“You are your only limit”: Appropriations and valorizations of affect in university branding

Abstract

This article considers the role of affect in university branding in a context of neoliberal higher education, by way of examining the semiotic landscape of the Singapore Management University concourse. Contemporary branding often involves stimulating stakeholder/audience investments of meaning and affect into the brand, thereby appropriating consumers’ affective labour for brand‐building and communications. Adopting a discourse‐analytic approach, I examine how linguistic, visual and spatial modalities are utilized to evoke and semiotize particular affective meanings and orientations in the emplaced discourse within the university's brand space. This discourse, which includes organizational branding discourse as well as more organic student‐generated texts, becomes part of the affective regime, helping to encourage and enjoin what is deemed to be normative affective sensibilities and practices in that context. Consequently, the article also considers the kinds of affective subjectivities that are valorized, and how stakeholder/student‐subjects are interpellated in a context of neoliberal‐oriented higher education.

Brand Personality Higher Education Using Rasch Model Approach

“…This research contributes to filling literature than brand personality about the university, various marketing strategies that are out there today have been applied to a public company even college especially padjadjaran university which has moved to the form of college are legal entities, the time has come to apply a strategy branding for its institutions (Foroudi et al, 2019;Fazli et al, 2019;Schlesinger et al, 2017;Ng, 2019). Made high unpad brands that have a reputation.…”

Análisis del discurso educacional en páginas webs de universidades chilenas: El caso de enfermería

“…En esta línea, Sanz del Vecchio et al (2017) investigaron la actitud del estudiantado como ente consumidor, y señalan que este busca la conveniencia entre calidad, los servicios y los costos que se ofertan. A su vez, las instituciones establecen estos sitios como uno de los principales medios de comunicación, incorporando páginas exclusivas y orientadas a postulantes, en muchos casos con una relación interactiva (Ng, 2019;Wörner et al 2016).…”

‘It all begins with a teacher’: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of Singapore’s teacher recruitment videos

“…In so doing, she demonstrates how affect can turn ideological positions into common sense by facilitating the 'circulation of naturalised and normative cultural logics and ideological structures to shape desirable practices and feelings' (p. 236). Equally interested in the ideological potential of affect but in a different landscape, Ng (2019) traversed the concourse of a Singapore university to explore its spatial, verbal and visual representation of affect as part of the university's branding. By showing how affect can be effectively harnessed and extracted for value, profit and advantage within a late capitalist, neo-liberal context, Ng (2019) underscores the importance of affect in branding as it can evoke and engender evaluative-dispositional orientations towards particular objects.…”

“…Despite examining diverse affective materiality in different socio-cultural contexts, both Matus (2017) and Ng (2019) call attention to the ideological work that affect can perform to cultivate certain evaluative dispositions and mobilise particular actions. Embarking on a similar venture to examine affect as a form of ideological persuasion but through a different medium, the present study seeks to explore how affect can be used to create and curate particular realities about teachers and teaching in a series of teacher recruitment videos in Singapore.…”