Riyad A Shahjahan
Biographic Data
| ID | 2120682 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Riyad A Shahjahan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Riyad A |
| FAMILY NAME | Shahjahan |
| SIGNATURE | SHAHJAHAN R A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3244-3215 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 303 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Chrono-affective nationalism and higher education: Insights from the USA and Hungary
Chrono-affective nationalism in higher education: Harvard and the Trump administration
‘Time’ and international students
While much has been written about international students, the temporal dimensions underpinning and intersecting these students’ experiences remain under-theorized within existing scholarship. In this conceptual article, we aim to chart some of the temporal intricacies underlying the complex emotional and spatial elements of international students’ lives, decisions, and trajectories, implicating research and practice. We explore temporal dimension…
The role of geopolitics of knowledge in the mediatization of global university rankings
Theorizing clock time-as-affect in the decolonization of higher education
While decolonization in higher education has emphasized epistemological, pedagogical, and institutional change, the role of clock time as an affective force remains underexplored. Clock time, understood as linear, homogeneous measurement (e.g. clocks, calendars), structures academic life and shapes how decolonization unfolds. This paper introduces the concept of clock time-as-affect to examine how temporal regulation disciplines bodies and minds …
Unpacking the velcro of ‘Internationalisation’: The nation-state ontology and its implications for global higher education
Antiblackness as Global Aspiration? Centering Black Studies in Global Higher Education Research
Although education researchers have increased attention to the study of antib lackness, particularly within schools and national boundaries, how antiblackness impacts transnational phenomena within the higher education (HE) field remains undertheorized. As such, this conceptual article introduces the “antiblackness as global aspiration” heuristic and applies it to one cogent example: Sino-African relations in HE. The heuristic highlights two feat…
Decolonial chronopolitics: Resisting colonial temporalities in transformative learning
While transformative learning theory (TL) has increasingly acknowledged epistemological and cultural diversity, it often overlooks the role of colonial time regimes – particularly linear, standardized clock time – in shaping its practices and theories. This gap limits TL’s capacity for genuine decolonial transformation. This article addresses this gap by introducing the original concept of decolonial chronopolitics, a framework critiquing dominan…
Actualizing Curriculum Internationalization: An Integrative Review
Despite the growing literature on curriculum internationalization in higher education across disciplines and regional contexts for the past decade, such literature remains unexamined for its disciplinary and geographic (national or regional) nuances. Our integrative, comparative literature review helps address this gap. We take geopolitics of knowledge and disciplinary approaches to examine the similarities and differences in how curriculum inter…
A temporal gaze on work-life balance in academia: Time, gender, and transitional episodes in Bangladeshi women faculty narratives
The “Looming Disaster” for higher education: How commercial rankers use social media to amplify and foster affect
Temporality and academic mobility: Shomoyscapes and time work in the narratives of Bangladeshi faculty
Illuminating proximate ambivalence: Affect, body, and space in Covid-19 digitally-mediated teaching and learning
We offer the concept of proximate ambivalence to highlight the ambiguity inherent in the social and spatial relations of higher education's digitally-mediated teaching and learning that replaced in-person seminars during the COVID-19 pandemic. By proximate ambivalence, we refer to one's simultaneous proximity and distance in relation to an object, person, or space. We employ affect theories (i.e. collective bodies and affective atmospheres) and a…
“Decolonizing” Curriculum and Pedagogy: A Comparative Review Across Disciplines and Global Higher Education Contexts
Drawing on the global interdisciplinary literature on decolonizing curriculum and pedagogy (DCP) in higher education, we critically examined the idea of decolonizing in the context of disciplines and universities around the world. Based on a critical analysis of 207 articles and book chapters published in English and centering a geopolitics of knowledge frame, we present three themes: (a) decolonizing meaning(s), (b) actualizing decolonization, a…
Whiteness as futurity and globalization of higher education
Bringing the ‘nation-state’ into being: Affect, methodological nationalism and globalisation of higher education
Methodological nationalism (MN) pervades higher education scholarship and practice, particularly in the arena of globalisation of higher education (HE) (Shahjahan and Kezar 2013 Shahjahan, R. A., and A. J. Kezar. 2013. “Beyond the “National Container” Addressing Methodological Nationalism in Higher Education Research.” Educational Researcher 42 (1): 20–29.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). MN refers to the assumption that nationa…
