The structural and historical forces that explain what Canadian universities are, who they serve, and what it would actually take to change them.
I spent twenty-five years inside a Canadian university. I taught. I was assessed. I was renewed and then I was not renewed. I watched international students arrive with extraordinary knowledge and watched that knowledge get treated as ambient decoration rather than scholarship. I watched Indigenous students navigate a system that had been built, deliberately and historically, to erase the epistemologies they carry. And through all of it I watched institutions issue statements about diversity and reconciliation that had no structural relationship to any of those realities.
This page draws on a body of scholarship that explains why those things happen and what would be required to change them. It situates this dissertation within a much larger conversation about colonial legacies in Canadian higher education: how those legacies were built, how they are sustained under academic capitalism and disciplinary fragmentation, what they do to the people inside them, and what decolonial transformation would actually require. These are the structural stakes of this research. I want them named plainly before the findings arrive.
The Architecture of Colonial Legacies in Canadian Higher Education
Canadian universities were built alongside the other infrastructures of settler colonial governance. That is the beginning of the analysis, and it cannot be softened. The formation of these institutions occurred within the same historical moment as residential schools, land dispossession, and the deliberate dismantling of Indigenous governance. Curriculum design relegated Indigenous peoples to the past. Research frameworks treated Indigenous communities as objects of study rather than as holders of knowledge. Governance structures privileged Eurocentric epistemologies so completely that the privilege became invisible: it looked like neutrality (Phillips, 2024; Wotherspoon & Milne, 2020).
This is what epistemological violence means in practice. It is the systematic privileging of Western knowledge systems at the expense of Indigenous and other marginalized epistemologies, operating through tangible institutional mechanisms: exclusionary curricula, biased research evaluation frameworks, tenure metrics that penalize non-Western methodologies, and governance systems that enforce narrow definitions of scholarly legitimacy (Ozyonum, 2023). It is the reason an Indigenous scholar’s work using oral histories and relational accountability can be dismissed by a research adjudication committee that has never been asked to question its own standards. The harm is structural. It operates without anyone needing to intend it.
| Colonial Structure | How It Operates in Canadian Universities | Who Bears the Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Epistemological violence | Western knowledge positioned as universal standard; oral traditions, land-based methods, and relational inquiry treated as insufficiently rigorous; peer review reproduces Eurocentric evaluation norms | Indigenous scholars; students from non-Western knowledge traditions; any researcher using methodologies outside positivist frameworks |
| Academic capitalism | Knowledge commodified under market rationales; performance metrics reward conformity to dominant paradigms; international students recruited as revenue while their knowledge remains marginalised; contingent faculty expand to manage cost | Contract faculty; international students; community-based research partners; anyone whose work cannot be easily monetised |
| Disciplinary fragmentation | Disciplines organized around 19th-century colonial foundations; cross-disciplinary work penalised by promotion systems; Indigenous knowledge treated as elective enrichment rather than foundational curriculum | Scholars working across knowledge systems; students whose prior learning does not fit departmental categories; communities whose knowledge is inherently holistic |
| Missionary and assimilationist legacies | Hierarchical teacher–student relationships that position students as passive recipients; Western therapeutic and support models that invalidate cultural approaches to wellness; institutional resistance to ceremonial and land-based practices as legitimate pedagogy | Indigenous students and communities; international students from collectivist knowledge traditions; anyone seeking culturally responsive support |
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action in 2015 named some of this directly. What the research makes clear is that including Indigenous content in curricula, without confronting the governance structures, hiring practices, funding frameworks, and epistemological hierarchies that produced the exclusion in the first place, cannot achieve decolonization. Adding content without restructuring power is what Wotherspoon and Milne (2020) call selective uptake: reconciliation rhetoric grafted onto an unchanged institutional architecture. The appearance of change without the substance of it.
Relational Accountability: Research as Relationship
The framework that changes the most things for me methodologically is relational accountability. It does more than describe an ethical posture. It restructures the foundation of what research is. In Western methodological traditions, research is a process of gathering and analyzing data. In Indigenous research paradigms, research is the building of relations. Every methodological choice is a weaving of new knots in a web of connections that must be maintained responsibly over time (Latulippe, 2015, p. 7). That is a fundamentally different ontology. And it is the one this dissertation is accountable to.
