Favoring individual entrepreneurial freedom and free-market competition, neoliberalism has reshaped the social and discursive practices of higher education institutions (HEIs) around the world. In this paper, I draw on methods from critical multimodal discourse studies and an analytic concept from linguistic anthropology to examine several sets of student service materials circulating on the campus of a Hong Kong university between 2016 and 2017. While these materials are purportedly designed with student welfare in mind, I demonstrate how they effectively position students as (1) consumers of tailored services or experiences provided by the university; and (2) entrepreneurial selves, that is, socio-economically competitive and self-managed young individuals. I conclude by arguing that these service materials are shaped by and espouse a neoliberal governmentality that (re)orients HEIs and their students towards an all-pervasive marketization, competitiveness, and assertion of class privilege in a globalizing, particularly Westernized late capitalist society in Asia. Copyright © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Critical (multimodal) discourse studies of marketing or corporate documents of universities have shown the rapid neoliberalization of higher education and academia around the world. However, little attention has been paid to promotional materials for academic events. This chapter examines posters advertising invited lectures, colloquiums and conferences displayed on the campus of a “top” university in Hong Kong, the University of Hong Kong (HKU). The study draws on multimodal discourse studies and social theories of branding to analyze how different discursive components and semiotic placements of the posters create particular social meanings and values for the academic events and/or institutions. It identifies several dominant “tropes of branding” emerging from the displayed posters such as global connection and leadership, hierarchical internationalization with local advantage and interdisciplinarity. It shows how these tropes manifest or resonate with HKU’s more general self-branding enterprise of building itself into “Asia’s Global University”. The chapter concludes by discussing how its findings can deepen our understanding of institutionality in the areas of higher education and academia under the conditions of neoliberalism and globalization. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Operating as a hegemonic, market-driven governmentality, neoliberalism has been colonizing academic institutions and academic professionals’ everyday lives globally. This article demonstrates how several sets of academic event posters displayed at a public Hong Kong university work as spatialized multimodal branding devices that discursively entangle certain types of individuals, activities, institutions, and political economy under a specific mode of neoliberal governmentality. It shows that the posters position the university and its academic units as internationally competitive, Global-North-oriented knowledge enterprises in a mutually shaping relationship with a globalized neoliberal political economy par excellence in Asia. The study signals the need for research on neoliberal academic discourses to pay closer attention to the spatialized, multi-semiotic nature of discursive practices and the multi-layered institutional, politico-economic and cultural contexts in which the neoliberal discourses are situated. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).