Annotated Bibliography – Through Our Eyes Witnessing Belonging, Precarity, and Possibility in Higher Education

Thirty Key Sources and How They Shape This Dissertation

Amy Tucker, DSocSci Candidate, Royal Roads University

ORCID: 0009-0006-9872-2248

What follows is a curated selection of the thirty sources that most profoundly shaped my dissertation, Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Belonging, Precarity, and Possibility with International Students in Higher Education. I have organised them by the five domains of my theoretical framework: Sociology, Communications, Ethics, Leadership, and Education, with a sixth section for the methodological sources that shaped how I designed blended witnessing. Each entry includes the full APA 7 reference and a first-person annotation explaining how the source informed my thinking, what it made visible, and where I extend or depart from the author’s argument. These annotations are written in the Scholarly Personal Narrative voice that runs through the dissertation itself: they are analytical reflections rather than neutral summaries.

This bibliography is designed for fellow researchers entering this field, graduate students building their own theoretical frameworks, and anyone who wants to trace the intellectual genealogy of the concepts on this site. It is pre-defence work: it describes the theoretical and methodological architecture without disclosing the empirical findings that will be shared after the doctoral examination.

Domain I: Sociology and the Structures of Extraction

The sociological domain of my framework asks a deceptively simple question: why does the university extract more from international students than it returns? The following sources taught me to see the university as a market actor, international students as racialised revenue sources, and precarity as a shared yet unequal condition linking students and the contract faculty who teach them.

Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

This book gave me the foundational concept for my entire sociological analysis: academic capitalism, the transformation of universities under neoliberal governance from public institutions producing knowledge as a common good into market actors competing for revenue streams. Slaughter and Rhoades demonstrate how the contemporary university has integrated market logics into every aspect of its operation, from intellectual property regimes to student recruitment strategies. What struck me most was their concept of interstitial organisations: boundary-spanning units like international recruitment offices that blur the line between academic mission and market operation. When I mapped this framework onto Thompson Rivers University, where international students constitute roughly 45% of total enrolment and contribute an estimated $180 million in tuition revenue, the extractive logic became unmistakable. I extend Slaughter and Rhoades by arguing that the international student economy represents a specific, racialised form of academic capitalism, and by developing the concept of the time tax to name the temporal extraction their framework overlooks.

Robinson, C. J. (1983). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Zed Books.

Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism transformed how I understand the international student economy. Robinson argued that capitalism has always depended on the racialisation of those from whom value is extracted: the accumulation of wealth is inseparable from the production of racial difference. I draw on this insight to argue that the tuition differential at Canadian universities is a racialised as well as economic mechanism. The “international student” is overwhelmingly a racialised subject from the Global South, recruited through networks targeting specific regions while the institution frames this recruitment as “internationalisation” and “global engagement.” Robinson’s framework made me see that the lounge built with international tuition dollars, empty because those students are at work during its operating hours, is a spatial artefact of racial capitalism: value extracted from racialised bodies, converted into institutional infrastructure, and then rendered inaccessible to those whose labour funded it. My concept of the time tax extends Robinson by treating time itself as an enclosed resource subject to racialised extraction.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu’s framework of capital, field, and habitus provides the micro-sociological lens through which I understand how international students experience the university as a structured social space. The university is a field with its own rules, hierarchies, and forms of currency. To succeed, one needs cultural capital that the dominant group recognises. International students often arrive with substantial cultural capital from their home contexts: multilingualism, resilience, the intergenerational business knowledge I refer to as “grandmother’s wisdom.” Yet upon entry into the Canadian university, this capital is devalued or unrecognised. The student must acquire new capital (“Western business experience”) while the capital she already holds is rendered illegitimate. Bourdieu helped me understand that the question “Where do I put grandmother’s wisdom?” is a question about the convertibility of capital across fields, and that the institution’s refusal to recognise that capital is a form of structural violence rather than innocent oversight.

Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.

Standing defines the precariat as a class characterised by permanent temporariness: unstable employment, insecure housing, and the constant threat of falling further. I found his framework essential for understanding both international students and the contract faculty who teach them. Both populations exist in a state of conditional belonging: their presence within the institution depends on forces they cannot control, and their futures are contingent on decisions made in rooms they cannot enter. What Standing’s framework enabled me to develop was asymmetrical precarity: the recognition that contract faculty and international students occupy structurally analogous positions within the “gig academy” while facing dramatically different stakes. I can lose my job. My students can lose their country. This distinction prevents the collapsing of our experiences into false equivalence while allowing structural analysis of how the same institutional logic exploits both its workers and its customers.