Relational accountability repositions community partners as co-authors of knowledge rather than subjects of study. It requires transparency about positionality before data collection begins. It demands that research benefits return to the communities whose knowledge makes the research possible. And it extends the researcher’s obligations beyond the grant cycle into sustained relationship, because knowledge does not end when the funding does. These principles come from Indigenous scholarship, but their implications reach into every methodological decision I have made in this dissertation: how I entered the research relationship, how I hold participant stories, how I understand my own position as both insider and outsider, and how I plan to ensure that what I produce serves the people who trusted me with their experiences (David-Chavez, 2019; Henry et al., 2016).
| Principle | What It Requires in Practice | How It Shapes This Dissertation |
|---|---|---|
| Respect | Attentiveness to cultural protocols; refusal of appropriation; recognition of community sovereignty over their own knowledge systems | Ethics approvals (TRU H25-04204; RRU H25-00572) as minimum floor, not ceiling; participant anonymity held as absolute; community-defined participation terms |
| Relevance | Alignment between research aims and community-defined needs; research questions shaped by lived experience rather than solely by academic trends | Research questions grown from my own nineteen years as contract faculty and my direct witnessing of international student experience |
| Reciprocity | Tangible benefits returning to participants; co-authorship arrangements; outputs accessible to communities in usable forms | Dissertation site designed to be publicly accessible; participants able to read and engage with research as it develops |
| Responsibility | Sustained commitment beyond project timelines; obligations maintained regardless of institutional pressures or grant cycles | Research relationships treated as ongoing; this site continues beyond defence as a public scholarly resource |
Ceremonial and ethical protocols within Indigenous research paradigms are integral to what constitutes valid and respectful scholarly engagement. They are the enactment of this accountability. Seeking permission from Elders and recognized knowledge holders before proceeding, participating in community gatherings before data collection begins, offering tobacco when imagery engages cultural heritage sites: these are practical methodological commitments that align the researcher’s intentions with collective priorities. I am an outsider to many of these protocols. That outsider status is itself a methodological position I must name, hold clearly, and never use as an excuse for bypassing the relational obligations the research carries (Wilson, 2008; Archibald, 2008).
International Students: The Structural Condition
The research on international students in Canadian higher education tells a consistent story. These students are recruited aggressively as premium revenue sources. They are charged fees two to four times those of domestic students. They are celebrated in institutional marketing materials as evidence of campus diversity. And they are then placed inside systems that were built around domestic student norms, Western epistemologies, and English-language cultural assumptions, and expected to succeed on those systems’ terms (Sidhu, 2006; Stein & Andreotti, 2016).
This is the contradiction I name as asymmetrical precarity. Contract faculty and international students share a structural condition: conditional belonging, expendability when economically inconvenient, and exclusion from the institutional decisions that shape their lives. The conditions rhyme. The stakes are radically different. I lose a job. An international student loses the legal right to remain in the country. I hold both the connection and the difference simultaneously. The asymmetry is part of the analysis.
| Structural Barrier | How It Manifests | Scholarship That Names It |
|---|---|---|
| Financial precarity | Tuition two to four times domestic rates; limited work rights under federal permit restrictions; housing markets near campuses unaffordable; food insecurity among enrolled students | Wotherspoon & Milne (2020); Kirloskar & Inamdar (2021) |
| Epistemic marginalisation | Cultural knowledge treated as diversity decoration rather than scholarly resource; prior learning systems not recognised in departmental categories; navigational capital invisible in academic assessment frameworks | Ozyonum (2023); Latulippe (2015) |
| Immigration vulnerability | Enrolment continuity tied to study permit; 2024 federal study permit cap restructured participation without student consultation; post-graduation work restrictions limit financial viability | Y. Li & Zhao (2024); Kirloskar & Inamdar (2021) |
| Mental health and wellness gaps | Culturally responsive counselling absent or tokenistic; Western therapeutic models misaligned with collectivist wellness frameworks; distance from familial support structures unaddressed by institutional provision | Ozyonum (2023); Shokirova et al. (2022) |
| Governance exclusion | No voice in the institutional decisions that shape their conditions; survey-based feedback loops that abstract lived experience into statistics; concerns managed by diversity offices rather than addressed structurally | David-Chavez (2019); Joseph et al. (2021) |
Community cultural wealth theory reframes what these students bring. The theory, developed within critical race scholarship, insists on recognising aspirational capital (the capacity to sustain visions for future possibility despite structural obstacles), navigational capital (the ability to maneuver through complex and hostile institutional landscapes), and linguistic capital (the analytical depth that comes from functioning across multiple language systems and cultural frameworks). These are scholarly resources. Institutions that treat them as diversity decoration rather than epistemically valuable knowledge are impoverishing themselves, and doing so deliberately (Latulippe, 2015; Joseph et al., 2021).
