What Four Students and One Researcher Found When They Looked Closely
The findings of this dissertation will be shared in full following the doctoral defence. This page describes the structural argument those findings support, the original concepts the research generated, and the researcher’s own story as it unfolded alongside participants’ testimony. Participant-generated evidence, including photographs, quotations, and the four concepts participants developed through the SHOWeD analysis process, will be published here after the committee has received them first.
What the Study Was Designed to Find
I designed this study around a question with a shape I could only partially see the answer to. The question went beyond simply “Do international students experience exclusion?” Anyone paying attention knows the answer to that. The question was structural: how does exclusion operate as a system rather than as a collection of unfortunate individual incidents, and what do the people living inside that system see when they are given cameras and asked to document it?
The answer this study produced is the architecture of exclusion: an integrated system of economic extraction, spatial segregation, and epistemic dismissal that operates simultaneously and reinforces itself across each dimension. These three mechanisms reinforce each other rather than operating independently. Economic precarity, the financial conditions that require students to work overnight shifts while paying four times the domestic tuition rate, limits the time available for campus engagement. Spatial segregation, the pattern of spaces that perform welcome while withholding access, reduces the opportunities for the epistemic recognition that genuine belonging requires. And epistemic dismissal, the systematic rendering of non-Western knowledge as inadmissible or decorative, ensures that even the students who find time and space inside the institution remain structurally positioned at its margins.
I use the word architecture deliberately throughout this dissertation. A building’s architecture is load-bearing. Remove a wall and something above it shifts or falls. The exclusion this study documents works the same way: it is structural, it is reinforced across multiple systems at once, and it requires redesign rather than cosmetic intervention. Hanging a welcome banner leaves a load-bearing wall intact. Scheduling a diversity workshop leaves a budget model unchanged. The architecture has to be redesigned from the inside, and redesign requires first understanding what is actually holding what up.
The Original Concepts This Research Generated
Research in the critical-transformative tradition is designed to produce more than findings. It is designed to produce tools: concepts that can travel beyond the original study and be applied in other institutional contexts. This dissertation contributes nine original concepts to the scholarly conversation, five developed through the researcher’s analytical process and four generated by participants through the SHOWeD protocol. The four participant-generated concepts will be named and developed in full following the doctoral defence. The five researcher-developed concepts are described below.
Asymmetrical precarity names the structural condition shared by contract faculty and international students at TRU: conditional belonging, expendability when economically inconvenient, and exclusion from the institutional decisions that shape their lives. The conditions rhyme. The stakes are radically different. A contract faculty member loses a job. An international student loses the legal right to remain in the country. Asymmetrical precarity holds both the structural connection and the asymmetry simultaneously. It insists on solidarity without collapsing the difference. This concept emerged from the recognition that I was studying a system that had already made me one of its subjects, and that my experience and my participants’ experience illuminated each other without being equivalent.
Malperformative inclusion extends Sara Ahmed’s (2012) concept of non-performativity into a sharper analytical register. Ahmed demonstrates that institutional diversity statements often fail to produce what they name. Malperformative inclusion names something more active than failure: institutional actions that succeed in absorbing critique, demonstrating awareness of equity problems, and thereby stabilizing the very extractive systems they claim to address. The prefix mal- is load-bearing. The institution is doing something. What it is doing causes harm. A university that builds an international student lounge, locks it during evening hours when international students are available to use it, and then photographs it for the recruitment brochure has produced malperformative inclusion. The space performs belonging for an audience that will never occupy it.
Malperformative aesthetics extends the concept into the spatial and visual register. It names the use of architecture, signage, murals, banners, and designed spaces to perform inclusion symbolically while withholding the material conditions that would make those spaces genuinely inhabitable. A diversity mural in a corridor that international students pass through on the way to the ATM where they access overnight shift wages is a malperformative aesthetic. The image performs welcome. The corridor delivers extraction.
The time tax names the compounded temporal extraction that international students experience through four simultaneous forms of labour: immigration labour (managing visa conditions, permit renewals, and status anxiety), economic labour (working overnight shifts to fund tuition the institution sets at four times the domestic rate), linguistic labour (translating their identities, their knowledge, and their presence for institutional legibility), and affective labour (managing the emotional weight of conditional belonging while performing gratitude for the opportunity). Each form of extraction is individually significant. Together they constitute a tax levied on time itself: the resource that academic success requires and that the institution systematically depletes while claiming to support it.
Ghost data names the analytical significance of participant withdrawal under conditions of precarity. When the most precarious participant in a study of precarity is consumed by the conditions being studied before she can participate in research about them, her absence is structural evidence. Ghost data asks what the system takes before testimony can occur. It maps the outer limits of what participation under extraction can produce. The fifth participant’s empty folder is ghost data. It is the most eloquent testimony in the study because it demonstrates, without a single image or word, exactly what the architecture of exclusion does to the people it most affects.
The Policy Frame: What Was Happening When Students Were Photographing
The data collection for this study took place during a specific and acute policy moment. In January 2024, the Canadian federal government announced a 35% reduction in study permit approvals, framing this cap as a response to housing pressures and programme integrity concerns (Government of Canada, 2024). International students who had arrived at Canadian universities under one set of institutional promises and political conditions became the subjects of a different political calculus without their circumstances changing. They had done everything right. The country’s relationship to them had shifted.
The policy reversal produced two simultaneous effects. At the institutional level, it created immediate anxiety around enrolment projections and revenue models. TRU, like most comprehensive teaching universities with substantial international student populations, built its operating budget around international tuition revenue. A 35% reduction in study permit approvals was a direct threat to the financial model the institution had spent two decades constructing. At the student level, it produced a pervasive sense of conditional belonging made newly visible: the right to remain in Canada was suddenly debatable in ways that had previously been managed at the level of individual visa renewal rather than national political debate.
The photographs this study generated were taken in this context. They carry the specific texture of that historical moment. The anxiety visible in the images, the documentation of locked spaces and empty tables and graveyard shift earnings, is shaped by the acute policy crisis as well as by the chronic structural conditions that preceded it. Throughout this dissertation I maintain the distinction between what is chronic and what is acute: naming both the durable architecture of exclusion that was in place before the study permit cap and the specific historical intensification that the policy shift produced.
What Comes Next
Following the doctoral defence, this page will be expanded to include the participant-generated findings in full, the visual evidence that grounds each concept in specific, documented experience, and the four concepts that participants themselves developed through the SHOWeD analysis process. Those concepts, generated by four international business students who decided that the existing scholarly literature lacked adequate vocabulary for what they were living, are the most original contribution this dissertation makes. They belong to participants first. They will be shared here after the committee has received them.
The witness continues.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
Government of Canada. (2024). Canada to stabilize growth and decrease study permit intake by 35%. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2024/01/canada-to-stabilize-growth-and-decrease-study-permit-intake-by-35.html