Higher education discourses: A contrastive keyword analysis of the US and Japan

In this investigation we use keyword analysis to critically analyze higher education discourse, specifically job advertisements. Using two sets of advertisements, one from Japan-based and another from US-based institutions, we examine what is indexed (Blommaert, et al., 2015) in the advertisements, considering how those indexes are differentially scaled by each. We discuss these scales (Blommaert, et al., 2015) from the viewpoint of the process of the advertisements’ creation as encompassing multiple stakeholders and discourses that intersect with different degrees of tension and agreement. These tensions manifest in the advertisements through how they differentially scale the concepts they index. Finally, we consider the implications of our analysis for understanding higher education discourse. Specifically, this analysis helps reveal how antiracist, or “woke,” inclusionary ideologies expressed in the advertisements tend to use formulaic language that signals their relatively low priority scaling relative to the other features (Khaitova & Muller, 2022) that they index.