB) was created to host students from Portuguese-speaking Africa and Brazil. In this article, we look at the aims and objectives of UNILAB, which include the social integration of these students at the university. We present results from interviews conducted at UNILAB in 2018 with 63 international and domestic students. Analysis of this material shows that despite acknowledgement of the value of internationalization at UNILAB, the social integration level of Portuguese-speaking students from outside Brazil at the university is characteristically weak among the interviewees, a situation they attribute to a lack of suitable preparation for staff at the host institution and prejudice towards African students in the local community. We consider what these findings mean for the future of UNILAB and the development of Global South-South student migration.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio