Globalizing whiteness? Visually re/presenting students in global university rankings websites

ABSTRACT

Amid debates about the role and impact of global university rankings (GURs), very few have closely examined how GURs media outlets construct meanings of higher education (HE) in their visual representations. We critically examine publicly available visual media of students in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and US News and World Report websites. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s heuristics of representation and attending to visual grammars, we argue whiteness maintains its racial hegemony in GURs’ student imagery through its flexibility and in/visbility. Furthermore, whiteness is entangled with other systems of oppression, particularly patriarchy, homonormativity, and heterosexuality. We suggest that GURs rankings media are not simply constructing and informing us about the quality and excellence of HE, but simultaneously teaching us how to view students, often reproducing oppressive racialized and gendered ideologies. We end with methodological implications of visual cultural studies in comparative education.

KEYWORDS:

• University rankings
• visual data
• cultural studies
• students
• Stuart Hall
• whiteness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We focus on these two ranking websites because they provide a comparative analysis of corporate media products situated in the UK and USA, respectively, and have different histories with global rankings. Unlike THE, USN is a recent player in global university rankings. The prominence of imagery on these rankings websites in terms of number, size, and relevance to our themes, made them ideal case studies. Both GURs are interested in the ranking game because it helps garner audience and advertising potential (Stack, 2013).

2 In other words, we collected images that (1) displayed on the listed pages and (2) displayed after clicking a link on the listed pages. For instance, on the USN homepage section ‘Global University Advice for Students and Parents’ we collected the six images shown on that page. We then clicked the links of with those six images, and found that there were additional ‘Recommended Articles’ listed underneath the image on the new page. We collected these images as well since they were one click away from the original ‘Global University Advice for Students and Parents’ page.

3 We acknowledge the problematics and potential harms in coding race and gender based on our own visual interpretation – that race and gender as self-identified may not match what is perceived by the viewer. For instance, someone racially minoritized may be perceived as white, or someone perceived as female may identify as male or non-binary. We proceeded in coding however, because a semiotic approach assumes shared understandings exist around social identities implied by visual markers (e.g., a skirt signifies a female student). We believe there is intentionality in who and what media outlets choose to represent and not represent, as evidenced through our analysis.

4 We believe the cumulative and wide-ranging nature of evidence we have identified in the following sections, rather than a singular pattern or numeric representations, supports our argument for the hegemony of whiteness in the GURs imagery. Furthermore, given the scope and length of this paper, each example in our paper represents one of multiple examples for a given sub-argument.

5 Due to the cost-prohibitive nature of reproducing copyrighted images, we could not include the GUR images here.