Managing higher education and neoliberal marketing discourses on Why Choose webpages for international students on Australian and British university websites

Abstract

International education is impacted by multiple discourses, in particular the discourse of university as an educational institution responsible for producing and curating knowledge for the public good, pursuing truth and transforming student life, and the neoliberal marketing discourse which portrays the university as a business organization providing a service for international students as customers/consumers. Following a multimodal discourse analytic perspective, this study examines ‘Why Choose’ webpages of one British and two Australian universities to identify how the apparently conflicting higher education and neoliberal marketing discourses are managed in the interdiscursive space using language, images and videos. The results reveal that ‘Why Choose’ webpages are hybrid texts where the discourse of higher education is upheld in relation to the neoliberal marketing discourse through multimodal strategies of accentuation, infusion and progression. The study argues for the necessity of undertaking a multimodal discourse approach to understand how various positions are negotiated interdiscursively in online media.