⚠️ Research in Progress — Doctoral Defence Forthcoming
This site is a living academic document. Content is being updated as the dissertation moves toward its final defence. Some sections remain in draft form.
This blog is the public home of Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Belonging, Precarity, and Possibility with International Students in Higher Education, a doctoral dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Social Sciences programme at Royal Roads University.
The research began with a question I had no ready answer for.
In September 2022, a student in my Business Ethics class at Thompson Rivers University raised her hand to ask where her grandmother’s business wisdom fit into the case study analysis we were conducting. Her grandmother had run a successful textile operation in their home village in India for decades, employing women from the community and sustaining a business through political upheavals that Western case studies never imagined. The frameworks I was teaching had no room for her grandmother. The matrices and models assumed a particular kind of knowledge, a particular kind of knower, and a particular relationship between learning and power that rendered the very expertise this student embodied invisible.
“Where do I put grandmother’s wisdom?”
I had no good answer. That question became this dissertation.
Over the following three years, I developed a methodology called blended witnessing that braids two ways of seeing. I handed cameras to four international business students at Thompson Rivers University and asked them to photograph their daily lives on campus. Their images revealed what I call the architecture of exclusion: the integrated system of economic extraction, spatial segregation, and epistemic dismissal that operates within the university, where international students are simultaneously recruited as essential revenue sources and structurally positioned at the margins of belonging.
A fifth student signed up to participate but withdrew before taking a single photograph. Her work commitments, the very precarity the study sought to document, consumed her capacity to participate in research about precarity. I came to understand her absence as ghost data: structural evidence of how the system silences participation before it can occur. Her empty folder became the most eloquent testimony in the study.
The four students who completed the research produced twenty-nine photographs that mapped a campus divided between two realities. One reality is the institutional brochure: gleaming lounges, diversity banners, welcoming signage in multiple languages. The other reality is the locked door at 5:00 PM, the empty fridge, the graveyard shift that pays the tuition, and the quiet corners where students hide from the loudness of institutional expectations. The students went further than documenting these conditions. They theorized them, generating concepts that exceed the frameworks available in the existing scholarly literature: checkbox inclusion, the loneliness of diversity, fluent in appearances, and the mindset of enough.
I brought my own experience to this research. I taught at Thompson Rivers University for twenty-five years, nineteen of them as a contract faculty member whose position was renewed semester by semester at the institution’s discretion. In May 2025, I was laid off. In the same month, I received the Faculty Council Teaching Award. The institution that deemed me expendable simultaneously declared me exemplary. I became the ghost data I had theorized, disappeared from the institutional record, while the work I produced continued to circulate. This experience makes my precarity something other than equivalent to my students’ precarity. I hold citizenship they navigate visa conditions to maintain. I hold epistemic authority that they must earn through translation. I can organise through my union; their capacity for collective action is constrained by immigration status. I call this relationship asymmetrical precarity: patterns of institutional treatment that rhyme without being identical.
This blog translates the dissertation’s findings into accessible language for multiple audiences. If you are an international student, you may find words here for experiences you have felt but lacked words to name. If you are a faculty member, you may find practical tools for your classroom. If you are an administrator, you may find evidence-based recommendations that require a key rather than new construction. If you are a researcher, you may find methodological innovations you can adapt for your own work. If you are a policymaker, you may find structural analysis that reframes how you understand the international education system you govern.
The dissertation argues that witnessing creates obligation. This blog extends that argument beyond the academy. Having seen what these students showed me, I carry a responsibility to ensure their testimony reaches the audiences who hold the power to act on it.
The architecture of exclusion remains standing. The stone behind the vending machine remains. The witness continues.
Amy Tucker
Doctor of Social Sciences Candidate, Royal Roads University
ORCID: 0009-0006-9872-2248
This research was conducted on the unceded territory of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwépemcúl’ecw. I live and work on Syilx (Okanagan) territory. I hold these acknowledgements as ongoing questions rather than settled statements, informed by a dissertation that critiques the very performativity of institutional land acknowledgements while insisting that the obligations they name are real.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.