Imagining ‘Asian’ higher education: visual campus gaze and global university rankings (GURs) websites

ABSTRACT

Amid debates about 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 135 publicly available visual media (photographs) in the Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) websites to uncover the rankers’ ‘Asian visual gaze’ to extend our understandings of GURs and the significance of Asian universities within global discourse. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s ‘imaginary,’ Stuart Hall’s heuristics of representation, and attending to photographic techniques, we posit that THE and QS GUR imagery constructs a ‘social imaginary’ of Asian HE simultaneously as a: 1) technological frontier, 2) site of educational prestige, and 3) environmental and cultural paradise. We argue that these constructed visual imaginaries of Asian HE serve as sites for social consumption, reproduce particular imagined communities and imagined selves, and serve as scripts for action, in an era of platform capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• University rankings
• visual data
• cultural studies
• campus architecture
• Asia
• photography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Platform capitalism refers to recent trends whereby platform-based businesses are introducing intermediary digital infrastructures that (a) allow different users to interact, (b) build on network effects (as platform users increase, platform can generate more value from its users), (c) engage in cross-subsidisation (offer free products and services to accumulate more users), and (d) deploy constant user engagement (see Srnicek 2017). We view these GUR websites as new global HE advertising platforms and manifestation of platform capitalism in the context of global HE.

2. This analysis stems from our earlier study (Shahjahan, Estera, and Vellanki forthcoming) where we critically examined how GURs’ websites constitute and normalise HE regions of the world through visualisation of HE. In our earlier analysis, we found that regions of the world were constituted using three tropes that reproduced the geopolitics of knowledge, namely a tourist gaze, campus architectural gaze, and/or (de)humanising students gaze. In particular, our findings pertaining to architectural imagery motivated the current study. Overall, we observed that GURs imagery privileged elite institutions in their respective regions (country or city), and rarely did we see Western elite universities (i.e. in the USA or UK) in light of their existing modern campus buildings, thus symbolising them as historical world-class universities. Yet, campus shots underscored rankers’ attitudinal ambivalence towards HE ‘frontiers’ (i.e. Asia) in terms of admiration, aspiration, or rising global competition, by featuring modern buildings which accentuated functionality and instrumental learning. We wanted to explore this Asian gaze further, hence this analysis.