Reflexivity Journal: Selected Entries

A reflexivity journal is a researcher’s running account of the analytical decisions, interpretive tensions, and positionality questions that arise throughout the research process. It is where the researcher goes when the data says something unexpected, when a theoretical commitment is challenged, or when the gap between what the study was designed to find and what it is actually finding becomes too large to ignore.

I kept this journal throughout the research process, from the design stage through the final analysis. What follows are selected entries that illuminate the major analytical turning points and positionality questions I navigated. The full journal is on file as part of the research record. The entries here are reproduced with only minor editorial adjustments for clarity and length. They are written as the field notes they were: in the moment, with the uncertainty intact.

Entry 1: Before the Ethics Application

Date: Autumn 2024

I have been circling this research question for three years. Every time I sit down to formalize it, I run into the same problem: I am both the researcher and part of the system being studied. I am a TRU faculty member. I teach international students. I am, by any reasonable definition, an actor within the architecture of exclusion I am trying to analyze.

The standard methodological answer to this problem is to acknowledge it and move on. State your positionality, note the limitation, proceed. I keep thinking that is insufficient. If my positionality shapes what I am able to see, then acknowledging it at the front of the dissertation and then proceeding to write as if I have set it aside is a kind of methodological dishonesty. Scholarly Personal Narrative offers a different answer: make the positionality part of the data. Let it be visible in the analysis rather than footnoted. I think that is the right call. I am still working out what it means in practice.

Entry 2: After the First Ethics Approval

Date: January 2025

TRU has approved the study. I expected to feel relieved. Instead I feel the weight of the approval. The ethics board asked several questions I had answered incompletely in my initial submission, including one I had been avoiding: what is the power differential between you and your participants, and what have you done about it?

I had answered this question in the abstract. The board wanted it answered concretely. A faculty member at TRU has institutional power over students at TRU. Full stop. The fact that I am a contract faculty member, precarious by my own measure, fails to dissolve that power. It complicates it. The asymmetry I am studying runs between us even as we sit at the same research table.

I revised the consent framework to name this explicitly rather than euphemize it. The recruitment letter now includes the sentence: “The researcher is a faculty member at TRU. This creates a potential power imbalance. This study was designed specifically to protect you from that imbalance.” Naming it directly felt more ethical than managing it through procedural language.

Entry 3: During the Photography Period

Date: February 2025

I decided to take photographs myself during the two-week participant photography period. This was an experiment in blended witnessing: if I am asking participants to look at TRU through a camera, I should be doing the same thing, with my own camera, through my own eyes, at the same time.

The photographs I am taking are different from what I expected. I keep photographing food. The Tim Hortons lineup at 8am. The vending machine in the building where my office is. The faculty lounge where the coffee is always cold by the time I get there. I keep photographing the backs of buildings. The loading docks. The parking structures. The places where the institution’s infrastructure is visible in ways its public face conceals.

I remain uncertain whether these photographs are analytically significant yet. But I am noticing that what I photograph as a faculty member on this campus looks nothing like the photographs in TRU’s international student recruitment materials. That gap might be the beginning of something.

Entry 4: After the First Individual Interview

Date: March 2025

I am unprepared for how good these photographs are. I mean that in an analytical rather than aesthetic sense. I mean analytically. In nineteen years of teaching, I have never had a student show me the campus the way the participant I will call Alpha showed it to me today.

Alpha photographed a series of institutional signs. Bilingual in English and French. Nothing in Mandarin, Tagalog, Hindi, or any of the languages represented in TRU’s international student population. Alpha said: “They put both official languages. They do their duty. But the message is: you are a guest here, and guests go without a sign.” I wrote that down verbatim. It is the clearest description of malperformative inclusion I have encountered in the literature, and it came from a student describing a sign.

Reflexivity note: I need to be careful. I am already reaching for this account to confirm a concept I developed before the research began. That is confirmation bias dressed up as resonance. The test is whether the concept helps me understand what Alpha said, or whether I am bending what Alpha said to fit the concept. I will sit with this before I write anything.

Entry 5: During the Analysis: On Leaving Things Unresolved

Date: April 2025

I have been trying to resolve a tension in the analysis for two weeks. On one side: the data suggests that structural precarity is something participants experience as ambient, pervasive, and largely invisible to the institution. On the other side: several participants described moments of acute institutional awareness, moments when the structure became suddenly and painfully visible. These two things seem to be in tension. The ambient experience of structural invisibility alongside the acute experience of structural recognition.

I think the tension is real and analytically significant, and I am making a decision to leave it unresolved in the analysis rather than force a synthesis that smooths it over. IPA is comfortable with internal complexity within a case; it is also comfortable with unresolved tension across cases. The dissertation will carry this tension rather than resolve it. I am writing a memo to this effect so that I can trace this decision if the examining board asks about it.

A Note on What Is Held

The entries above represent the researcher-facing dimension of the reflexivity journal: analytical decisions, positionality questions, and methodological choices that can be shared before the doctoral defence. Later entries in the journal engage directly with participant accounts and are held in confidence until after the defence and participant review. The full journal is available to the supervisory committee and the examining board as part of the dissertation record.

Pages

Appendix M: Reflexivity Journal — Selected Entries