Attempting To Imagine The Unimaginable

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Attempting to imagine the unimaginable: a decolonial reading of global

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Contesting Coloniality
Attempting to Imagine the Unimaginable: A Decolonial

Reading of Global University Rankings
RIYAD A. SHAHJAHAN, GERARDO BLANCO RAMIREZ,
AND VANESSA DE OLIVEIRA ANDREOTTI
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 deemed possible and desirable within modern institutions. Seeking inspiration to
explore beyond the current limits of our modern imagination, we turned to the teachings
of the Dagara as a mirror that cast a different light on our investments in the very onto-
epistemic structures that sustain the GURs. Being taught by Dagara’s teachings led us to
realize that rankings are symptomatic of a much broader crisis shaking the ontological
securities of modern institutions and that it is only through the loss of our satisfaction with
these securities that we can start to imagine otherwise.
Introduction
Since the emergence of the Academic Ranking of World Universities

(ARWU), the first global university ranking (GUR), in 2003, there has been a
growing robust literature on global rankings in the past decade. Other GURs
include the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE), the
QS World University Rankings (QS), and U-Multirank, among others. This
literature includes discussions of GURs’ methodological limitations; GURs’
impact on faculty, institutions, and policy makers; and studies on how GURs
influence institutional decision making.1 Taken together, this work has pro-
vided a rich analytical and empirical description of the rise and impact of
GURs on higher-education institutions (HEIs) in the context of globalization.
We would like to thank Annabelle Estera and Sharon Stein for her helpful support in the prep-
aration and revision of this article. We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and the
special issue editors for their constructive feedback and support with this manuscript.
1
See Cheng (2011), Altbach (2012), Jöns and Hoyler (2013), Hazelkorn et al. (2014), and Stack
(2016).
Received October 14, 2015; revised May 16, 2016, and September 19, 2016; accepted November 30,
2016; electronically published March 23, 2017
Comparative Education Review, vol. 61, no. S1.
q 2017 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.
0010-4086/2017/61S1-0004$10.00
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SHAHJAHAN ET AL.
Many of the studies exploring rankings are aimed at improvement, and

yet, we agree with Amsler and Bolsmann (2012) that we need “to radicalise
the debate by problematising the practice of ranking itself within the main-
stream, asking the very questions that are explicitly silenced and creating
political situations in which they might be posed” (295). In this essay, we take
a different analytical tack and historical standpoint to the study of GURs. In
the context of the growing role of GURs in the globalization and mediatiza-
tion of higher-education policy globally (see Hazelkorn 2015; Stack 2016)
and the growing debate in the comparative education field regarding global
metrics, tools for comparison, and commensurability in educational policy
(Kamens and McNeely 2009; Rizvi and Lingard 2010; Meyer and Benavot
2013), we offer an analysis of GURs in light of decolonial thought.
Decoloniality is an epistemic, political, and pedagogical project that in-
volves the unpacking of modern civilizational worldview and the inclusion of
nonmodern systems of knowledge and categories of thought as legitimate
ways of knowing in higher education (Grosfoguel 2008; Mignolo 2011). De-
coloniality seeks to understand and disrupt coloniality, which refers to an
ongoing logic of domination underlying imperial powers (whether Spanish,
Portuguese, British, and, later on, American) and a Eurocentric process of
expansion of modes of knowing, being, and representation (Mignolo 2011).
Informed by decoloniality, we have two aims. We first attempt to show the
limits of the modern imaginary that circumscribe critiques of GURs in the
literature, and rankings themselves, making visible the Eurocentric and pro-
vincial horizons of modern reason underlying these critiques and rankings
in general. Second, we seek to speak from the edges of this modernity imag-
inary and highlight the complexity of being taught by dissenting voices. As
such, we shift the body politics and geopolitics of knowledge away from Eu-
rocentrism by centering the locus of our articulation in decolonial episte-
mologies. We mobilize teachings from the Dagara (a West African indigenous
group populated in what today is Burkina Faso and Ghana), as expressed by
Malidoma Somé, as a psychoanalytic mirror that foregrounds the effects of
our attachments to onto-epistemic structures reflected in modern institu-
tions that restrict our possibilities for imagining otherwise. We elaborate on
our choice of Dagara teachings later in the article.
We argue that the process of ranking HEIs further narrows the imagi-
nary of universities and human relationships in general, limiting the possi-
bilities of knowledge and being. Rather than presenting “solutions” to this
problem, we seek to render such boundaries visible, which requires ontol-
ogies that are incompatible with the existing paradigm. In our collaborative
efforts in writing this essay, our original intention was to extend the edges of the
existing imaginary of higher education driven by rankings in order to open the
space for different possibilities for thinking and practice to emerge. As such, we
structure the article in three sections aimed at exploring the following questions:
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DECOLONIAL READING OF GLOBAL UNIVERSITY RANKINGS
1. What questions have already been asked? How have rankings been al-
ready problematized? What is normalized in these problematizations?
2. Given the dominance of certain onto-epistemic grammars, how can we
delink and introduce decolonial perspectives to the GURs debate and
rankings themselves in academia?
3. How can decolonial perspectives help us to imagine otherwise?
Seeking to respond to the first question, we present a brief summary of

relevant literature on global rankings in order to explore the limits of exist-
ing critiques. We then turn to a decolonial perspective, intentionally mak-
ing an abrupt departure from the scientific and systematic approaches that
characterize the literature on GURs. In this second section, we highlight how
making this decolonial turn is fraught with challenges in the context of col-
onized and colonizing practices, such as rankings.
Acknowledging the difficulties of our desires to “delink,” in the last sec-
tion, we present some of the Dagara’s teaching based on Malidoma Somé’s
(1994, 1997) writings in an effort to engage further with the paradoxes of
trying to imagine otherwise within modern institutions. Dagara’s critiques,
which are not grounded on modern metaphysics, offer “mirroring” insights
that call us to perform deeper forms of self-reflexivity, taking into account
conscious/subconscious processes, our desires, identifications, and attach-
ments. For this reason, we believe that the Dagara teachings prompt us to
engage with an indigenous form of psychoanalysis that illuminates the com-
plexities of delinking from modern/colonial knowledge systems within West-
ern academia. Dagara’s critiques of Western modes of existence are par-
ticularly useful for the GURs debate (and related debates in comparative
education) as they emphasize hidden existential choices, intellectual fore-
closures, and the circularity of afforded possibilities (including the circularity
of Western critique). In this last section, we also invite the reader to reflect with
us about Dagara’s teachings in relation to the GURs, higher education, and
modernity itself within the comparative education field. Drawing on such a
perspective, we remember that other fields of possibility do indeed have the
potential to exist. As such, we strive to mobilize Dagara’s teachings to cast a
different light on GURs, and we invite our readers to sit with the discomfort
of the limits of our imaginary.
Critiques of GURs
As we read the existing literature on rankings, we found a growing body

of scholarship problematizing rankings by deconstructing their methodo-
logical limitations and questioning their utility for decision making at the
national, institutional, or individual level. These critiques can be catego-
rized within six overriding questions: (1) Are GURs’ methods valid or reli-

SHAHJAHAN ET AL.
able? (2) What are the consequences and adverse effects of GURs on higher
education? (3) Whom do GURs serve? (4) Why do we participate in them?
(5) What do rankings do to us as scholars? (6) What are some alternatives?
How do we resist them? In the following literature review we will illuminate
how these rankings’ debates reproduce key aspects of the geopolitics and
body politics of knowledge production that are constitutive of modernity
(Mignolo 2011) and the questions that are left out as a result.
Are GURs’ Methods Valid or Reliable?

Many scholars have a shared concern to “objectively” and “rigorously” test
claims implicit or explicitly contained in rankings. These studies in general
want to “correct” the flaws identified with rankings by problematizing their
claims of measurement (O’Connell 2013). The methodological critiques fo-
cus on what rankings measure (Bowden 2000; Dill and Soo 2005; Usher and
Sovino 2007); whether they produce statistically salient differences (Locke
et al. 2008); if they measure what they assume to (Salmi and Saroyan 2007);
and if they use the correct unit of analysis (Pascarella 2001; Saisana et al.
2011). For instance, both Bowden (2000) and Usher and Savino (2007) have
offered significant critique toward the validity of rankings by interrogating
the choice and use of indicators and criteria and the weightings assigned to
them. Similarly, Saisana et al. (2011) conducted a robust analysis to test the
validity of the inference about the ARWU and the United Kingdom’s THE
rankings. Their findings demonstrated that university and country-level sta-
tistical inferences are unsound and the ranking systems reflect the perspec-
tives of their producers and may not meet the needs of students or higher-
education policy makers. Finally, Pascarella (2001), drawing on an established
literature on correlates of learning quality, challenges rankings. Pascarella
suggests that GURs focused on resources, reputation, or student/alumni out-
comes rather than on effective educational practice and processes. While
these studies present worthwhile critique of rankings, they do so within the
framework or logic of rankings and scientism (Amsler and Bolsmann 2012;
Wedlin 2014). Overall, they unintentionally legitimize rankings (Amsler and
Bolsmann 2012) and assume we “can know” or tame knowledge production—
that is, engineer the world to our will. Such critiques, nevertheless, unknow-
ingly perpetuate the assumption that things can be ranked according to
some universal perceived value, which historically has had drastic effects on
those who do not wish to or cannot conform (see Smith 1999).
What Are the Consequences and Adverse Effects of GURs on Higher Education?
A growing body of scholarship problematizes the general politics of
knowledge production of GURs for perpetuating a monoculture of the mind
(i.e., a singular imaginary of higher-education purpose and knowledge;
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Marginson and van der Wende 2007; Kaba 2012; Lynch 2014). Many have
noted that GURs privilege particular institutions (via discourse of world-class
excellence), disciplines, language, and overall mission of HEIs. As such, Mar-
ginson and van der Wende found ARWU and THE problematic because of
their exclusive focus on research tailored to science-strong and English-
speaking universities. Such GURs ignore teaching, and global comparisons
are possible only when in relation to a single model—the comprehensive re-
search institution in the United States. Furthermore, Ordorika and Lloyd
(2014) argue that GURs (e.g., ARWU, THE, and the QS) privilege the Anglo-
Saxon model of HEIs (particularly the US model; see also Kaba 2012) and
are “fundamental elements in the contest for cultural hegemony on a global
scale” (3).
Many problematize rankings for perpetuating stratification among
nation-states, within the national container,2 and/or their adverse effects on
HEIs and administrators (Ackers 2008; Hazelkorn 2015). For instance, Alt-
bach (2012) notes that GURs create centers and peripheries, whereby “the
major English-speaking countries such as the United States, the United King-
dom, Canada, and Australia . . . have significant head starts provided by their
histories, wealth, ability to attract top scholars and students worldwide, strong
traditions of academic freedom, and academic cultures based on competition
and meritocracy” (29). Similarly, Kehm (2014) and Lo (2014) point to the
ways in which vertical stratification of HEIs is linked to resource allocation in
some countries.
Beyond the global and national levels, Ordorika and Lloyd (2014) note
that HEIs face pressures to conform to a largely arbitrary and Anglocentric
set of performance indicators, and institutions are being forced to compete
in an increasingly “costly and high-stakes ‘academic arms race’ to the detri-
ment of more pressing local or national development priorities” (1). As
Enders (2012) put it, “some rankings use indicators that invite universities
to actively engage in influencing their image in the eyes of relevant others”
(2). In short, GURs exacerbate a competitive system in which already well-
positioned institutions are at an advantage. While these critiques illuminate
how GURs perpetuate various forms of monocultures of the mind, they rarely
raise questions about the consequences of GURs on our ways of being (on-
tological effects). Such critiques assume and unconsciously reproduce en-
lightenment narratives of general progress and educational development vis-
à-vis higher education.
Whom Do GURs Serve?

“Whom do GURs serve?” is another question that many have debated.
For instance, Hazelkorn (2015) notes that they serve governments and re-
2
See, e.g., Altbach (2012), Davies and Zarifa (2012), Jöns and Hoyler (2013), and Cremonini et al.
(2014).

SHAHJAHAN ET AL.
gional bodies (e.g., European Commission) to justify their reform, HEIs for
gaining global competitive advantage, families and students for deciding on
institutional choice, and even some faculty to garner reputation. Others have
noted that rankings serve media companies and popular media in that they
help garner circulation and readership (Chang and Osborn 2005; Stack
2016). Some scholars have nuanced this “who benefits?” discussion further
by noting that GURs are part of a global hegemonic discourse that serves the
transnational elite and intentionally enacted/neoimperial project (Amsler
and Bolsmann 2012; Pusser and Marginson 2013). For instance, Amsler and
Bolsmann (2012) suggest that rankings are part of a “politico-ideological
technology” that serves a transnational elite class (284). They caution us from
accepting GURs as “inevitable” or “permanent” and suggest that such rank-
ing discourses are instead politicized speech that perpetuates the status quo.
While these critiques are indeed relevant, they do not raise questions about
the psychological and ontological underpinnings of GURs that seduce vari-
ous stakeholders to participate in them in an effort to secure prestige and
affluence through higher education.
Why Do We Participate in GURs?

Some have focused on teasing out the networks of power that compel
various social actors to respond and make changes vis-à-vis GUR. In this re-
gard, the literature draws on Foucault to explain how institutions and gov-
ernments feel compelled to respond and make changes to thrive, or survive
(e.g., Erkkilä 2014). Drawing on Gramsci and his ideas that power is gener-
ated culturally and operates through cultural norms, views, and practices, Lo
(2014) helps explain why rankings are not simply coercive tools, but rather
persuasive tools for change. Others, drawing on Bourdieu’s notions of so-
cial capital, try to make sense of why HEIs participate in GURs (e.g., Mar-
ginson 2007, 2008). The overarching argument forwarded by such scholars
is that GURs serve a reputational value to secure positional goods that are in
limited supply. These critiques are indeed fruitful in illuminating the social-
material dimensions governing human subjectivity in relation to GURs. How-
ever, they still reproduce modern conceptualizations of human subjectivity
and agency that do not, for instance, consider sacred subjectivity (human
beings with spiritual connections to the world). As such, they omit questions
regarding the ontological consequences of GURs to our existential being and
collective well-being of the planet.
What Do Rankings Do to Scholars?

One important consequence of global rankings involves changes in the
composition of faculty work responsibilities. Rankings depend to a great ex-
tent on research reputation (O’Loughlin et al. 2015); institutions that seek to
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advance their reputation and, consequently, their position in rankings tend

to increase the expectations on faculty for tenure and promotion (O’Meara
2007). Even universities that are not competitive in GURs have increased
their expectations about research productivity. Sophisticated mechanisms
to measure faculty productivity have been developed; many of them rely on
bibliometric measures (Linton et al. 2011; Moksony et al. 2014; O’Loughlin
et al. 2015). The process of commensuration, defined as “the transformation
of different qualities into a common metric” (Espeland and Stevens 1998,
314), which rankings are dependent on (Colyvas 2012), narrows the types of
activities that faculty members focus on. As Espeland and Stevens (1998)
argue, the very process of commensuration requires content to be erased
from faculty work. In a ranked, commensurate system, scholarly production’s
worth is determined by its ability to be measured rather than by its content.
Most importantly, rankings position academics into hierarchical, com-
petitive environments, within a neoliberal culture focused on individualism,
the cult of personalities, and the recoding of fund-raising as academic success
(Roy 2006). However, these critiques presented in the literature frame the
impact of GURs as unintended consequences and rarely question the process
of ranking in itself. These insightful critiques illustrate the limits of existing
imaginaries, which take competition and hierarchy as a given. Furthermore,
these critiques leave unquestioned the existence of modern HEIs in the first
place.
How Have GURs Been Contested/Resisted?

Some have proposed alternatives, such as changing the unit of analysis or
the relative weight of some input measures to control variables, and by pro-
posing strategies of holding rankings agencies to account (O’Connell 2013).
Alternative metrics are often proposed. For instance, Pusser and Marginson
(2013) identified the system of university assessment developed by the Estu-
dio Comparativo de Universidades Mexicanas as a counter-hegemonic rank-
ing system. This assessment not only evaluates HEIs in Mexico in terms of
research output but also considers “democratic aspects of their public mis-
sions, including the expansion of social opportunities and public purposes
of the Mexican state through postsecondary provision” (562). Some scholars
remain unconvinced by such alternatives because they fail to challenge the
“logic” of rankings (Amsler and Bolsmann 2012). More recently, Amsler
(2014) suggested creating a “breathing space” in HEIs to nurture “other ways
of thinking and talking about the quality of knowledge and learning” (164).
While these solutions are indeed helpful, they fail to push us further in raising
questions about ontological securities, status, and privileges afforded to us via
HEIs, and perhaps we need to raise and center questions of uncertainty.
Furthermore, we need to caution against universalist tendencies of such so-
lutions that trap us back in modernity logics.

SHAHJAHAN ET AL.
Despite being contextually useful, these critiques fall short of problem-

atizing the modern frames of knowing and being they are situated in. In the
next section, in an effort to foreground the onto-epistemic grammar that
gives form and substance to modern institutions and subjectivities, we share
the complexities of introducing decolonial perspectives into academia and
the challenges of reimagining how disciplinary knowledge is produced and
circulated in academic spaces. This self-reflexive move became necessary as,
in our conversations about delinking, we realized the risks of appropriating
Dagara teachings and presenting them as our own learning in the context
of our rankings analysis and critique. To put it simply, we realized that we
need to complicate our own project of presenting Dagara’s perspectives as
responses to our academic questions as this could reinscribe the coloniza-
tion of indigenous knowledge systems, despite our best intentions (see Ahe-
nakew 2016). Thus, the next section, which was not planned from the outset,
reflects our attempts to enable the possibility for Dagara’s teachings to in-
terrupt our own project and to teach us on its own terms.
The Complexities of Decolonial Interventions in Academia
Our multilayered positionality as visible minorities, having ties to coun-

tries labeled as “Third World,” and working with dissenting perspectives
mostly in white settler contexts, sets both the tone and the mode of the de-
colonial approach we propose. Despite the daily frustrations of negotiating
imposed identities, racialized academic hierarchies, and the intelligibility
and value of our work, we enter this theoretical ground with hesitation. We
are aware of the trap that Spivak (1993) denounces in regard to becoming the
margin at the center speaking from the South (in the North) in order to serve
the North or to use our identity as currency for personal advancement in
established hierarchies. Yet, at the same time as scholars of color working in
highly internationally “ranked” programs/universities in the Global North,
we are implicated in GURs affording us certain privileges to speak and be
heard. Indeed, given our networks and English language proficiency, our
scholarship can be easily placed in highly ranked Anglo-American journals.
As such we have struggled with being part of the GURs debate without re-
producing it, while at the same time acknowledging the limits of journal
publications.
In this context, we ask: What would be possible to imagine if we put de-
colonial perspectives to work in our engagements with GURs? What would
HEIs, education, and rankings look like? Would rankings still exist? As we
pondered on these questions collectively and more deeply, we encountered a
tsunami of embodied and conceptual difficulties of reimagining GURs and
higher education from a decolonial perspective. We highlight some of these
tensions next.
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As noted earlier, decoloniality asserts that the structures of being that

have sustained academic knowledge production were created to uphold a
political project of universality that is inherently committed to the elimina-
tion of alternatives as a necessary condition to justify its (universal) legitimacy
(Sousa Santos 2007; Mignolo 2011). Sousa Santos further reminds us of this
subjugation of alternative knowledge systems by suggesting that critiques of
the system are appropriated and incorporated into its onto-epistemic gram-
mar—a grammar that defines what is real, ideal, desirable, and intelligible—
where alternatives are again rendered invisible precisely when they are voiced
(but cannot be heard). In the academy, the dominant onto-epistemic gram-
mar suggests that we intellectualize existence, prioritize logical coherence
and argumentation, and view the systematization of convictions as the only
legitimate goal of academic endeavors. This emphasis on intellectual nor-
mativity (i.e., thinking that defines being and reality) is very different from
what some “other(ed)” structures of being would be anchored in. We were left
with the overriding question: Given the dominance of certain onto-epistemic
grammars, how can we delink and introduce decolonial perspectives to the
GURs debate and GURs themselves in academia?
In response, we took inspiration from Somé (1994), who noted, “If one
can imagine something, then it has at least the potential to exist” (8). This
quote is significant for us as it indicates two interpretations with very differ-
ent implications in terms of the possibility of something radically new with
GURs. If one reads it from a perspective grounded on an allegedly universal
onto-epistemic grammar, something needs to be imagined first (within this
grammar) so that it has the potential to exist. However, if read from another
perspective, not based on Cartesian, logocentric, teleological, anthropocen-
tric, universalist, or utility-maximizing reasoning, the quote indicates precisely
the opposite; that is, if another conscience (human or not) has imagined
something, it at least has the potential to insist on existing (despite not being
acknowledged by the dominant onto-epistemic grammar).
The first interpretation shows that contestations in the dominant lan-
guage and mode of critique (of description, prescription, or moral normative
orientations) are either tokenistically assimilated into a project of “soft re-
form” (Andreotti et al. 2015), ignored altogether, or resisted as deemed “of-
fensive” to the benevolent history and legacy of the institution. Sousa Santos
(2007) has referred to this as “abyssal thinking” and “epistemic blindness.”
His analogy of abyssal thinking is very useful in this context as it helps us vi-
sualize knowledge/being production as an abyssal social divide; Sousa Santos
explains: “The division is such that the other side of the line vanishes as re-
ality becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced as nonexistent. Nonex-
istent means not existing in any relevant or comprehensible way of being.
Whatever is produced as nonexistent is radically excluded because it lies
beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion considers to

SHAHJAHAN ET AL.
be its other” (2). Those on “this side of the line” have a vested interest in their
epistemic blindness as they feel the need to protect the privilege to define
social realities in ways that also conveniently define the distribution of labor,
resources, and the merit of what is considered good and desirable.
If we are to follow the second interpretation of the quote above, we re-
alize that the burden of translation falls on those on the other side of the line
who need to inscribe or graph their own knowledges and forms of being into
something that is legible and credible to those on the upper side (see also
Ahenakew 2016), for instance, in our case, incorporating a decolonial Da-
gara perspective in reimagining the GURs debate and rankings themselves.
This work is fraught with difficulties as it prompts different kinds of resis-
tance on both sides. We highlight another caveat: trying to “explain” what
things would look like using a language built on other referents needs to be
characterized as an act of “translation” that will never capture the lived ex-
perience and logic of what we are trying to translate (Bassnett and Trivedi
1999). As Somé (1994) eloquently put it, “there is usually a significant vio-
lence done to anything being translated from one culture to another” (2).
Acknowledging these tensions, we aim to offer a “translation” in which
this radical difference is defined against a specific structure of being can-
onized by modern institutions, and now expanded exponentially through the
GURs to the point where already precarious, but insisting, academic spaces
for dissent and contestation face a higher risk of elimination. We looked at
different possibilities for presenting a glimpse of forms of existence that lie
beyond the abyss. Drawing on the writings of Somé (1994, 1997), we settled
on the example of the Dagara indigenous community (located in what is to-
day Burkina Faso and Ghana).3
Drawing on Sousa Santos’s (2007) call for an alternative way to think
about alternatives, we propose that what the Dagara can teach us about GURs
is something very different from what our existing referents tend to expect to
learn from alternative knowledges. Their teachings can teach us that Sousa
Santos’s abyss is not about what we do not imagine (from this side of the line)
as a lack of knowledge, but what we cannot imagine as a result of the limits of
our realms of intelligibility and experience, and the constitutive foreclosures
happening as a result of what has been normalized as real, ideal, knowable,
and desirable. As the upcoming section will discuss, by turning to the Dagara
teachings and decentering our own project, we encountered teachings that
were, at least initially, unintelligible to us.
3
In a previous version of this article we considered three different decolonial perspectives as
exemplars of critiques that could take us to the edges of the dominant global university imaginary: Da-
gara teachings expressed by Malidoma Somé, Gloria Anzaldua’s Nepantla, and DaSilva’s po-ethic. How-
ever, it was the Dagara’s teaching that offered us a sharper mirror to interrogate our own conceptuali-
zation of decoloniality further. By drawing attention to distractions and foreclosures, the Dagara gifted
us indigenous psychoanalytic tools that prompted us to delve deeper into the circularities of our own
investments.
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In this exercise we were taught that the importance of this decolonial

challenge does not lie in proposing indigenous worldviews or perspectives as
viable alternatives to modern forms of knowing and being in the field of
comparative education. In other words, we are not arguing that we should
adopt a Dagara worldview or way of being or to instrumentalize their “per-
spective” in relation to the GURs. This would inevitably reproduce the vio-
lences of grafting, recoding, appropriation, and commodification that abound
in efforts to decolonize or indigenize academic spaces, despite their good
intentions (see Tuck and Yang 2012). These efforts also tend to ignore that
Dagara culture is inherently heterogeneous (Lentz 2000) and that, for ex-
ample, some Dagara people may not identify with the perspective presented
in this text. Unfortunately, many efforts to respond to the universalization of
Western knowledge production have followed a pattern of offering existing
alternatives without problematizing the recoding of “othered” epistemologi-
cal categories and processes into the very ontological structures one wants to
criticize (Ahenakew 2016). As such, we are not presenting Dagara teachings
as context-free (universal) knowledge that can be instrumentalized as a gen-
eral epistemology. With these challenges and complications in mind, we next
present some Dagara teachings and illuminate how these teachings implicate
the GURs literature and rankings in general.
Being Taught by the Dagara
Our desire to approach Dagara teachings to illuminate the limits of our

modern understandings responds to the ways in which Dagara people are
uniquely positioned to illustrate the colonial aftermath and a decolonial way
of being.4 First, the interchanging Dagara/Dagaba identity is contested, with
conflicted narratives of what is the core culture of these ethnicities and its
origins (Lentz 1994). Rather than essentializing the Dagara, we acknowledge
that the idea of ethnicity in Africa was imagined, invented, and imposed by
colonizers (Lentz 2000). The Dagara/Dagaba spelling controversy denotes a
deeper conflict on identity itself. Second, like most postcolonial identities,
the Dagara designation relies on othering. For Dagara elders and intellec-
4
While we could provide more socio-cultural-political context for the body of “Dagara thought” to
avoid the unintended presentation of this body of thought as context-free (universal), we are concerned
about “grafting” Dagara thought in a dominant onto-epistemic grammar to be perceived “relevant” or to
be “heard.” Our interpretation of decolonizing knowledge is such that, while we do not want to re-
produce the obfuscation of politics/inequality in our theoretical mobilizations, overlocalizing Dagara
knowledge would force us in a position whereby knowledges beyond the abyss are perceived as either
too different to be considered of relevance or too similar (when grafted) to make any difference. We
attempted to mobilize Dagara knowledge to shed light on our own paradoxes and contradictions and to
inspire us to sit at the edge of our comfort zones of righteous critique, prestige, and securities. In short,
we strove to hear the call of “othered” knowledge systems for us to imagine something genuinely dif-
ferent without again grafting it into what is desirable within the dominant grammar we, as critical ac-
ademics, are also oversocialized into.

SHAHJAHAN ET AL.
tuals, their name invokes people in “revolt” (Lentz 1994, 70). For European
colonizers and for other African peoples, the name refers to “stammerers,
those who cannot be understood” (Lentz 2000, 112). Moreover, the Dagara
people’s location, in contemporary Burkina Faso and Ghana, illustrates the
ways in which European colonialism fractured the geographic landscape
through artificial national boundaries. Finally, as Plange (1979) has explained,
modernistic perspectives have attributed the inhabitants of this region a so-
called “intellectual incapacity” and blamed this as the reason for a supposed
lack of development (5).
While Dagara culture cannot be reduced to a narrow set of customs and
characteristics, the prominence of elders is a shared trait. For this reason, we
turn to a Dagara shaman healer and elder, Malidoma Somé, for Dagara
teachings that derive from the above historical/social contexts. According
to Somé (1994, 1997), for the Dagara, human beings are not individuals
represented by bodies, but a collective spirit who has taken a body form.
Human subjectivity is thus embedded in sacred subjectivity and not simply
constituted in social material realms. As Somé (1997) puts it, the clear split
between the spiritual and material in modernity is “alien to the Dagara. . . . To
a Dagara man or woman, the material is just the spiritual taking on form” (8).
This negation and absence of the sacred subjectivity are prevalent in modern
thought and institutions.
Tied to this spiritual ontology, Dagara notions and criteria of knowledge
are intimately connected to ancestral knowledge. According to Somé (1994),
“the ancestors are the real school of the living” (20) and “are always avail-
able to guide, to teach, and to nurture” (9). The Dagara believe that “contact
with the otherworld is always deeply transformational” (19). Modern sub-
jectivity, for Somé, is embedded in psychological “restlessness” because of
a dysfunctional relationship with one’s ancestors and loss of one’s roots. As
Somé puts it, “When a person from my culture looks at the descendents of
the Westerners who invaded their culture, they see a people who are ashamed
of their ancestors because they were killers and marauders masquerading as
artisans of progress. Dagara believe that, if such an imbalance exists, it is the
duty of the living to heal their ancestors” (9).
Tied to ancestral knowledge is the notion of limits of knowing. Somé
(1994) introduces the Dagara notion of Yielbongura: “the thing that knowl-
edge can’t eat.” In his words, this concept “suggests that the life and power of
certain things depend upon their resistance to the kind of categorizing knowl-
edge that human beings apply to everything” (8). This notion of categorical
fallacies or limitation of conceptual knowing fundamentally contradicts West-
ern epistemologies’ emphasis on rational knowing or “to know.” From a Da-
gara perspective, we could argue that knowledge production, or the concept
of learning, cannot be categorized, and it is such a “being” that is simply re-
sistant to being categorized or “tamed” by institutions because of the “spiritual
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nature” of the endeavor, which is being stripped, caged, and turned into a
“secular material thing” in modern forms of knowledge production.
The realm of imagination is also very important among the Dagara.
There is no distinction between reality and imagination. According to Somé
(1994), “To us, there is a close connection between thought and reality, to
imagine something, to closely focus on one’s thoughts upon it, has the po-
tential to bring that something into being” (8). This ties with the absence
of the concept of time in the Dagara worldview, which “generates a mode of
life whose focus is on the state of one’s spirit” (Somé 1997, 16). For Dagara,
notions of time usage are embedded not so much in outcomes but actually
in attention: “The elder who noticed that moderns don’t have to run toward
something that isn’t moving was pointing to the idea that to move is also to
keep oneself distracted. . . . And so the elder sees those in constant motion
(going places, doing things, making noise) as moving away from something
they do not want to look at or moving away from something that others do
not want them to look at” (16–17). Somé’s notion of restlessness is particularly
striking in that it illustrates a larger (non-Western) psychoanalytical perspec-
tive that seems to be missing in the larger higher-education imaginary.
The question of the symbolic and nonphysical world is also central in
Dagara ontology and epistemology. Tied to the question of restlessness ar-
ticulated earlier, according to Somé (1997), problems in the visible realm
cannot be addressed simply in the empirical material world. Instead, Somé
suggests that “to correct a dysfunctional state of affairs effectively, one must
first locate its hidden area, its symbolic dimension, work with it first, and then
assist in the restoration of the physical (visible) extension of it” (25). Somé
argues that to address these dysfunctional states one has to begin to address
the world of spirit. As such, Somé’s point here raises questions missing in
current higher-education imaginaries: What are some of the symbolic di-
mensions missing in these dominant framings of the dysfunctional state of
global higher education that suggest rankings as the solution? Such a sym-
bolic dimension is hardly part of the discussion in modernity or postmodern
critiques and reforms of HEIs.
Related to the question of symbolic world, according to Somé, moder-
nity is stuck in future utopias and linear progress. As Somé (1994) put it,
“Westerners look to the future as a place of hope, a better world where every
person has dignity and value, where wealth is not unequally distributed,
where the wonders of technology make miracles possible” (9). As such, the
Dagara problematize modernity progress narratives that are tied to the fu-
ture. In summary, Dagara teachings emphasize the central importance of
sacred subjectivity, ancestral connections, limits of knowing, and uncovering
the invisible that have been concealed by modern onto-epistemic grammars.
Borrowing from Alexander (2005), this shift “necessitates a different exis-
tential positioning in which to know” and “living a purpose that exceeds the