Posselt, J. R. (2016). Inside graduate admissions: Merit, diversity, and faculty gatekeeping. Harvard University Press.

Posselt’s ethnography of graduate admissions committees taught me how “merit” functions as a socially constructed gatekeeping mechanism. She demonstrates that faculty often rely on homophily — a preference for students who resemble themselves culturally and intellectually — to define who “fits.” Applied to the international student experience, Posselt’s framework reveals that the exclusion of grandmother’s wisdom is an active act of disciplinary policing rather than mere oversight. The grandmother’s wisdom is rejected because it fails to mirror the merit markers (Western theory, quantitative analysis, Standard English) that faculty use to define their own legitimacy. Posselt helped me see that the curriculum’s inability to accommodate non-Western knowledge systems is a feature of how academic fields reproduce themselves rather than an accidental gap waiting to be filled.

Domain II: Communications and the Politics of Voice

The communications domain asks through what mechanisms the institution silences the knowledge systems international students carry. If the sociological domain explains the economic structures, the communications domain explains how those structures are maintained through the politics of whose voice counts and whose gaze determines what is seen.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.; J. B. Thompson, Ed.). Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu’s analysis of linguistic capital and symbolic violence explains why “Standard English” functions as a mechanism of power within the Canadian university. Proficiency in the prestige dialect is conflated with intelligence, academic capability, and moral worth. International students who speak multiple languages fluently yet lack proficiency in the specific register of Canadian academic English face systematic devaluation of their communicative competence. This devaluation constitutes symbolic violence: the imposition of a meaning system that makes the linguistic hierarchy appear natural and meritocratic. When a student who speaks Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, and conversational English apologises for “broken English,” she has internalised the institution’s hierarchy so thoroughly that she polices herself. Bourdieu taught me to hear that apology as a symptom of structural violence rather than individual deficiency.

Rose, G. (2016). Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Rose’s critical visual methodology provided the analytical framework for how I approach participant photographs. Rose insists that images are constructed arguments requiring interpretation rather than transparent windows onto reality. She identifies three sites of analysis: the site of production (how was the image made?), the site of the image itself (what does it show?), and the site of audiencing (how is it received?). This three-site framework structures my analysis of every participant photograph in the dissertation. Rose’s work also taught me to attend to what is absent from an image: the people who should be in the photograph yet are elsewhere, the spaces that appear empty yet carry the traces of who built them and who cannot access them. This attention to visual absence connects directly to the concept of ghost data in my methodology.

Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309

Wang and Burris developed Photovoice for community health research, and their three stated goals — to enable people to record and reflect on community concerns, to promote critical dialogue through photographs, and to reach policymakers — aligned precisely with what I needed. The core principle is radical in its simplicity: the people who live an experience are the experts on that experience. Rather than the researcher deciding what matters and designing instruments to capture it, Photovoice positions cameras in participants’ hands and asks them to document their own realities. This method transforms the international student from the object of the institutional gaze (viewed in marketing brochures, counted in spreadsheets) into the subject who looks. Wang and Burris also developed the SHOWeD protocol that structures the collaborative analysis in my study. I build on their work by braiding Photovoice with Scholarly Personal Narrative through what I call blended witnessing, and by extending the framework to treat participant withdrawal as evidence through the concept of ghost data.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.

Spivak’s question — “Can the subaltern speak?” — haunts the epistemological foundations of this study. Spivak argued that the conditions of subalternity are defined precisely by the inability to speak within dominant discursive frameworks: the subaltern’s voice is always already mediated by structures that determine what can be said and what will be heard. In the context of international education, the student can speak, yet what is heard is filtered through the institution’s expectations: grandmother’s wisdom registers as “anecdote” rather than “theory,” as “cultural background” rather than “intellectual contribution.” Spivak made me question the limits of my own methodology. Even Photovoice, for all its participatory commitment, is a researcher-designed method that operates within academic structures. I address this tension through the concept of protective divergence: maintaining analytical separation between my interpretive framework and the students’ visual arguments to prevent my theoretical apparatus from colonising their testimony.

Domain III: Ethics, Trauma, and the Relational Space Between

The ethics domain asks what moral obligations arise from the institutional conditions documented in the sociological and communications domains. These sources shaped my understanding of harm, care, justice, and the relational ethics that ground the entire study.