Lessons on love in collaboration: Black and Brown ruminations on global whiteness
This article illuminates our spiritual journey, as Black and Brown scholars, to globalize and further temporalize the discussion of whiteness in the field of higher education. By employing the spiritual ontoepistemologies of communities of color, we recount our journey in developing a critical race temporal heuristic, Whiteness as Futurity (Shahjahan & Edwards, 2022). We illuminate the three lessons we learned on this path: (1) trust in multiple …
Navigating student resistance towards decolonizing curriculum and pedagogy (DCP): A temporal proposal
A concerted attempt to offer a temporal lens (the way we make sense of and relate to time changes) underlying decolonizing pedagogy and curriculum (DCP) remains absent. Drawing on student resistance as an entry point, we offer a temporal account of DCP by unearthing the entanglements between past, present, and future underlying DCP enactments. We explore timescapes shaping DCP from three specific temporal perspectives on student resistance: a) st…
What is in the observer? From thinking to being ‘public’ ‘outcomes’ of higher education
The paper engages in ‘paradigmatic talk’ about public outcomes of higher education (HE). We were drawn to this paradigmatic discussion because of its inherent ‘cultural’ dimensions and the opportunity for us to be self-reflexive about the ontological values underlying ‘cultures’ that shape the articulation, representation, and enactment of HE's public outcomes. While we agree with Marginson and Yang (forthcoming) that comparisons of public outcom…
Global university rankings as ‘sticky’ objects and ‘refrains’: Affect and mediatisation in India
Global university rankings (GURs) have garnered increasing media attention since their inception. Yet to date, a concerted attempt to offer an affect lens – emotions, responses, reactions and feelings that are relational and transpersonal – underlying the mediatisation of GURs remains absent. Drawing on affect theories, we analysed the Indian national media's coverage of Times Higher Education rankings and Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd. rankings (betw…
Navigating Shomoyscapes: Time and faculty life in the urban Global South
We aim to decenter the Global North knowledge production about time in higher education (HE) by introducing and applying a culturally sustaining concept of shomoyscapes. While the Bengali word “shomoy” literally means “time,” it goes beyond “clock time” and also refers to memories, present moments, feelings, a particular duration, and/or signifier for a temporal engagement. A shomoyscape entails a complex temporal landscape of different temporal …
Emoscapes and commercial university rankers: The role of affect in global higher education policy
A concerted attempt to offer an affect (emotions, desires, moods, and/or attitudes) lens underlying the global university rankings (GURs) phenomenon remains absent. Using two commercial ranker case studies (Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd (QS)), this article provides a critical policy analysis illuminating how rankers use emoscapes (affective landscapes) in globalizing HE policy. Based on an analysis of publicly availabl…
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) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) websites to uncover the rankers’ ‘Asian visual gaze’ to extend our understandings of GURs and the significance of Asian univer…
On ‘being for others’: Time and shame in the neoliberal academy
Amid growing studies of time in higher education, few have theorized the interconnections between affect, academic work, and temporality – the way we make sense of and relate to time changes – in the neoliberal academy. By interconnecting temporality with shame, this article presents a critique of dominant temporalities of neoliberal higher education by exploring the differing existential temporalities associated with academic work. It presents a…
From ‘Geopolitics of Being’ towards Inter-being: Envisioning the ‘In/visibles’ in the Globalization of Higher Education
Amid growing debates about globalization of higher education (HE), an analysis of the onto-epistemic grammar underlying the articulation of this global phenomenon remains absent. This essay posits that our understanding of the nature of globalization of HE cannot be separated from questions of a) emotions, b) temporality, and c) ontology. Drawing on the extant literature on globalization of HE to date and personal experiences, it demonstrates the…
Being ‘Lazy’ and Slowing Down: Toward decolonizing time, our body, and pedagogy
In recent years, scholars have critiqued norms of neoliberal higher education (HE) by calling for embodied and anti-oppressive teaching and learning. Implicit in these accounts, but lacking elaboration, is a concern with reformulating the notion of ‘time’ and temporalities of academic life. Employing a coloniality perspective, this article argues that in order to reconnect our minds to our bodies and center embodied pedagogy in the classroom, we …