SHAHJAHAN ET AL.
imperatives of” (297) modern higher-education imaginaries. We next elab-

orate on the latter by focusing on how these Dagara lessons implicate the
critique of GURs and rankings themselves.
Reflecting on Dagara’s Teachings in Relation to GURs
Engaging with alternative forms of knowledge and existence persisting
beyond the dictates of nation-states, capitalism, modern identities, and/or
forms of knowledge production challenges the very core of what we com-
monly understand by education and research today. This type of engagement
problematizes the relationship between knowledge, knowing, and knowers,
as well as the normalized referents (of time, being, utility, representability)
that circumscribe our realm of intelligibility. The Dagara worldview, as pre-
sented by Somé (1994, 1997), highlights the limits of the modern form of
existence at the heart of HEIs and, more visibly, at the core of GURs. For this
reason, Dagara teachings illuminate assumptions that have yet to be exam-
ined in this discussion.
The key teaching we take from the Dagara is that the GURs are symp-
tomatic of a much larger problem affecting higher education and modern
societies related to the arrogance of (Western) rational (hegemony-seeking/
imperialistic) universality that is rarely discussed in critiques of GURs. This
problem has its roots in the metaphysics of hierarchical dualism, separability,
and anthropocentrism that grounds modern structures of being (Smith 1999;
Mignolo 2011). Within an axis of modern metaphysics, ontology, and epis-
temology, GURs represent a rational and logical tool to rank things in the
world according to their perceived (universal) value (Espeland and Stevens
1998; Colyvas 2012). In this sense, it is no different from previous tools that
have constructed racial, cultural, gendered, colonial, socioeconomic, mer-
itocratic, heteronormative, neurotypical, and ableist hierarchies. As such,
earlier questions of GURs’ validity, reliability, consequences, and alternatives
raised in the GURs literature fail to address the underlying metaphysics em-
bedded in GURs.
We interpret the teachings of the Dagara to point to the limits, contra-
dictions, paradoxes, denials, arrogance, and circularity of our narratives and
modes of knowledge production, which are framed (even in our critical en-
deavors) as universal, all-encompassing, and unlimited. For example, most of
the critiques calling for a reform of the GURs ask only for a change of game
rules rather than for game change. This literature points to the contradic-
tions of GURs and our complicity as players in the game, but the solutions
offered point only to making the game fairer or more equitable rather than
changing the game. Despite recognition about the multiple impacts of GURs
at the “national and institutional as well individual academic and student
behavior” (Hazelkorn et al. 2014, 44), the scholarship on GURs tends to em-
phasize their impact at the organization level, with a focus on the strategies
S000 May 2017

that university administrators deploy in order to advance their universities’

place in the global hierarchies that rankings produce and reinforce (e.g.,
Hazelkorn 2008; Kehm 2014).
Reflecting on Dagara’s teachings, such overall critiques (e.g., “whom
does it serve,” “why do we participate in them,” “what are some alternatives,”
and/or “how do we resist them”), while worthwhile within its modern onto-
epistemology, fail to problematize GURs beyond modernity discourses. They
circulate a meaning of GURs in which critiques and solutions are still em-
bedded in a seamless discourse of general progress and educational devel-
opment that naturalizes notions of institutional competition for prestige.
From this perspective, GURs are simply part of an “academic olympiad,” like
other global educational metrics (Kamens and McNeely 2009; Rizvi and
Lingard 2010; Yudkevich et al. 2015), that needs to be tempered in order to
become more equitable.
The teaching of Dagara’s Yielbongura implies that rankings cannot even
register the things that knowledge cannot eat or “make sense” of. GURs may
set us on a wild goose chase, where restlessness kills our capacity to observe
and to reason with patience, attention, and wisdom. This distractive rest-
lessness based on the speed and spectacle of academic production in linear
(fast-paced) time can also have devastating effects on our well-being as aca-
demics (Shahjahan 2015). Trying to imagine the Dagara examining the GURs
(assuming they would be remotely interested) prompted us to think that they
would be laughing at the futility of our endeavors in academia and alarmed
by our desires for totalizing knowledge and for engineering the world ac-
cording to our will (e.g., “how do we make GURs more valid or reliable,” “what
are some alternatives,” “how do we resist them”). The Dagara may also be
concerned about our lack of capacity to come up with a form of existence that
can promote deep existential learning and sustained collective well-being,
given that we are using up most resources in the planet and threatening
anyone and anything that gets in our way, including the Dagara themselves.
Such deep existential questions are simply ignored in GURs critique literature
and are not considered in rankings themselves or in the field of comparative
higher education in general.
So What? Now What? What Would Dagara Teachings Prompt Us to Do?