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001

Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice became one of the most important theoretical tools in my framework. She identifies two forms. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker’s credibility is deflated due to identity prejudice: the international student whose accent leads a faculty member to underestimate their intellectual capacity. Hermeneutical injustice is more structurally insidious: it occurs when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of their own experience. When a student feels the wrongness of being reduced to a tuition unit yet lacks the conceptual language to name what is happening, she experiences hermeneutical injustice. Several of the concepts I develop in this dissertation — including the time tax, malperformative inclusion, and artificial scarcity — are designed in part as tools of hermeneutical justice: providing language for experiences that the institution’s existing vocabulary obscures.

Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education (2nd ed.). University of California Press.

Noddings’ ethics of care shifted my understanding of what the university owes its students. Noddings argues that ethical action arises from the relational “space between” individuals rather than from abstract rules. Care requires proximity, attention, and the willingness to be moved by what one encounters. In the context of international education, care ethics demands attention to the specific, embodied, particular needs of this student in this classroom at this moment, rather than the generic “international student experience” aggregated across institutional data sets. Noddings helped me design the blended witnessing methodology as an enactment of care ethics: the researcher sits with photographs rather than processing them, sits with testimony rather than coding it, and carries the weight of what participants share. The recommendation I develop for the “First Ten Minutes” protocol — asking students how they are arriving before asking what they know — is a direct application of Noddings’ relational ethic.

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.; 50th anniversary ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published 1970)

Freire’s critique of the banking model of education — in which teachers deposit predetermined knowledge into passive student receptacles — catalysed this entire research project. When a student asked “Where do I put grandmother’s wisdom?” and the curriculum had no answer, I realised I had been functioning as a banker for seventeen years: depositing Western management theory into students who were expected to receive it without question. Freire’s concept of conscientisation — the development of critical awareness of one’s social situation — informs the SHOWeD protocol used in this study: the structured movement from “What do you see?” through “Why does this exist?” to “What can we do?” is a Freirean exercise in collective critical consciousness. I also draw on Freire’s later work on unfinishedness (1998) to frame the dissertation itself as incomplete: a contribution to an ongoing conversation rather than a definitive answer.

Ginwright, S. (2018). The future of healing: Shifting from trauma-informed care to healing-centered engagement (Occasional Paper No. 25).

Ginwright’s distinction between trauma-informed care (“What is wrong with you?”) and healing-centred engagement (“What is right with you?”) transformed how I designed the Photovoice prompts. Where a trauma-informed approach might ask students to photograph their difficulties, barriers, and pain, healing-centred engagement asks what is already working, what gives life, what sustains. I designed the photography prompts to invite both: Week 1 focused on belonging and exclusion, Week 2 on barriers and bridges. This dual attention refuses to reduce international students to their precarity. It insists that survival strategies, community practices, and what I term the mindset of enough represent sophisticated forms of resistance and creativity rather than merely the residue of deprivation. Ginwright taught me that the methodology itself can either reproduce extraction or model the relational integrity the findings call for.

Domain IV: Leadership, Governance, and the Performance of Inclusion

The leadership domain asks how institutions perform inclusion in ways that absorb critique and stabilise the very extraction they claim to address. Sara Ahmed’s work is the theoretical lynchpin of my entire framework, and the concepts I develop in response to her analysis represent some of the dissertation’s most significant theoretical contributions.

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.

Ahmed’s On Being Included is the single most important source in this dissertation. Her concept of non-performativity — statements that fail to bring about what they name — became the foundation for my entire analysis of institutional diversity work. Ahmed demonstrates through institutional ethnography how diversity policies and committees operate within universities: the diversity statement becomes a substitute for the action it describes, the commitment to “creating an inclusive environment” becomes the achievement itself, and the environment remains unchanged. I extend Ahmed’s framework in two directions. First, I develop malperformative inclusion: where Ahmed’s non-performativity describes statements that fail to produce intended effects, malperformative inclusion describes institutional actions that succeed in absorbing critique, demonstrating “awareness,” and thereby stabilising the extractive systems they claim to address. The prefix mal- signals active harm rather than mere failure. Second, I extend Ahmed into what I term malperformative aesthetics: the spatial and visual register through which malperformative inclusion materialises in architecture, signage, and institutional space. These extensions represent two of the dissertation’s four primary scholarly contributions.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour provides the framework for understanding the affective dimension of what I call the time tax. Hochschild demonstrated how service workers are required to manage their emotions as part of their job: to smile when angry, to appear calm when frightened, to perform the feeling the employer requires. International students perform a version of this emotional labour constantly: they must appear grateful for the “opportunity” of paying $28,000 in tuition, they must perform enthusiasm in classrooms that devalue their knowledge, and they must manage the homesickness, exhaustion, and anxiety that the architecture of exclusion produces. This affective labour is the fourth component of the time tax, and it is perhaps the most invisible because the institution reads the student’s managed smile as evidence of successful integration rather than as evidence of performed compliance.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.

Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of social interaction helps me understand what I call the front stage and back stage of international student life. On the front stage (classrooms, the Global Lounge, welcome week events), students perform the role the institution expects: grateful, engaged, culturally enriching. On the back stage (packed lunches in hallways, late-night study sessions, overgrown gazebos), they inhabit a different reality: exhausted, isolated, navigating systems that were designed without their rhythms in mind. Goffman’s framework helped me understand why the Photovoice methodology captures what surveys cannot: the camera enters back-stage spaces that the institutional gaze never reaches. It also shaped my understanding of the mindset of enough as a back-stage practice of self-preservation that the institution’s front-stage metrics fail to register.

Domain V: Education, Decolonisation, and What the Curriculum Kills

The education domain asks what the curriculum destroys when it excludes grandmother’s wisdom, and what counter-narratives already exist within the communities the institution marginalises. These sources taught me to see the business school as an intellectual monoculture and to recognise the wealth that students already carry.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.

Kimmerer, a botanist and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, offers what I consider the most generative metaphor in my entire framework: the distinction between monoculture (industrial agriculture’s single-crop logic) and polyculture (the diverse, relational ecosystem that Indigenous land management sustains). I apply this distinction to the business school curriculum. The Western business school functions as an intellectual monoculture: a single epistemological crop (Anglo-American management theory) grown to the exclusion of all others, requiring immense institutional inputs (standardised testing, English proficiency requirements, case study methods) to maintain. This monoculture is profitable in the short term and catastrophically fragile in the long term. Grandmother’s wisdom represents the polyculture: a diverse, relational ecosystem of knowledge that has sustained communities through upheavals that Harvard case studies never anticipated. Kimmerer also shapes my concept of regenerative sufficiency: her insistence that flourishing is mutual, that healthy systems return more than they extract, directly informs the dissertation’s recommendations for institutional transformation.

de Sousa Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers.

De Sousa Santos gave me the word epistemicide: the systematic destruction of knowledge systems that fail to conform to dominant Western academic frameworks. This concept names what happens when the business curriculum dismisses grandmother’s textile business wisdom as “folk knowledge” rather than legitimate economic theory. The case study method, drawn from Anglo-American management theory, strips business decisions of their colonial contexts and positions Western managerialism as the only valid way to organise human activity. De Sousa Santos argues that modern Western thinking is abyssal: it draws a line between what counts as knowledge and what falls into the abyss of ignorance, superstition, or tradition. The grandmother’s wisdom falls on the wrong side of that line. Decolonising the curriculum requires more than adding “diverse” case studies; it requires dismantling the abyssal line itself. This insight informs the dissertation’s argument that the architecture of exclusion operates epistemically as well as spatially and economically.

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

Yosso’s framework of Community Cultural Wealth provides the counter-narrative to deficit models that frame marginalised students as lacking the capital needed to succeed. Where Bourdieu’s original framework risks reinscribing deficit logic by measuring marginalised communities against dominant norms, Yosso identifies six forms of capital that communities of colour cultivate: aspirational (maintaining hope despite barriers), linguistic (multilingual skills), familial (kinship-based knowledge), social (networks), navigational (moving through hostile institutions), and resistant (oppositional knowledge). The grandmother’s textile business represents an abundance of familial, social, and navigational capital. The student already possesses Community Cultural Wealth. The failure lies entirely in the institution’s inability to recognise, receive, and honour that wealth as a legitimate contribution to the academic field. Yosso’s framework helped me design the Photovoice methodology to capture wealth rather than deficit, and directly informs the concept of the mindset of enough.

Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.