Decolonizing the evidence-based education and policy movement: Revealing the Colonial Vestiges in Educational Policy, Research, and Neoliberal Reform
There is a growing body of literature discussing evidence-based education, practice, policy, and decision-making from a critical perspective. In this article, drawing on the literature and policy documents related to evidence-based education in the USA, Britain, and Canada, I join this critique and offer an anticolonial perspective. I argue that proponents of evidence-based education unknowingly promote a colonial discourse and material relations…
Beyond the “National Container”: Addressing Methodological Nationalism in Higher Education Research
This essay argues that there is a need for higher education researchers to become aware of methodological nationalism (MN) and take steps to reframe their scholarship in new ways. It illuminates two characteristics of MN prevalent in higher education research and suggests that although a few researchers have attempted to move beyond MN in the higher education globalization literature, most remain encapsulated in a view of nation-state equates soc…
The legitimation of OECD's global educational governance: Examining Pisa and Ahelo test production
Although international student assessments and the role of international organisations (IOs) in governing education via an evidence-based educational policy discourse are of growing interest to educational researchers, few have explored the complex ways in which an IO, such as the OECD, gains considerable influence in governing education during the early stages of test production. Drawing on a comparative analysis of the production of two interna…
Spirituality in the academy: Reclaiming From the Margins and Evoking a Transformative Way of Knowing the World
In this paper, the author's first and foremost objective is to render the answer to the following question: Why is spirituality marginalized in the academy? The author searches for the answer to this question in the terrain of knowledge production and worldviews that permeate the Western academy. The author examines the landscape of the neo-colonial academy and delineates the conditions that restrict the spaces for spirituality. The author's seco…
Global competition, coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in higher education
While scholars have analyzed global higher education (HE) competition, they have largely failed to address how global spaces of equivalence are tied both to coloniality and to competition. Using the OECD’s International Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) as a case study and drawing on concepts from coloniality including Fanon’s zone of being/non-being and Mignolo’s geopolitics of knowledge, we reveal how coloniality underpin…
On ‘being for others’: Time and shame in the neoliberal academy
Amid growing studies of time in higher education, few have theorized the interconnections between affect, academic work, and temporality – the way we make sense of and relate to time changes – in the neoliberal academy. By interconnecting temporality with shame, this article presents a critique of dominant temporalities of neoliberal higher education by exploring the differing existential temporalities associated with academic work. It presents a…
International organizations (IOs), epistemic tools of influence, and the colonial geopolitics of knowledge production in higher education policy
While other scholars have analyzed the way that international organizations (IOs) in higher education policy may contribute to neocolonial domination, this paper illuminates not only on how IOs’ epistemic activities promulgate one-size fit all solutions, but centers the colonial structures of knowledge/power that inform the why (or logic) of these IOs’ epistemic activities and their effects. A decolonial analysis of discursive artifacts and tools…
From 'no' to 'yes: Postcolonial Perspectives on Resistance to Neoliberal Higher Education
Various scholars have suggested ways to resist neoliberal conditions in higher education (HE). In analysing current neoliberal policies and practices in HE, I suggest that postcolonial theories of resistance can enhance our ability as faculty and administrators to understand and ‘resist’ these policies and practices. In this article, I review four modes of postcolonial resistance as described by David Jeffress (2008), mobilizing a critique of res…
Coloniality and a global testing regime in higher education: Unpacking the OECD’s Ahelo initiative
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is currently engaging in a worldwide feasibility study entitled International Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO). This feasibility study seeks to develop measures that would assess student learning outcomes that would be valid across different languages, cultures, and higher education institutions. Drawing on anticolonial perspectives, this article provides a c…
Bringing the ‘nation-state’ into being: Affect, methodological nationalism and globalisation of higher education
Methodological nationalism (MN) pervades higher education scholarship and practice, particularly in the arena of globalisation of higher education (HE) (Shahjahan and Kezar 2013 Shahjahan, R. A., and A. J. Kezar. 2013. “Beyond the “National Container” Addressing Methodological Nationalism in Higher Education Research.” Educational Researcher 42 (1): 20–29.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). MN refers to the assumption that nationa…