Reflecting on this question got us talking about how, within our institu-
tions, we seem to be moving toward the GURs in order to avoid having to
deal with something else. Drawing on decolonial critiques of modernity, the
teachings of the Dagara made us pause and pay attention to what we could
be overlooking in our critique of the GURs. Like other global metric coun-
terparts used in international education (Rizvi and Lingard 2010), we then
looked at the GURs themselves as an obsessive distraction: an academic
Olympics that draws attention away from a deep existential crisis at the core

SHAHJAHAN ET AL.
of modern institutions and structures of being in current times. Perhaps we

are realizing that the promises of security, futurity, seamless progress, indi-
vidual affluence, and happiness through modern frames of thinking, being,
and organizing are at best unrealistic and at worst violent and harmful to
our social relations and to the planet itself. For modern subjects, the mo-
ment we know intuitively that these promises are false and already broken
is also a moment of fear and denial when this gut insight is repressed, and
when we try to hold on for dear life to the structures that have sustained us so
far. In this context, we intensify our (futile and distractive) attempts to fix
what is beyond repair in order to secure our futurity. In this sense, as some
critical of GURs noted in “whom does it serve?” the GURs could be inter-
preted as an attempt to redefine the purpose of universities around capital
and affluence for a global middle class who still can afford higher education
as a temporary shelter from unemployment. In a context in which universities
can no longer claim to have a monopoly on knowledge production and in
which the social benefits and costs of higher education are being challenged,
GURs provide the necessary economy (of prestige) that serves as a lifeline for
a number of institutions.
The second moment of realization of false and broken promises of mo-
dernity is also the moment of desire for already articulated alternatives, which
is another form of distraction. Once our ontological securities are troubled, it
is logical to seek a replacement of these securities with alternative promises
that are perceived as viable but that reenact the same metaphysics, some-
times while affirming the opposite. In this sense, we again become restless in
the pursuit of radical solutions and often turn to worldviews that have been
marginalized by the dominance of modernity’s universality, including reli-
gious, traditional, ethnic, indigenous, critical, cultural, and ancestral per-
spectives. This interested engagement, driven by a desire for new securities,
tends to instrumentalize, essentialize, and romanticize these alternatives as
the mythical opposite of whatever is perceived to have caused the interrup-
tion of previous ontological securities. This movement toward a “possible
way forward” in terms of the adoption of different epistemologies tends to
remain within the same ontological parameters that we are trying to tran-
scend because it relies on the same investment needs, reproducing again the
circular dance of distraction: we try to change knowing without changing our
own ways of being. For example, we could look to the Dagara for solutions for
the problems of the GURs, we could propose an alternative GUR that takes
account of subaltern knowledges, or we could leave the university altogether
in search of a space devoid of its frustrations and contradictions.
Perhaps there is a third moment of facing false and broken promises
when we realize the problem of circularity and become disillusioned with it,
we start framing the frames of our own responses, and we reorient our desire
S000 May 2017

toward something outside our realm of intelligibility and, hence, deemed

“impossible” (when we interrupt our satisfaction with securities). This is the
moment when we start not only to disidentify but to disinvest in the struc-
tures of being (not just of “knowing”) that are sustained by the economies
that depend on and reproduce the (false/broken) promises themselves. This
disinvestment comes with the acknowledgment that these structures and
economies are dying and need to be “hospiced” (Andreotti et al. 2015), with
attention and wisdom, if something radically new and more prudent is to
emerge. In this sense, what Dagara teachings have to offer is not the articu-
lated solution for the crises we face, but the insight that for us to exist oth-
erwise, we have to pay attention to the lessons being taught by the limits,
failures, and eventual collapse of modernity itself, and this we can do only
through facing its death both internal and external to ourselves. In order to
do that, we do not need to shift contents of modern frames, but to change our
relationship with the contents and frames themselves, in ways that these
contents and frames no longer define our existence or allocate our desires
and investments.
Moving beyond GURs is not easy work as it requires an interruption of
the satisfactions we have with the ontological securities, status, and prestige
that the system affords us, demanding a form of disinvestment that com-
mands that “we work ourselves out of our jobs” (Kapoor 2004, 644). The Da-
gara teach us that it is our responsibility (not theirs) to sort out the mess we
have created, where our comfort is subsidized by violence somewhere else.
This responsibility entails “re-membering.” We use the word “re-membering”
both in the sense of challenging the dismembering separability and hierar-
chies imposed by modernity and in the sense of awakening the senses
numbed by modern forms of individual rational existence so that something
new can be imagined through us, beyond the existing referents and frames
we have inherited that define what seems “possible.”
In inviting us to the “impossible,” Dagara’s teachings take us beyond ideas
of back and forward in linear time, to a space of different possibilities for
teaching, learning, service, and inquiry beyond the academy. These possi-
bilities cannot be grafted, recoded, or institutionalized, but they are “alive”;
and if mobilized in ways that safeguard their autonomy and integrity, they
can teach us to work through existing academic structures to rearrange de-
sires and help hospice a system in crisis in order to clear the way for some-
thing new and yet undefined (Andreotti et al. 2015). Ultimately, Dagara’s
teachings remind us that, as Burman (2012) states, “there is no way we are
going to intellectually reason our way out of coloniality, in any conventional
academic sense. There is no way we are going to publish our way out of mo-
dernity. There is no way we are going to read our way out of epistemological
hegemony” (117).

