Date/Time
Date(s) - 18/06/2026 - 19/06/2026
9:00 am - 6:00 pm
Categories
International Conference
June 18–19, 2026
15 Tsar Osvoboditel Blvd, Sofia, Bulgaria
Sofia University “St Kliment Ohridski”
Universities face a persistent paradox: the growing demand for visibility through rankings, performance indicators, and global competition contrasts with their core missions of teaching, research, social inclusion, and regional development. While institutions strive to enhance their public profile, many strategic decisions and internal processes remain opaque, creating tensions between visibility and institutional balance.
Institutional Visibility and Rankings
University visibility is largely shaped by standardized indicators used in global rankings, emphasizing performance, competitiveness, and employability. Although some institutions adapt successfully to these frameworks, ranking-driven visibility often marginalizes social, cultural, and civic missions that are difficult to measure and remain largely invisible.
Transparency, Digitalization, and New Invisibility
Digitalization, data-driven management, and algorithmic governance introduce new forms of opacity alongside efforts to improve transparency. The key challenge for universities is to reconcile global competitiveness with their public responsibility and to make their invisible social and cultural contributions more visible beyond ranking-based metrics.
Call for Contributions
This conference invites interdisciplinary contributions (sociology, political science, management, economics, communication studies, geography, education studies, law) that critically examine how visibility and invisibility are produced, negotiated, and contested within contemporary universities.
Topics include (non-exhaustive):
-
-
Construction of visibility/invisibility through indicators, narratives, and governance
-
Invisible missions, actors, and practices in evaluation systems
-
Tensions between global visibility and local missions
-
Governance choices and resource allocation
-
Communication strategies and symbolic hierarchies
-
Digitization, algorithms, and AI in higher education
-
Comparative and historical perspectives
-
Alternative frameworks for assessing public value
-
Conference language: English
Submission deadline: April 25, 2026
Submissions to:
stojchevap@phls.uni-sofia.bg
gilles.rouet@uvsq.fr
Scientific Committee
Carmen Alba (Complutense University, Spain)
Dimitar Angelov (Harvard University, USA)
Mourad Attarça (UVSQ, France)
Michael Byram (Durham University, UK)
Hervé Chomienne (UVSQ, France)
Thierry Côme (UVSQ, France)
Sonia Mileva (Sofia University, Bulgaria)
Stela Raytcheva (UVSQ, France)
Maria Rostekova (University of Banska Bystrica, Slovakia)
Gilles Rouet (UVSQ, France)
Maria Stoicheva (Sofia University, Bulgaria)
Ivo Valev (National University of Singapore)
Download Call for Papers
