Amy Tucker, DSocSci (Candidate)
Royal Roads University
ORCID: 0009-0006-9872-2248
I am a doctoral candidate in the Doctor of Social Sciences programme at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. My dissertation, Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Belonging, Precarity, and Possibility with International Students in Higher Education, examines how international students experience the gap between what universities promise about belonging and what they actually deliver.
Research
My research is grounded in a methodology I developed called blended witnessing, which integrates Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997), Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith et al., 2009) within a critical-transformative paradigm (Mertens, 2009). This methodology braids participant visual testimony with researcher reflexivity to generate what I call depth perception: an understanding of lived experience and the structural systems that produce it, held together rather than separated.
My dissertation advances four original scholarly contributions to the social sciences: the time tax, malperformative aesthetics, blended witnessing and ghost data, and the mindset of enough. A full glossary of these terms is available under Section Two: The Research.
My research interests include international student belonging and precarity in Canadian higher education; participatory visual methodologies; Scholarly Personal Narrative as qualitative methodology; critical university studies and academic capitalism; care ethics, epistemic justice, and trauma-informed pedagogy; and contract faculty labour in the gig academy.
Teaching and Professional Background
I spent twenty-five years at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, located on the unceded Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc territory within Secwépemcúl’ecw. Nineteen of those years, I taught organizational behaviour, business ethics, leadership, and diversity, primarily to international student populations, on semester-by-semester contracts. That structural position shaped who I am as a researcher in ways I carry with care and transparency throughout this work.
In May 2025, after a quarter-century of service, I was laid off. In that same month, I received the Faculty Council Teaching Award. I became, in the most literal sense, the phenomenon I had been studying. That experience deepened my commitment to this research and clarified what is at stake.
I serve as Chair of the Non-Regular Faculty Committee for the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of British Columbia (FPSE), advocating for contract faculty across the province.
Teaching Recognition
- TRU Student Empowerment Award (2021)
- TRU Interculturalization Award (2023)
- Faculty Council Service Award (2024)
- Faculty Council Teaching Award (2025)
Education
- Doctor of Social Sciences Candidate, Royal Roads University (2017 to present)
- Master’s Candidate, Human Rights and Social Justice, Thompson Rivers University (2022 to 2025)
- Master of Arts, Leadership and Training, Royal Roads University
- Provincial Instructor Diploma, British Columbia Institute of Technology
Supervisory Committee
Supervisor: Dr. Brian White
Committee: Dr. Eugene Thomlinson, Dr. Kyla McLeod
Mentor: Dr. Mary Bernard
Research Assistant: Jesal Thakkar
Ethics Approvals
This research received dual ethics approval from Thompson Rivers University (File H25-04204, Board of Primary Record) and Royal Roads University (File H25-00572).
Connect
ORCID: 0009-0006-9872-2248
For the full positionality statement, including my heritage, class background, and relationship to this research, see Section One: The Researcher.
References
Mertens, D. M. (2009). Transformative research and evaluation. Guilford Press.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method and research. SAGE.
Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education and Behavior, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309