Between Local Distinction and Global Reputation: University Rankings and Changing Employment in Japan
Dr. Mayumi Ishikawa (Professor, Center for Global Initiatives, Osaka University) to speak at UBC.
Date: Sept 17, 2019
Time: 12-1:30 pm
Location: PCOH 1215
The study examines the incompatibility between the excellence norms used in global rankings and the conventional domestic university hierarchy. The prestige of Japanese elite universities has been primarily constructed on exam selectivity of students and producing desirable graduates for the domestic labour market. Although such a conventional system is in need of adjustment under globalisation, replacing it with excellence norms of global rankings is destructive to employment and career systems that have defined the lives of Japan’s middle-class, white-collar workers for much of the postwar period. Unlike previous works on global university rankings often conducted from national or institutional perspectives, this study identifies a potential threat of the hegemonic “world-class” model to jobs, remunerations and upward social mobility of individuals from a case of Japan.
Bio : Mayumi Ishikawa’s (ishikawa@iai.osaka-u.ac.jp) research interests include the globalization of higher education and ethnographic studies of universities and of Malaysian Borneo, the internationalization of higher education, transnational mobility of students and scholars, world university rankings and the emergence of hegemony in academia, and power in the construction of knowledge. She edited Sekai daigaku ranking to chi no joretsuka [World University Rankings and the Hegemonic Restructuring of Knowledge], a volume in Japanese published from Kyoto University Press.
For more information contact michelle.stack@ubc.ca
