Abstract
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.
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