Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Heike Jöns (Geography)

Dr. Heike Jöns, Reader in Human Geography, Loughborough University, UK

World university rankings have played a crucial role in monitoring and fuelling an increasingly competitive atmosphere between universities and thus reinforced widespread neoliberal reforms in higher education. The significant tension between a considerable agency of these league tables as policy drivers of socio-economic change and a variety of critical voices that question their methodology and value highlights the need for scrutinizing their underlying assumptions. This paper aims to provide a critical and differentiated geographical analysis of two major world university rankings, produced at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and by Times Higher Education, with the twofold aim of revealing their highly partial and very different representations of global higher education and providing insights, through the comparison, into ongoing shifts within the global knowledge economy.