Globalizing whiteness? Visually re/presenting students in global university rankings websites
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 gra…
Unpacking ontological security: A decolonial reading of scholarly impact
Despite the growing debate about scholarly impact, an analysis of the onto-epistemic grammar underlying impact has remained absent. By taking a different analytical approach to examining impact, we interrogate the concept through the lens of decolonial thought. We offer an empathetic review of the impact scholarship and illuminate the limits of the modern imaginary that circumscribe critiques of impact in the literature, making visible the Euroce…
Navigating Shomoyscapes: Time and faculty life in the urban Global South
We aim to decenter the Global North knowledge production about time in higher education (HE) by introducing and applying a culturally sustaining concept of shomoyscapes. While the Bengali word “shomoy” literally means “time,” it goes beyond “clock time” and also refers to memories, present moments, feelings, a particular duration, and/or signifier for a temporal engagement. A shomoyscape entails a complex temporal landscape of different temporal …
Will I learn what I want to learn?' Usable representations, 'students' and OECD assessment production
Amid growing debates around international assessment tools in educational policy, few have critically examined how students themselves are cast in policy tool production processes and discourse. Drawing on Stuart Hall's concept of representation, we show how higher education (HE) ‘students’ are constructed, fixed and normalized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes …
Antiblackness as Global Aspiration? Centering Black Studies in Global Higher Education Research
Although education researchers have increased attention to the study of antib lackness, particularly within schools and national boundaries, how antiblackness impacts transnational phenomena within the higher education (HE) field remains undertheorized. As such, this conceptual article introduces the “antiblackness as global aspiration” heuristic and applies it to one cogent example: Sino-African relations in HE. The heuristic highlights two feat…
Emoscapes and commercial university rankers: The role of affect in global higher education policy
A concerted attempt to offer an affect (emotions, desires, moods, and/or attitudes) lens underlying the global university rankings (GURs) phenomenon remains absent. Using two commercial ranker case studies (Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd (QS)), this article provides a critical policy analysis illuminating how rankers use emoscapes (affective landscapes) in globalizing HE policy. Based on an analysis of publicly availabl…
Global university rankings as ‘sticky’ objects and ‘refrains’: Affect and mediatisation in India
Global university rankings (GURs) have garnered increasing media attention since their inception. Yet to date, a concerted attempt to offer an affect lens – emotions, responses, reactions and feelings that are relational and transpersonal – underlying the mediatisation of GURs remains absent. Drawing on affect theories, we analysed the Indian national media's coverage of Times Higher Education rankings and Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd. rankings (betw…
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) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) websites to uncover the rankers’ ‘Asian visual gaze’ to extend our understandings of GURs and the significance of Asian univer…
From ‘Geopolitics of Being’ towards Inter-being: Envisioning the ‘In/visibles’ in the Globalization of Higher Education
Amid growing debates about globalization of higher education (HE), an analysis of the onto-epistemic grammar underlying the articulation of this global phenomenon remains absent. This essay posits that our understanding of the nature of globalization of HE cannot be separated from questions of a) emotions, b) temporality, and c) ontology. Drawing on the extant literature on globalization of HE to date and personal experiences, it demonstrates the…
Structure and agency in the neoliberal university
edited by J.E. Canaan and W. Shumar, New York, Routledge, 2008, 328 pp., $125.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-95672-7, $39.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-89801-0 As a higher education scholar special
Reclaiming and reconnecting to our spirituality in the academy
In this paper, the author, a doctoral student, examines his past to understand why spirituality is important in his present life and why it is important to integrate spirituality within the academy for young adults. In this personal narrative, the author discusses how spirituality becomes important for him from his childhood, as he grows up in Kuwait and Bangladesh and is subjected to numerous forms of psychological violence from his family, his …
The Muslim Mind on Trial: Divine Revelation vs. Secular Rationalism by Abdessalam Yassine; tr. Muhtar Holland (Iowa City: Justice and Spirituality Publishing, 2003. 98 pages.)
