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

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) a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Compare 2022-01, Vol.52 (1), p.129-146
Main Authors: Shahjahan, Riyad A., Estera, Annabelle L., Bae, Sohyeon, Sonneveldt, Erin L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Architecture
Asia
campus architecture
Campuses
Capitalism
Comparative Education
cultural studies
Educational Quality
Foreign Countries
Global Approach
Heuristics
Higher Education
Institutional Advancement
Institutional Characteristics
Institutional Evaluation
Marketing
Mass media images
Periodicals
Photography
Prestige
Ratings & rankings
Reputation
Student Recruitment
Technological Advancement
Universities
University rankings
visual data
Web Sites
Websites
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:0305-7925
1469-3623
DOI:10.1080/03057925.2020.1746176