Decolonial Pedagogy: What the Banking Model Costs
Freire named it the banking model of education: the practice of depositing pre-approved content into students as if learning were a transaction rather than a relationship. I taught for nineteen years inside institutions that ran on this model. I also taught against it whenever I could. The banking model is not only pedagogically impoverished. In the context of Canadian higher education, it is a colonial instrument. Content is deposited in students for later retrieval rather than collaboratively interrogated or produced. The instructor holds all interpretive authority. The student’s lived experience is irrelevant to the content. And Indigenous knowledge, when it appears at all, appears as a unit in someone else’s curriculum rather than as an epistemological framework with its own internal logic and claims (Chiramba & Motala, 2023; Weasel Head, 2023).
| What the Banking Model Does | What Decolonial Pedagogy Requires Instead |
|---|---|
| Positions instructor as sole authority over knowledge; student as passive recipient | Dialogical exchange where all participants contribute lived experience as theory-building material |
| Treats lived experience as contextual background, not analytical data | Scholarly Personal Narrative and autoethnography: lived experience as rigorous inquiry |
| Marginalises Indigenous knowledge as elective content or cultural enrichment | Indigenous epistemologies as foundational, not supplementary; embedded in core learning outcomes |
| Assesses students against Western scholarly conventions as universal standard | Assessment frameworks that recognise oral histories, relational inquiry, and visual methods as equal in rigor to conventional essay and exam formats |
| Strips away student agency through standardised delivery | Photovoice and participatory visual methods: visual sovereignty over representation; students as co-authors of knowledge |
| Isolates academic content from students’ material realities | Well-being infrastructures recognised as prerequisites for learning; housing, food, and mental health integrated into educational planning |
Freirean dialogical learning, combined with Indigenous pedagogies that emphasise wholeness, experiential knowledge, and reciprocity between human and more-than-human relations, offers an alternative that Canadian universities have the intellectual resources to enact and the institutional courage to resist. Land-based learning situates pedagogy in relation to territory and community rather than inside a classroom. Storytelling transmits knowledge across generations not as nostalgia but as living epistemology. Photovoice positions students as co-creators of representation rather than subjects of someone else’s research narrative. These are methodological commitments. They are also political ones (Archibald, 2008; Wilson, 2008; Wang & Burris, 1997).
Photovoice and Visual Sovereignty: Methods That Return Control
Photovoice was developed by Wang and Burris in the mid-1990s with a specific premise: people most directly affected by a social reality hold essential expertise on it and should lead its representation. The method uses photography as a vehicle for community-based inquiry, critical dialogue, and policy engagement. Participants photograph their lived experiences, contextualize those images in their own words, and bring the resulting materials into dialogue with each other, with researchers, and with decision-makers. The researcher does not mediate the narrative. The participants do.
Visual sovereignty is the principle that anchors this. It refers to the right of individuals and communities to assert control over the creation, interpretation, and circulation of visual narratives representing their lives. This control operates at every level: deciding what images are taken, determining the narrative that accompanies them, and establishing where and how that imagery is shared. It resists the pattern that colonial research has followed for generations: extracting images, stories, and data from marginalised communities and using them for institutional gain without returning interpretive authority to those depicted (Henry et al., 2016; David-Chavez, 2019).
This matters for this dissertation in concrete ways. My participants are contract faculty and international students at Thompson Rivers University. They are precisely the populations whose narratives have been managed by institutional diversity offices, abstracted into equity statistics, and used in recruitment materials without being engaged structurally. Photovoice returns the interpretive authority. The SHOWeD protocol structures the analytical dialogue. And my commitment to visual sovereignty means that the images and stories I hold are held on behalf of the people who made them, with their consent and under their conditions.
Scholarly Personal Narrative as Decolonial Method
Scholarly Personal Narrative fits inside this framework precisely because it refuses the false objectivity that colonial knowledge systems require. The claim that a researcher can stand outside their subject and see it clearly is a performance. SPN names that performance and offers something more honest in its place: a methodology that integrates lived experience with scholarly analysis, makes positionality visible as an analytical resource rather than a liability to be managed, and insists that the personal and the structural are the same analysis told at different scales (Nash, 2004; Nash, 2019).
For this dissertation, SPN is the voice and the method together. I am a former contract faculty member studying contract faculty precarity. I have been an instructor of international students for the entirety of my teaching career. I have witnessed the institutions this research is investigating from inside their structures and from the peripheral position those structures assign to people like me. That positioning is not a disqualifying conflict of interest. It is the analytical resource I call blended witnessing: the methodological stance of holding insider and outsider positions simultaneously as a source of insight rather than a problem to be resolved.
