Visual studies of Indian universities: A summary of the project processes

This poster was prepared by Johny Marjit, as lead field researcher for the visual studies workstream, and the two primary investigators, Prof Belluigi (UK) and Dr Dhawan (India), of the project 'Counter-Narratives of Authority in Transition: Marginality in the Indian university'. It was presented by Johny Marjit at an event organised by the Indian funders, to "showcase the transformative impact of the SPARC programme of India's research ecosystem". The poster summarised the project motivation and objectives, the methodology, key findings and discussion conclusions, and ongoing works or future vision.

Motivation:
How might quotidian spatial and temporal conditions be studied?

Visual University Studies – a term coined by Prof Belluigi (2025) is “enquiry about the university on, through, and by the visual”. The visual is central to the focus/ process/ product of research on the university and its citizens “raising questions about what is in/visibilised and envisioned within material and virtual representations, including image-manufacture.” [3]

Methodology:
- 10 Indian States selected to capture visual data
- 13 spaces per institutional site identified in protocol
- Image content and file meta-data cleaned, to ensure ethical compliance, using open source software

Findings and outputs:
The visual methodology enabled Postcritical Discourse Analysis of the plural conditions for everyday institutional and agential representation, communication and commemoration. Patterns of in/ hyper/ visibility emerge, such as through the selective presence, absence and framing of individual/ collective, public/ private expressions.

Over 5000 still images were captured with a low resource device (mobile phone) across 17 institutional sites over a period of six months. A composite dataset of 1013 images was published open access. [1]

Bottlenecks:
- Securitised campus cultures and reputational risk-management, despite permissions to access sites and ethical clearance

Dissemination:
- Displayed at engagement exhibitions, workshops and conferences in Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Burdwan, Belfast, Nottingham [2]
- Incorporated within short story anthology [4]

Under Development:
- Co-authored journal paper ‘Visual study of Indian Universities’

Long term Vision:
- Travelling exhibition to universities internationally

Key references:

1. Belluigi, D. Z., Marjit, J., Sakar, A., Meistre, B. A. and Dhawan, N. B. (2025) Visual studies of Indian universities – A dataset. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15647338

2. Belluigi, D., Dhawan, N. B, Achuthan, A., & Vieten, U. M. (2025). Counter-Narratives of Authority in Transition: Marginality in the Indian Academy. Touring exhibition. Materials at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14593329

3. Belluigi, D. Z. 2025. Visual University Studies since the Cold War: Mapping journal articles published in Englishes from 1992-2023, Higher Education Research and Development https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2025.2472854

4. Dhawan, N. B., & Belluigi, D. Z. [Eds]."Then we have this Other Story…": Intergenerational Interpretative Stories of Socially Marginalised Critical Scholars of Indian Universities (1963-2024). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17181463