Global university rankings as ‘sticky’ objects and ‘refrains’: affect and mediatisation in India

ABSTRACT

Global university rankings (GURs) have garnered increasing media attention since their inception. Yet to date, a concerted attempt to offer an affect lens – emotions, responses, reactions and feelings that are relational and transpersonal – underlying the mediatisation of GURs remains absent. Drawing on affect theories, we analysed the Indian national media's coverage of Times Higher Education rankings and Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd. rankings (between 2018–2019). Amid a globalised media ecology, we illuminate how affect plays a pivotal role in how the mediatisation process infuses ranking logic into a national context that is at the periphery of GUR outcomes. We argue that national media uses affect to confer and open up GURs for localised meaning making, allowing GURs to persevere despite their questionable legitimacy in a Global South context, thus globalising higher education policy. We suggest that affect is essential in the expansion of GURs through mediatisation in national policy arenas.

世界大学排名自诞生以来，获得越来越多的媒体关注。然而,到目前为止，仍然缺乏—种协同的尝试，为世界大学排名提供—种情感透镜，涉及关系间的以及超个人的情绪、回应、反应和感受，这些情感正是世界大学排名媒体化之潜在根基。借助情感理论，我们分析了印度国家媒体对《泰晤士报高等教育》排名和QS世界大学排名（在2018–2019年间）的报道。我们阐明在—个全球化的媒体生态中，情感如何在媒体化的过程中发挥关键作用，将排名逻辑注入—个处于世界大学排名结果边缘的国家情境中。我们论证，国家媒体利用情感来赋予并开放对世界大学排名的本土化解读，这使世界大学排名在发展中国家（Global South）情境中合法性受到质疑的情况下，仍得以维持，进而使高等教育政策全球化。我们认为，世界大学排名通过媒体路径在国家政策领域的扩张中，情感至关重要。

KEYWORDS:

• University rankings
• India
• affect theory
• higher education
• media
• ontology

关键词:

• 大学排名
• 印度
• 情感理论
• 高等教育; 媒体
• 本体论

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Naseeb Bhangal, Euan Auld, Adam Grimm, Arif Kabir, Rino Adhikary, the three anonymous reviewers of the journal for their comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Finally we would like to thank Prasanthi Ramasawamy for her help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 By affective discourses, we are referring to language projecting an emotional and directional capacity.

2 By GURs, in this paper, we are referring to mainly the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, which are often cited among HE stakeholders in India.

3 By Global South, we are referring to regions of the world (e.g. India), not marked by underdevelopment or cultural differences (i.e. ‘low-middle income country’), but rather regions who have felt the geopolitical brunt of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic and social change, leading to large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy, and access to material and symbolic resources today (Dados and Connell 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Riyad A. Shahjahan

Riyad A. Shahjahan is an Associate Professor of Higher, Adult and Life Long Education (HALE) at Michigan State University. He is also a core faculty member of Muslim Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies, Asian Studies, and Center for Advanced Study of International Development. His areas of research interests are in globalization of higher education, decolonizing curriculum/pedagogy, temporality and embodiment in higher education, cultural studies, and de/anti/postcolonial theory.

Paul E. Bylsma

Paul E. Bylsma is a doctoral student at Michigan State University studying Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education. He is interested in affect theory, critical theory, and theories of teaching and learning.

Chetan Singai

Chetan Singai is an associate professor at the School of Social Sciences, Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences and Deputy Director, Ramaiah Public Policy Center, Bengaluru, KA, India. He has obtained his doctoral degree (PhD) from the National Institute of Advanced Studies, India. His areas of research interests are in university and higher education governance, internationalization of/in higher education, higher education policy and sociology of education.