Wilson, an Opaskwayak Cree scholar, argues that research creates relationships, and that those relationships carry obligations beyond publication. His concept of relational accountability provides the axiological foundation of this study. While I am a settler researcher using a settler methodology, I draw on Wilson’s framework as an ethical compass: findings must be returned to the communities that generated them, the knowledge generated through this study belongs to those communities, and the institutional capital I gain (the degree, publications, career advancement) must be leveraged toward the structural changes those communities identified as necessary. Wilson’s insistence that research is ceremony also shaped the kitchen table analysis: the physical handling of photographs, the tracing of connections with yarn, the sitting with images before categorising them. These are relational acts — practices of attending to testimony with the seriousness it deserves — rather than merely analytical procedures.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

hooks’ vision of the classroom as a site of liberation rather than conformity shapes the pedagogical commitments that underpin this research. Her concept of engaged pedagogy — drawing on Freire yet extending it through the lens of Black feminist thought — demands that education address the whole person: body, mind, and spirit. hooks argues that the classroom can become a space of “radical openness” where students and teachers alike risk vulnerability in service of genuine learning. I found this framework essential for understanding why the business curriculum at Thompson Rivers University felt so deadening to the students I taught: the banking model I was delivering left no room for the whole person, for the grandmother’s wisdom, for the grief and joy and complexity that students carried into the room every day. hooks also helped me understand my own positioning: as a first-generation university student who grew up in poverty, I carry my own history of educational transgression. My Scholarly Personal Narratives throughout the dissertation are indebted to hooks’ insistence that the personal is always political and always pedagogical.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.

Tuck and Yang’s argument that decolonisation requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life — and that its use as a metaphor for other social justice projects risks trivialising Indigenous sovereignty — disciplines my use of decolonial language throughout the dissertation. I study international student precarity within a settler-colonial institution built on unceded Secwépemc territory. These are connected yet distinct injustices. Tuck and Yang taught me to resist collapsing them: international students face their own forms of displacement, yet their precarity differs fundamentally from Indigenous dispossession. This distinction runs through the land acknowledgements that frame the dissertation and through the concept of asymmetrical precarity itself, which insists on connection without equivalence. I engage decolonial frameworks as ethical guides for how the university might restructure itself, while acknowledging that the restructuring I propose operates within, rather than beyond, settler-colonial institutions.

Methodological Sources: Building Blended Witnessing

The following sources shaped the design of blended witnessing, the methodology I developed for this study. They taught me how to hold participant voice and researcher reflexivity in productive tension, how to analyse visual data with rigour, how to slow down, and how to treat absence as evidence.

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Nash developed Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) as a method for generating scholarly insight through the researcher’s own experience. Nash argues that the personal narrative, when grounded in theoretical engagement and reflexive awareness, constitutes a rigorous form of scholarly inquiry rather than mere autobiography. SPN refuses the “view from nowhere” that traditional academic writing implies, insisting that all knowledge is situated and that acknowledging situatedness strengthens rather than weakens scholarly claims. Nash’s work gave me permission to write my own story alongside my participants’ stories: to describe the cold coffee in the parking lot, the layoff alongside the Teaching Award, the kitchen table where the analysis began. Yet I needed to manage the risk that my narrative would overshadow participant testimony. This is where I developed protective divergence: maintaining analytical separation between my voice and theirs to prevent appropriation while enabling the resonance that Nash’s approach makes possible.

Nash, R. J., & Bradley, D. L. (2011). Me-search and re-search: A guide for writing scholarly personal narrative manuscripts. Information Age Publishing.

Nash and Bradley extend the SPN methodology with practical guidance for constructing scholarly personal narratives that meet academic standards of rigour. Their concept of me-search — the rigorous examination of one’s own life as a source of scholarly insight — helped me frame my positionality as analytical data rather than confessional preamble. They argue that the best SPN manuscripts achieve what they call universalisability: the capacity of a highly particular story to resonate across contexts and audiences. I found this concept essential for understanding why my experience as a contract faculty member at a small Canadian university could illuminate structural dynamics of academic capitalism operating globally. My story is particular. The architecture of exclusion it documents is systemic.

Smith, J. A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: Theory, method, and research. SAGE Publications.

Smith, Flowers, and Larkin developed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as a qualitative approach that combines phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation and idiographic commitment. IPA demands that each participant’s experience be understood on its own terms before cross-case patterns are identified, and it acknowledges the researcher’s interpretive role through the concept of double hermeneutics: the researcher is making sense of the participant making sense of their experience. IPA provides the systematic analytical rigour that both Photovoice and SPN require. Without it, the analysis risks impressionistic reading. With it, the themes that emerge carry the weight of systematic interpretive engagement. I adapted IPA for visual data, which represents an extension of its traditional application to interview transcripts, and integrated it with the kitchen table analysis approach to create the dual-mode analytical structure of blended witnessing.