Abdessalam Yassine, a Moroccan Qur’anic scholar, passionately arguesthat Muslims need to return to the Qur’anic revelation and the propheticmethod of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) in order to resurrect the Muslimmind and worldview, which are currently subjugated to secular westernthought. According to Yassine, the book’s purpose “is the establishmentand reminding of the Prophetic Method” (p. 25). This argument is madein the format of an introduction an…
Walking the Talk: Decolonizing the Politics of Equity of Knowledge and Charting the Course for an Inclusive Curriculum in Higher Education
In this paper, the authors offer a dramatic presentation regarding questions surrounding the politics of equity of knowledges in higher education. The vignette invokes the perspectives of an anti-racist educator, a graduate student, and a community educator—all of whom are grounded in the academy. Through personal reflection, discussion, and anti-racist, feminist, and anti-colonial theorizing, each grapples with the multi-faceted issues surroundi…
Spirituality in the academy: Reclaiming From the Margins and Evoking a Transformative Way of Knowing the World
In this paper, the author's first and foremost objective is to render the answer to the following question: Why is spirituality marginalized in the academy? The author searches for the answer to this question in the terrain of knowledge production and worldviews that permeate the Western academy. The author examines the landscape of the neo-colonial academy and delineates the conditions that restrict the spaces for spirituality. The author's seco…
Decolonizing the evidence-based education and policy movement: Revealing the Colonial Vestiges in Educational Policy, Research, and Neoliberal Reform
There is a growing body of literature discussing evidence-based education, practice, policy, and decision-making from a critical perspective. In this article, drawing on the literature and policy documents related to evidence-based education in the USA, Britain, and Canada, I join this critique and offer an anticolonial perspective. I argue that proponents of evidence-based education unknowingly promote a colonial discourse and material relations…
Structure and agency in the neoliberal university
edited by J.E. Canaan and W. Shumar, New York, Routledge, 2008, 328 pp., $125.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-95672-7, $39.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-89801-0 As a higher education scholar special
Coloniality and a global testing regime in higher education: Unpacking the OECD’s Ahelo initiative
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is currently engaging in a worldwide feasibility study entitled International Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO). This feasibility study seeks to develop measures that would assess student learning outcomes that would be valid across different languages, cultures, and higher education institutions. Drawing on anticolonial perspectives, this article provides a c…
Beyond the “National Container”: Addressing Methodological Nationalism in Higher Education Research
This essay argues that there is a need for higher education researchers to become aware of methodological nationalism (MN) and take steps to reframe their scholarship in new ways. It illuminates two characteristics of MN prevalent in higher education research and suggests that although a few researchers have attempted to move beyond MN in the higher education globalization literature, most remain encapsulated in a view of nation-state equates soc…
The legitimation of OECD's global educational governance: Examining Pisa and Ahelo test production
Although international student assessments and the role of international organisations (IOs) in governing education via an evidence-based educational policy discourse are of growing interest to educational researchers, few have explored the complex ways in which an IO, such as the OECD, gains considerable influence in governing education during the early stages of test production. Drawing on a comparative analysis of the production of two interna…
Being ‘Lazy’ and Slowing Down: Toward decolonizing time, our body, and pedagogy
In recent years, scholars have critiqued norms of neoliberal higher education (HE) by calling for embodied and anti-oppressive teaching and learning. Implicit in these accounts, but lacking elaboration, is a concern with reformulating the notion of ‘time’ and temporalities of academic life. Employing a coloniality perspective, this article argues that in order to reconnect our minds to our bodies and center embodied pedagogy in the classroom, we …
From 'no' to 'yes: Postcolonial Perspectives on Resistance to Neoliberal Higher Education
Various scholars have suggested ways to resist neoliberal conditions in higher education (HE). In analysing current neoliberal policies and practices in HE, I suggest that postcolonial theories of resistance can enhance our ability as faculty and administrators to understand and ‘resist’ these policies and practices. In this article, I review four modes of postcolonial resistance as described by David Jeffress (2008), mobilizing a critique of res…
Will I learn what I want to learn?' Usable representations, 'students' and OECD assessment production
Amid growing debates around international assessment tools in educational policy, few have critically examined how students themselves are cast in policy tool production processes and discourse. Drawing on Stuart Hall's concept of representation, we show how higher education (HE) ‘students’ are constructed, fixed and normalized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes …
International organizations (IOs), epistemic tools of influence, and the colonial geopolitics of knowledge production in higher education policy
While other scholars have analyzed the way that international organizations (IOs) in higher education policy may contribute to neocolonial domination, this paper illuminates not only on how IOs’ epistemic activities promulgate one-size fit all solutions, but centers the colonial structures of knowledge/power that inform the why (or logic) of these IOs’ epistemic activities and their effects. A decolonial analysis of discursive artifacts and tools…