SHAHJAHAN ET AL.
Conclusion
Our analysis shows that the nature of GURs is not simply tied to market-
based economic or political rationalities. Similar to other global spaces of
equivalence in education, GURs also operate under onto-epistemological
and metaphysical dimensions interlinked with historically conditioned un-
even and competitive economies of prestige and historical processes affect-
ing international relations. We have pointed to the racialized/racializing and
colonial politics of GURs where these violences are typically silenced even
in “critical” literature. We also highlighted the epistemic silencing that is ac-
complished through ranking practices (including journal scholarly prac-
tices) that are perceived to matter only for university “reputation.” Decolo-
nial perspectives can help us better understand these severe limitations and
implications of the GURs (and other global spaces of equivalence) and invite
us to imagine beyond them.
Reminiscent of the comparative and international education field (Ta-
kayama 2011; Takayama et al. 2015), the GURs debate continues to privilege
and valorize knowledge systems that derive from historically epistemically
privileged positions (i.e., Global North). As such, decolonial perspectives
raise questions about ontological and epistemological assumptions under-
pinning GURs and the historical foundations of higher education. These
questions include: What kind of academic subjectivities are imagined through
GURs? What forms and political economies of knowledge production are
enabled or disabled through the GURs? What kinds of “ethics” are made
possible through GURs? Exploring the limits of these questions can open up
possibilities for new questions for higher education, such as: How can higher
education resist the overwhelming imperatives of global capitalism when it
is funded by a state that is dependent on it? How can we move beyond con-
ceptual entrapments grounded on nation-states and methodological nation-
alism to defend higher education (Shahjahan and Kezar 2013)? How can we
imagine education and research in international education beyond the con-
fines of modernity and its violences?
Like others (e.g., Amsler 2014), we propose that an important purpose of
HEIs is to serve as a critic and conscience of society and that the legitimacy
of this purpose is being lost in the GURs debate. GURs mobilize higher ed-
ucation to advance a single story of progress, development, and human evo-
lution based on situated and limited—but allegedly universal—epistemolog-
ical and ontological referents. In the current context of global crises and
social-economic and ecological unsustainability, higher education should be
about “pluraliz[ing] the future by pluralizing knowledge in the present [in
order to produce] a better, more honest and wider range of options—mate-
rial, ideational and normative—for human beings and societies to choose
S000 May 2017

from” (Nandy 2000, 122). In order to resist current tendencies and plural-
ize our possibilities, higher education should secure spaces for critically in-
formed, socially accountable, and multivoiced conversations about global jus-
tice and alternative futures.
Finally, how does our “reimagination” of GURs serve as a “model” for
challenging other norms/metrics/tools for comparison/commensurability
that are used in the field of comparative and international education? First,
our intellectual journey with GURs suggests that we cannot purport to pro-
vide “model” exemplars of decolonial interventions in the commensurability
debate in comparative education, as it would reinscribe modernity’s grammar.
Instead, we need to be wary and careful of decolonial intellectual endeavors
as they are fraught with tensions and contradictions within academia, as we
need to be self-reflexive of universalizing “alternatives” and reproducing the
violences of grafting, recoding, appropriation, and commodification of in-
digenous knowledge systems (Ahenakew 2016). Second, our analysis suggests
that existential questions regarding global spaces of equivalence and their
outcomes are rendered invisible because of the narrow parameters of intel-
ligibility of enduring modern/colonial global imaginaries and can be fore-
grounded only if we take ourselves to the limits of these imaginaries, inter-
rupting the securities and satisfactions these imaginaries afford us. Third, the
comparative and educational field needs to challenge and complicate its own
complicity in the onto-epistemic grammar of modernity, by not only unpack-
ing the geopolitics/body politics of its own canonical thought but also when
speaking of and using alternative and “Southern” perspectives.
This amplification of possibilities requires, as Sousa Santos (2007) states,
an alternative way to think about alternatives, in the field of comparative
and international education, that welcome us first to the edge and then invite
us beyond the abyss. In the last section of the paper, we explored the intel-
lectual accountabilities involved in such an endeavor through our reflections
on teachings offered by the Dagara people. We proposed that, rather than
representing their worldview as a Southern alternative to dominant forms of
knowledge production, the Dagara can teach us something much deeper
about the need for different forms of existence animated by an ecology of
(limited and situated) interknowledges that can take us beyond the mono-
culture of the mind that grounds the ontological securities of the GURs and
of modern institutions and subjectivities in general. In short, our normative
stance is that, in the debates about the GURS and other global spaces of
equivalences, further work is needed in terms of enabling more uncomfort-
able analyses and the formulation of deeper existential questions, so that we
can change the modes of engagement, the questions perceived worth asking,
and the terms of the conversation in relation to the implications of global
metrics and the purposes and roles of education.

SHAHJAHAN ET AL.
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Attempting to imagine the unimaginable: a decolonial reading of global

Article in Comparative Education Review · May 2017

Riyad A. Shahjahan Vanessa De Oliveira Andreotti

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Attempting to Imagine the Unimaginable: A Decolonial

Since the emergence of the Academic Ranking of World Universities

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Many of the studies exploring rankings are aimed at improvement, and

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Seeking to respond to the ﬁrst question, we present a brief summary of

As we read the existing literature on rankings, we found a growing body

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Are GURs’ Methods Valid or Reliable?

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Whom Do GURs Serve?

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Why Do We Participate in GURs?

What Do Rankings Do to Scholars?

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advance their reputation and, consequently, their position in rankings tend

How Have GURs Been Contested/Resisted?

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Despite being contextually useful, these critiques fall short of problem-

The Complexities of Decolonial Interventions in Academia

Our multilayered positionality as visible minorities, having ties to coun-

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As noted earlier, decoloniality asserts that the structures of being that

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In this exercise we were taught that the importance of this decolonial

Being Taught by the Dagara

Our desire to approach Dagara teachings to illuminate the limits of our

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imperatives of” (297) modern higher-education imaginaries. We next elab-

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that university administrators deploy in order to advance their universities’

So What? Now What? What Would Dagara Teachings Prompt Us to Do?

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of modern institutions and structures of being in current times. Perhaps we

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toward something outside our realm of intelligibility and, hence, deemed