Metaphors figuratively pair ordinarily separate concepts in a way that is intended to be illustrative (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Their use in relation to universities is not new – such as in case of the ivory tower (see Shapin 2012) – but it seems that while the juxtaposition can help us to think about phenomena in different ways, there is also a danger of them blurring our understanding (Lumby and Foskett 2011). As Tight (2013) mentions, sometimes the metaphor simply doesn’t fit because it obfuscates core characteristics, such as in framing students as consumers, apprentices, or something other than students. Metaphors have, though, been applied fruitfully, such as to consider tensions between different purposes for higher education such as knowledge republic or free market actor (Olsen 2007), and they are a common feature of debate and ‘battle’ over The University’s ‘soul’ (Deering and Sá 2018).

One common metaphor around universities is that of the landscape, and its prevalence across educational scholarship more broadly has led to it being identified as something of a buzzword (Terepyshchyi 2017). Its use in higher education in particular has been associated with a somewhat geographical turn in our language, such as shifting tectonic plates around universities (Caruana 2016), the climates of campus cultures (Sundaram and Jackson 2018), or disciplinary spaces, terrains, domains, or kingdoms (Chen and Hu 2012). Landscapes appear to be somewhat ubiquitous in higher education scholarship and wider writing, appearing in outlets  ranging between official USAID reports (Lebrón et al. 2018) to mainstream media such as The Atlantic (Fallows and Ganeshanthan 2004). Google Scholar searches return 37,000 results on the term “research landscape”, and 13,000 on “academic landscape”, and there are other formulations. While it is important to draw a distinction between literal and theoretical uses of the term such as landscape planning or landscapes of practice, landscapes are clearly doing a lot of ‘work’ in and around higher education. What work that is, though, remains to be seen.

The focus of this paper is therefore on the use of the term landscape in higher education research and within that, “higher education landscape”, which returns over 30,000 results on Google Scholar. If, as the literature suggests, metaphors serve a function, what function – or functions – does this one serve for higher education? To be clear, the research question here is ‘how are landscapes as metaphors, and within that, higher education landscapes, used in higher education scholarship?’ Through a systematic review of the literature, this paper ‘maps’ the higher education landscape of higher education landscapes. It is hoped that exploring the application of this metaphor – and whether the juxtaposition illustrates or obfuscates – can provide useful insights into how higher education is conceptualised.

The application of systematic reviews in educational research has been debated for some time, particularly around their in-/appropriateness to a ‘what works’ agenda (Evans and Benefield 2001). Alongside other review types studies, though, their use in higher education research has grown, which Tight (2019) associates with a maturation of the field (in itself a metaphor). They are often used to understand variations and potential gaps in how particular themes are addressed (e.g. Shahjahan et al. 2021), and it is with this intention that the current study was undertaken. Given the volume of literature using the term landscape noted earlier, and also the difficulties of identifying key words associated with higher education rather than education (see Kuzhabekova et al. 2015), the search was narrowed to those which employed landscape in the title and were indexed as relating to higher education. The Web of Science (WoS) was used as the primary source; while not exhaustive and being biased towards English, it is the largest database. This returned 380 results, and supplementary searches through other sources returned an additional 400. A filtering process was then undertaken to include only original, peer-reviewed scholarly contributions, focusing on higher education, that used landscape as a metaphor rather than in a literal or theoretical sense. Bibliographic studies were omitted unless they were about higher education rather than reviewing topics/literature within other academic fields. The resulting overall sample consisted of 287 digitally accessible items (240 articles, 40 chapters, 7 books), comprising of work by 631 different authors in 223 separate journals. The majority were in education or higher education (including general or disciplinary teaching) outlets, but 21 other disciplinary/field areas also featured, with Economics, Geography, Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Library Studies, and Language/Linguistics presenting multiple items. The analysis proceeded in two stages. The first consisted of a surface, corpus analysis of the whole sample, considering elements such as the uses of landscape as well as the geographical locations of first authors. The second involved a closer reading and reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2019) of a sub-sample of 55 items which employed higher education landscape/s or landscape/s of higher education in the title. Thematic analysis is suitable for this kind of study as the sample is large enough (over 10) and seeks to identify themes across a dataset rather than generate theory or understand personal meaning-making (Ibid).

Overall, the sample included 1321 in-text mentions of landscapes but some omitted it altogether, implying or neglecting to state what the landscape was. Approximately half referred to one kind of landscape while 33 referred to three or more. 40 discussed considered metaphors in relation to a diversity of topics but few acknowledged landscapes as one. Almost half projected dynamism, reporting on landscapes which were changing, evolving, shifting, emerging, new, or transforming/-ed. In scalar terms, the national level comprising just over half, followed by global, regional, local, and literary. Striking was the diversity, with 202 kinds of landscape were portrayed. These could be grouped into nine thematic areas: • Broad educational – e.g. higher, tertiary • Narrow educational – for profit, graduate • Policy/Practice – admissions, governance • Sociopolitical – linguistic, gendered • Teaching – assessment, curricular • Bodies of Knowledge – literature, theoretical • Disciplines/Professions – STEM, legal • Personal – Cognitive, imaginative • Material/Scalar – architectural, international In terms of the closer analysis of sub-sample, core themes were discerned by progressing through the stages of Thematic Analysis from familiarisation to coding, then to theme generation and consolidation and review. These included, at the broadest level, the actors, context, scale, and how – or if – landscapes were im- or explicitly described or defined. By considering the patterns and differences within these themes, we can see somewhat shared but also uneven descriptions of higher education, characterised by of a complex interplay of topical issues and power relations, often (but not always) acknowledged as located within a wider socio-political context. In other words, these authors are – largely unwittingly or implicitly – collectively describing contrasting political economies of higher education. What this means is that even though ‘we’ are all talking about higher education landscapes, we often mean quite different things.

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