Honest answers to the questions I am most often asked.
This page addresses the questions I receive most frequently about this research from students considering similar methodologies, from educators encountering these concepts for the first time, from administrators wondering what this means for their institutions, and from the general public curious about what doctoral research on international student belonging actually involves. I have answered them as directly and honestly as I can, including the ones that make me uncomfortable.
About the Research
What is this research actually about?
This research asks how international business students at Thompson Rivers University experience the gap between what the institution promises them belonging, opportunity, global community and what they actually encounter. It is specifically interested in 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. It uses a participatory visual methodology called blended witnessing, in which students photographed their own lives on campus and I analysed those photographs alongside my own narrative of institutional precarity.
Why did you focus on business students specifically?
The catalysing question for this research “Where do I put grandmother’s wisdom?” was asked in a business ethics class. The business curriculum is where I spent seventeen years teaching and where I encountered, most viscerally, the epistemicide that Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) describes: the systematic destruction of non-Western knowledge systems by curricula organised around Anglo-American management theory. Business education is also the programme most heavily populated by international students at many Canadian universities, and the programme whose assumptions about what counts as legitimate economic knowledge are, in my view, most urgently in need of critique.
What did the participants photograph?
I cannot share specific photographs before the doctoral defence. What I can say is that participants photographed spaces, objects, moments, and juxtapositions on campus that they felt documented the gap between what the institution promises and what it delivers. The photographs include spaces of exclusion, spaces of refuge, evidence of malperformative aesthetics, and evidence of what I call the mindset of enough: the community practices and relational sufficiencies that students create despite the institutional conditions they navigate. The full visual findings will be shared on this site following the defence.
What is ghost data, and why does it matter?
Ghost data is my term for participant attrition treated as structural evidence rather than methodological failure. In this study, a fifth participant enrolled and withdrew before taking a single photograph. Her work commitments the precise precarity the study sought to document consumed her capacity for participation. I treat her withdrawal not as a gap in the data but as evidence of what the system takes before testimony can exist. Her empty folder is the most eloquent testimony in the study.
About the Methodology
Why did you use Photovoice instead of interviews or surveys?
Surveys can tell you that a certain percentage of international students report feeling lonely. They cannot tell you what the locked lounge at 5:15 PM looks like to the student who arrives after her shift. Interviews can capture testimony, but they filter experience through language and in a multilingual population navigating a prestige dialect not their own, that filter is itself a site of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1991). Photographs can document what language cannot easily say. The camera enters back-stage spaces that the institutional gaze never reaches (Goffman, 1959). That is why Photovoice.
Why did you include your own story in the research?
Because leaving it out would have been less rigorous, not more. I am not a neutral observer. I spent twenty-five years at the institution I am studying, nineteen of them as a contract faculty member on semester-by-semester contracts. I was laid off in May 2025. I received the Teaching Award in June. My positionality shapes what I see and what I miss. Making it visible gives you, the reader, the tools to assess my interpretations. Hiding it behind a passive voice would not have made those interpretations more trustworthy. It would have made them less accountable. The methodology for this is called Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004).
What is protective divergence?
Protective divergence is the analytical strategy I developed to prevent my narrative from absorbing my participants’ narratives. My story and their stories run parallel throughout the dissertation. They speak to each other and illuminate each other. But they do not merge. I do not interpret their photographs through my own experience. I interpret them first through their own explanations, then bring broader frameworks to bear. My story contextualises. It does not colonise.
What is the kitchen table analysis?
Before entering any photograph into NVivo, I printed every participant photograph and physically arranged them on my kitchen table the same table where I graded student papers for seventeen years. Using coloured Post-it notes and yarn, I traced emergent connections between images. This analogue phase comes before the digital analysis. It draws on feminist traditions of kitchen table reflexivity (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015) and on slow scholarship as a politics of resistance to neoliberal academic timelines (Mountz et al., 2015). The kitchen table is where the themes first emerged, and the physical traces of that process became part of the audit trail.
About the Concepts
What is the time tax?
The time tax is my term for the compounded temporal extraction that international students experience through immigration labour (managing visa paperwork, compliance requirements, renewal processes), economic labour (working near or over the legal limit to pay tuition and living costs), linguistic labour (translating themselves into the prestige dialect of the institution in every interaction), and affective labour (managing homesickness, performing gratitude, suppressing the anxiety of conditional belonging). Each of these is invisible to institutional metrics that measure only credit hours and completion rates. Taken together, they represent a substantial and unreported drain on academic capacity. The time tax is paid by the students. The interest accrues to the institution.
What is malperformative inclusion?
Malperformative inclusion is my extension of Sara Ahmed’s (2012) concept of non-performativity into the domain of institutional action. Non-performativity describes statements that fail to bring about what they name (a diversity commitment that substitutes for diversity action). Malperformative inclusion describes institutional actions that succeed in a very specific, limited way: they absorb critique, demonstrate awareness, and generate reputational return, while leaving the conditions they claim to address entirely unchanged. The lounge that closes at 5:00 PM. The diversity mural above the midnight cleaning shift. These are malperformative aesthetics: spaces and images that perform inclusion for the audiences who consume them from the outside, while serving as evidence of exclusion for the students trying to inhabit them.
What is the mindset of enough?
The mindset of enough is my term for the counter-logic that international students develop in response to institutional artificial scarcity. Rather than accepting the institution’s premise that there is never enough enough time, enough money, enough support, enough recognition students create sufficiency through community: shared meals, mutual aid networks, late-night study groups, the hidden stone behind the vending machine where you can sit for twenty minutes without anyone asking you to be productive. This is not merely coping. It is sophisticated resistance. It is a refusal of the institution’s scarcity logic. It is, in the language of Tara Yosso (2005), Community Cultural Wealth in practice.
About What Comes Next
When will the findings be available?
The full visual findings, including participant photographs and collaborative analysis, will be shared on this site following the doctoral defence. The defence is anticipated in 2026. Pre-defence content on this site describes the theoretical and methodological architecture without disclosing empirical findings.
What do you want administrators to do with this research?
I want administrators to understand that inclusion is not an aesthetic project. A lounge is not a strategy. A diversity statement is not a policy. The architecture of exclusion is structural, and the responses to it must be structural. Extend library and lounge hours to match when international students are available to use them. Revisit work-hour restrictions that force students into economic precarity. Create genuine mechanisms for international student voice in governance. Redesign curriculum to recognise non-Western knowledge systems as legitimate theoretical contributions rather than colourful anecdotes. None of this requires new buildings. It requires political will, reallocation of existing resources, and the honesty to admit that the current model is extractive.
What do you want students to take from this?
If you are an international student: you may find words here for experiences you have felt but could not name. The architecture of exclusion is not your imagination. The time tax is real. The conditional belonging is real. Your grandmother’s wisdom is legitimate knowledge. And the mindset of enough you and your community have built is not mere survival. It is resistance. You theorised your conditions before I had the language to write about them.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.; J. B. Thompson, Ed.). Harvard University Press.
de Sousa Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.
Kohl, E., & McCutcheon, P. (2015). Kitchen table reflexivity: Negotiating positionality through everyday talk. Gender, Place & Culture, 22(6), 747–763. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.958063
Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., Basu, R., Whitson, R., Hawkins, R., Hamilton, T., & Curran, W. (2015). For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(4), 1235–1259.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006