Mertens, D. M. (2009). Transformative research and evaluation. Guilford Press.

Mertens articulates the critical-transformative paradigm within which this entire study is situated. This paradigm holds that research should serve the interests of marginalised communities and contribute to social transformation. Mertens rejects the positivist assumption that research can or should be value-neutral, insisting that all research is political and that researchers carry an ethical obligation to use their work in service of justice. This paradigmatic commitment shaped every aspect of my research design: from the research questions (which position students as experts on their own experience) to the methodology (which hands cameras to students rather than surveying them from above) to the knowledge mobilisation plan (which returns findings to participant communities before academic audiences). Mertens’ framework also informed the trauma-informed protocols I built into the data collection procedures, recognising that research with precarious populations carries heightened ethical obligations.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges provides the epistemological foundation for blended witnessing. Haraway argues that only partial perspective promises objective vision, and that refusing what she calls the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” produces more honest and accountable scholarship. I translate this into the binocular vision metaphor: one eye (the participant’s) sees the lived experience of exclusion, while the other (the researcher’s) sees the institutional mechanisms that produce it. Together, they generate depth perception that neither alone could provide. Haraway taught me that my positioning as a contract faculty member, far from being a bias to be managed, is an analytical resource: my partial perspective reveals dimensions of the architecture of exclusion that a fully secure researcher would lack the embodied knowledge to perceive.

Mazzei, L. A. (2007). Inhabited silence: Finding meaning in the gaps of qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(2), 217–233.

Mazzei’s concept of inhabited silence argues that silences in qualitative research are analytically rich rather than empty. What participants choose to leave unsaid, what they avoid, deflect, or refuse to discuss, reveals as much about their social conditions as what they articulate. I extend Mazzei’s analysis from silences within participation to the absence of participation altogether through the concept of ghost data. When the most precarious potential participant withdraws because the very conditions the study examines have consumed their capacity, that withdrawal is structural evidence of those conditions. Mazzei gave me the theoretical permission to treat an empty folder with the same analytical seriousness I bring to completed data sets. Without her work, I might have reported the withdrawal as a limitation rather than recognising it as a finding.

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.

Mountz et al. articulate slow scholarship as a feminist politics of resistance to the accelerated timelines of the neoliberal academy. They argue that the pressure to produce, publish, and perform at ever-increasing speeds undermines the reflective, relational, and care-intensive practices that qualitative inquiry requires. Their work gave me the theoretical justification for the kitchen table analysis: beginning with the physical handling of photographs, the tracing of connections with yarn and Post-it notes, the sitting with images before digitising them. In a doctoral programme that tracks milestones against timelines, choosing to slow down was itself a political act. Mountz et al. taught me that the speed of analysis shapes its quality, and that the embodied, relational, slow engagement with participant photographs constitutes a form of care that the software platform cannot replicate.

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

Kohl and McCutcheon argue that the kitchen table has historically functioned as a site of women’s intellectual labour, community organising, and knowledge production. By locating initial analysis at the kitchen table, I position this study within a feminist lineage that values relational, embodied, and situated forms of knowing. The kitchen table where I analysed participant photographs is the same table where I graded student papers for seventeen years, the surface scarred by coffee rings and red pen marks. Kohl and McCutcheon helped me see that this location carries analytical meaning: the analysis is conducted in the domestic space of care rather than the institutional space of extraction, and the researcher’s body is present to the data in ways that screen-based interaction cannot replicate. The kitchen table is where the themes first emerged, and the physical traces of that process — the yarn connections, the Post-it clusters — became part of the audit trail documented in the dissertation’s appendices.

These thirty sources represent the intellectual community within which this dissertation was written. They are the scholars whose arguments I returned to repeatedly, whose frameworks I found indispensable, and whose limitations I sought to address through the original contributions this study develops. They do not constitute a comprehensive reference list: the full dissertation cites over two hundred sources across six chapters. Yet these are the ones that most profoundly shaped the questions I asked, the methods I designed, and the concepts I contributed to the field.

I share them here because I believe that scholarly genealogy matters. Every concept has a history. Every framework carries the fingerprints of those who built it. Understanding where the architecture of exclusion came from, which conversations it extends, and which limitations it inherits, is essential for anyone who wants to use, critique, or build upon this work.