Abstract:
Discourses on quality are central to how the corporatization of the State
university system has occurred in Sri Lanka. Neoliberal universities maintain an
extensive governance system that implements quality through a disciplinary
system that aims to produce quality within the university. In this paper, I examine
how such disciplinary measures are also productive. They produce discourses on
quality that are then performatively enabled by the university community. I
particularly focus on how Arts faculties navigate such discourses on quality by
examining how policy documents, guidelines, self-evaluation reports, annual
reports, and even promotion circulars perform a productive role, leading the
university community to produce the practices that are demanded of them. I will
specifically focus on IR guidelines, SLQF, annual reports and SERs produced by
the UGC and the University of Kelaniya as well as publicly available data on
academics from the two Arts Faculties at the University of Kelaniya. In this paper,
I focus on the Manual for Institutional Review in my analysis.
