Governing by visual shapes: university rankings, digital education platforms and cosmologies of higher education

ABSTRACT

University rankings have become commonplace in higher education. Traditional quantified rankings do not merely measure educational performance: they equally grant status, enforce competition between institutions, and are emblematic for the ongoing capitalization of higher education. Drawing on the field of Science and Technology Studies, this article undertakes an up-close, critical analysis of one ranking platform: U-Multirank. Explicitly recognizing the downsides of the football league mentality that is currently present in traditional league-table university rankings, U-Multirank provides a multidimensional and visual way of ranking higher education institutes that aims to take into account the diversity of the higher education sector and the complexity of what it is to evaluate educational performance. The article starts by analyzing U-Multirank as a situated place, that is, as embedded within a broader environment that is not exterior to the composition and eventual publication of the platform itself. After disentangling the platform’s situatedness, the article traces the operations and actions performed by U-Multirank. Governing by visual shapes rather than merely by numbers, the platform acts as a kaleidoscopic optical device installing specific sorts of vision and specific forms of higher education. The article further elaborates how the platform configures specific, responsibilized and singularized, types of users, and concludes with some remarks regarding a more general shift towards more participatory forms of datafication and knowledge creation.

KEYWORDS:

• University rankings
• digital education platforms
• Science and Technology Studies
• U-Multirank
• critical methodology
• data-visualization
• cosmologies
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mathias Decuypere

Mathias Decuypere is an Assistant Professor at the Methodology of Educational Sciences Research Group (KU Leuven, Belgium). Primary research interests are directed at developing and making use of innovative qualitative research methods that allow to analyze new educational technologies, higher and regular education policy, Open Education, education for sustainable development, and newly emerging educational time-space configurations.

Paolo Landri

Paolo Landri is a Senior Researcher of the Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies at National Research Council in Italy (CNR-IRPPS). His main research interests concern educational organizations, professional learning and educational policies.