Global competition, coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in higher education
While scholars have analyzed global higher education (HE) competition, they have largely failed to address how global spaces of equivalence are tied both to coloniality and to competition. Using the OECD’s International Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) as a case study and drawing on concepts from coloniality including Fanon’s zone of being/non-being and Mignolo’s geopolitics of knowledge, we reveal how coloniality underpin…
Attempting to Imagine the Unimaginable: A Decolonial Reading of Global University Rankings
This article presents a collaboration among critical scholars of color grappling with the challenges of reimagining global university rankings (GURs) in an effort to rethink the field of comparative education from a decolonial perspective. We start with an empathetic review of scholarship on rankings. This effort evidenced that rankings are embedded and sustained within a broader dominant imaginary of higher education, circumscribed by what is de…
From Pipelines to Tasting Lemonade: Reconceptualizing College Access
Pipeline metaphors are ubiquitous in theorizing and interpreting college access processes. In this conceptual article, we explore how a lemonade metaphor can open new possibilities to reimagining higher education access and going processes. We argue that using food metaphors, particularly the processes of mixing, tasting, and digesting lemonade, may help constitute new meanings of college going. Rather than focus on production, mechanization, and…
Unpacking ontological security: A decolonial reading of scholarly impact
Despite the growing debate about scholarly impact, an analysis of the onto-epistemic grammar underlying impact has remained absent. By taking a different analytical approach to examining impact, we interrogate the concept through the lens of decolonial thought. We offer an empathetic review of the impact scholarship and illuminate the limits of the modern imaginary that circumscribe critiques of impact in the literature, making visible the Euroce…
From ‘Geopolitics of Being’ towards Inter-being: Envisioning the ‘In/visibles’ in the Globalization of Higher Education
Amid growing debates about globalization of higher education (HE), an analysis of the onto-epistemic grammar underlying the articulation of this global phenomenon remains absent. This essay posits that our understanding of the nature of globalization of HE cannot be separated from questions of a) emotions, b) temporality, and c) ontology. Drawing on the extant literature on globalization of HE to date and personal experiences, it demonstrates the…
Globalizing whiteness? Visually re/presenting students in global university rankings websites
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 gra…
Emoscapes and commercial university rankers: The role of affect in global higher education policy
A concerted attempt to offer an affect (emotions, desires, moods, and/or attitudes) lens underlying the global university rankings (GURs) phenomenon remains absent. Using two commercial ranker case studies (Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd (QS)), this article provides a critical policy analysis illuminating how rankers use emoscapes (affective landscapes) in globalizing HE policy. Based on an analysis of publicly availabl…
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) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) websites to uncover the rankers’ ‘Asian visual gaze’ to extend our understandings of GURs and the significance of Asian univer…
On ‘being for others’: Time and shame in the neoliberal academy
Amid growing studies of time in higher education, few have theorized the interconnections between affect, academic work, and temporality – the way we make sense of and relate to time changes – in the neoliberal academy. By interconnecting temporality with shame, this article presents a critique of dominant temporalities of neoliberal higher education by exploring the differing existential temporalities associated with academic work. It presents a…
Navigating student resistance towards decolonizing curriculum and pedagogy (DCP): A temporal proposal
A concerted attempt to offer a temporal lens (the way we make sense of and relate to time changes) underlying decolonizing pedagogy and curriculum (DCP) remains absent. Drawing on student resistance as an entry point, we offer a temporal account of DCP by unearthing the entanglements between past, present, and future underlying DCP enactments. We explore timescapes shaping DCP from three specific temporal perspectives on student resistance: a) st…
What is in the observer? From thinking to being ‘public’ ‘outcomes’ of higher education
The paper engages in ‘paradigmatic talk’ about public outcomes of higher education (HE). We were drawn to this paradigmatic discussion because of its inherent ‘cultural’ dimensions and the opportunity for us to be self-reflexive about the ontological values underlying ‘cultures’ that shape the articulation, representation, and enactment of HE's public outcomes. While we agree with Marginson and Yang (forthcoming) that comparisons of public outcom…
Global university rankings as ‘sticky’ objects and ‘refrains’: Affect and mediatisation in India
Global university rankings (GURs) have garnered increasing media attention since their inception. Yet to date, a concerted attempt to offer an affect lens – emotions, responses, reactions and feelings that are relational and transpersonal – underlying the mediatisation of GURs remains absent. Drawing on affect theories, we analysed the Indian national media's coverage of Times Higher Education rankings and Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd. rankings (betw…
Sociology (37 works) · Political science (30 works) · Law (22 works) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (21 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (21 works) · Higher education (20 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Higher Education Governance and Development (18 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Law (15 works)