Ethics approvals: Thompson Rivers University (H25-04204) and Royal Roads University (H25-00572)
Who Participated in This Study
This research was designed to centre the voices of people whose experiences are routinely present in institutional data and absent from institutional decision-making. Two groups form the foundation of this study: international business students at Thompson Rivers University, and the researcher herself, a contract faculty member teaching within the same institution. This page describes who they are, how they came to participate, and what ethical obligations their participation created.
The Student Participants
Four international business students at Thompson Rivers University participated in the Photovoice component of this study. They were enrolled in undergraduate business programmes, living and studying on campus in Kamloops, British Columbia, on the unceded territory of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, during the study period.
Participants were recruited through purposive sampling: a method that selects participants based on their direct experience of the phenomenon under investigation rather than on statistical representativeness. To participate, students needed to be currently enrolled as international students in a business programme at TRU and willing to engage in a multi-session participatory visual research process that included a photography workshop, individual photo-elicitation interviews, and a group dialogue session.
All four participants completed the research process. A fifth student enrolled and withdrew before taking any photographs. Her withdrawal, caused directly by the work demands of the very precarity the study was designed to document, became what I call ghost data: structural evidence of how the system can silence participation before it occurs. Her empty folder is present in the analysis. It is the most eloquent testimony in the study.
Participants are identified in the dissertation by pseudonyms of their own choosing. No identifying details, including country of origin, programme, year of study, or personal circumstances, are shared publicly. This reflects the study’s foundational commitment to participant safety, particularly for individuals whose immigration status makes them vulnerable to institutional and legal consequences.
The Researcher as Participant
In a study using Scholarly Personal Narrative, the researcher is also a participant. I brought my own story into this research with the same analytical seriousness I applied to participants’ stories. For nineteen years I was a contract faculty member at Thompson Rivers University, teaching the same students whose experiences this study examines, from my own position of precarity. That parallel positioning is the basis for the study’s central theoretical concept: asymmetrical precarity.
My participation is asymmetrical to my students’ participation. I hold Canadian citizenship; they navigate visa conditions. I hold union protections; their capacity for collective action is constrained by immigration regulations. I am white; they move through an institution that reads their bodies differently than it reads mine. Asymmetrical precarity names this relationship: structural parallels held alongside crucial differences, rhyming without being identical.
Ethical Commitments
This study was approved by the Research Ethics Boards at both Thompson Rivers University and Royal Roads University. All participants provided informed consent, with consent treated as an evolving relationship rather than a one-time signature. Participants renegotiated consent at multiple stages: initial recruitment, photography, group debrief, and member checking.
The study drew on trauma-informed research principles throughout: prioritising participant wellbeing over data completeness, maintaining transparency about how data would be used, and treating the research relationship itself as an ethical responsibility rather than a logistical one.
A full account of the ethical design of this study is available on the Ethics, Consent, and Care page in Section Three.