The reflexivity this requires is ongoing. It means continuously interrogating how my own social location shapes what I see, what I ask, and what I write. It means acknowledging what I cannot see from where I stand. And it means being accountable not only to scholarly standards but to the community of people whose trust I have been given (Ellis, 2004; Richardson, 2000; Chang, 2008).
What Transformation Actually Requires
The literature on decolonial transformation in Canadian higher education is clear about what symbolic gestures cannot do. Renaming buildings cannot restructure governance. Issuing diversity statements cannot reallocate decision-making power. Adding Indigenous content to a curriculum designed around Eurocentric epistemologies cannot change what that curriculum treats as legitimate knowledge. Transformation requires something more specific, and the scholarship that examines it points toward the same set of structural commitments (Wotherspoon & Milne, 2020; Chiramba & Motala, 2023; Townsend & Roth, 2023).
| Domain | What Symbolic Gestures Look Like | What Structural Transformation Requires |
|---|---|---|
| Curriculum | Adding Indigenous content as a unit; hosting annual cultural events; including one land acknowledgement at the start of the year | Co-developing curricula with Indigenous Nations and international student collectives; embedding relational accountability in learning outcomes; recognising plural epistemologies as foundational, not supplementary |
| Governance | Creating an Indigenous advisory committee; appointing a diversity officer; issuing an equity statement | Co-governance structures where Indigenous scholars, contingent faculty, and international students hold coequal decision-making authority over curricula, research priorities, and resource allocation |
| Research ethics | Requiring a land acknowledgement in grant applications; offering intercultural training to research adjudicators | Ethics review processes that legitimise community-defined consent protocols, oral agreements, and ceremonial governance alongside Western bureaucratic frameworks; funding models that support multi-year relational engagement |
| Well-being infrastructure | Adding a multicultural counsellor to the wellness centre; creating a food bank on campus | Housing, food, and mental health provision treated as educational infrastructure; land-based healing programs recognised and funded; cultural counsellors legitimised within formal institutional structures |
| Faculty labor | Including contingent faculty in professional development events; inviting them to serve on committees without compensation | Employment security that enables the sustained community relationships decolonial pedagogy requires; evaluation criteria that recognise relational and community-engaged scholarship as equal to conventional outputs |
Transformative leadership in this context means servant leadership and critical leadership operating together: leaders who are accountable to community-defined priorities rather than market logics, who redistribute interpretive authority rather than managing diversity, and who interrogate their own positionalities within colonial histories as a prerequisite for leading institutions toward genuine change. These are leadership theories, but they are also ethics. The gap between stated commitments to reconciliation and enduring colonial structures in Canadian higher education is a leadership problem as much as a policy one (Wotherspoon & Milne, 2020; Fúnez-Flores et al., 2024).
The UNDRIP principles, affirmed by Canada through the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, provide an international human rights framework for these commitments. Free, prior, and informed consent is its core mechanism. Applied in higher education, it means that decisions affecting Indigenous students, curricula, and research must proceed only after community-led deliberation processes confirm alignment with Indigenous priorities. It means that consent is a collective governance function, not an individual signature on a form.
Why This Framework Is Load-Bearing for This Dissertation
This dissertation is a study of belonging and precarity inside a Canadian comprehensive teaching university. Its participants are contract faculty and international students. Its methodology is photovoice combined with scholarly personal narrative. Its analytical concepts, asymmetrical precarity, malperformative inclusion, ghost data, blended witnessing, performative silence, were developed to name what academic capitalism and colonial knowledge systems produce at the level of lived experience.
The framework on this page is the structural explanation for why those conditions exist and persist. Colonial legacies explain the epistemological hierarchies that marginalise participant knowledge. Academic capitalism explains the market logics that make contract faculty and international students structurally expendable. Relational accountability provides the ethical framework that makes the research itself possible without reproducing the extraction it is studying. Decolonial pedagogy explains why the methodology I chose, photovoice and SPN, is a methodological argument as well as a practical choice. Community cultural wealth theory provides the analytic lens for seeing what participants bring rather than what the institution does to them.
| Framework | What It Explains in This Research |
|---|---|
| Colonial legacies and settler colonial structures | Why the institution at the centre of this study was built in ways that make belonging conditional for the populations this research focuses on |
| Academic capitalism | Why contract faculty proliferate while tenure-track lines shrink, and why international students are recruited and managed as revenue sources rather than members of a learning community |
| Epistemological violence and disciplinary fragmentation | Why participant knowledge, whether Indigenous epistemologies, non-Western cultural frameworks, or the experiential expertise of contract faculty, is invisible in governance and invisible in data |
| Relational accountability (4Rs) | The ethical framework that governs how this research was designed, how participant relationships are held, and what obligations extend beyond the research timeline |
| Decolonial pedagogy and Freirean critique | Why photovoice was chosen over extractive data collection; why visual sovereignty matters; why the banking model is named as a colonial instrument in this context |
| Community cultural wealth theory | The analytical lens for centering what participants carry rather than what systems do to them; aspirational and navigational capital as scholarly resources rather than deficits |
| TRC Calls to Action and UNDRIP | The policy framework that makes the gap between institutional rhetoric and institutional reality politically accountable, and that grounds the dissertation’s structural critique in human rights obligations |
The findings of this research will arrive inside this framework. That is the only honest way to present them. I am a researcher who lived the conditions I am studying. I hold the structural analysis and the personal testimony in the same hand. That is what blended witnessing means. And the scholars on this page, from Wilson (2008) to Freire to Nash (2004) to David-Chavez (2019) to Kezar et al. (2019), are the intellectual community that made it possible to name that position as a methodology rather than a complication.
References
Álvarez Valencia, J. A., & Valencia, A. (2023). Indigenous students and university stakeholders’ challenges and opportunities for intercultural decolonial dialogue. Profile: Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development, 25(2), 219–237. https://doi.org/10.15446/profile.v25n2.102812
Archibald, J. (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit. UBC Press.
Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method. Left Coast Press.
Chiramba, O., & Motala, S. (2023). Towards transforming teaching and learning in higher education: Interrogating poverty through a decolonial perspective. Curriculum Perspectives, 43(Suppl 1), S11–S21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-023-00188-w
David-Chavez, D. M. (2019). A guiding model for decolonizing environmental science research and restoring relational accountability with indigenous communities. [Doctoral dissertation].
Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. AltaMira Press.
Fúnez-Flores, J. I., Pinheiro, W. A., Ávila Mendoza, A., Phelps, R., & Cherry Shive, E. (2024). The sociopolitical turn in mathematics education and decolonial theory. London Review of Education, 22(1), 13. https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.22.1.13
Henry, R., Tait, C., & UP, S. (2016). Creating ethical research partnerships: Relational accountability in action. Engaging with Indigenous Communities, 2(1), 183.
Joseph, L., Cuerrier, A., & Mathews, D. (2021). Shifting narratives, recognizing resilience: New anti-oppressive and decolonial approaches to ethnobotanical research with indigenous communities in Canada. Botany.
Kezar, A., DePaola, T., & Scott, D. T. (2019). The gig academy: Mapping labor in the neoliberal university. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kirloskar, P., & Inamdar, N. (2021). Shifting international student mobility directions and factors influencing students’ higher education destination choices. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Leadership Studies, 2(3), 160–178. https://doi.org/10.52547/johepal.2.3.160
Kovach, M. (2021). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations, and contexts (2nd ed.). University of Toronto Press.
Latulippe, N. (2015). Bridging parallel rows: Epistemic difference and relational accountability in cross-cultural research. The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2015.6.2.7
Li, Y., & Zhao, Z. (2024). Navigating new horizons: The future of international student mobility in the post-pandemic world. World Journal of Education and Humanities, 6(2), 49. https://doi.org/10.22158/wjeh.v6n2p49
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Nash, R. (2019). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative (2nd ed.). Information Age Publishing.
Ozyonum, E. (2023). Let’s talk about decolonial internationalization. YU-WRITE: Journal of Graduate Student Research in Education.
Phillips, M. J. (2024). The rules of the academic game: Reviewing the history of Australian higher education. Frontiers in Education, 9, 1297509. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2024.1297509
Richardson, L. (2000). Writing as inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). Sage Publications.
Shokirova, T., Brunner, L. R., Karki, K. K., Coustere, C., & Valizadeh, N. (2022). Confronting and reimagining the orientation of international graduate students: A collaborative autoethnography approach. Journal of Teaching and Learning, 16(2), 5–27. https://doi.org/10.22329/jtl.v16i2.7019
Sidhu, R. K. (2006). Universities and globalization: To market, to market. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2016). Cash, competition, or charity: International students and the global imaginary. Higher Education, 72(2), 225–239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9949-8
Townsend, J., & Roth, R. (2023). Indigenous and decolonial futures: Indigenous protected and conserved areas as potential pathways of reconciliation. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 5(1286970). https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2023.1286970
Weasel Head, G. (2023). Envisioning SoTL through a lens of indigenous cultural continuity. https://doi.org/10.29173/isotl683
Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.
Wotherspoon, T., & Milne, E. (2020). What do indigenous education policy frameworks reveal about commitments to reconciliation in Canadian school systems? The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2020.11.1.10215
Full citations for all scholars referenced throughout this site appear in the Annotated Bibliography.