The Scholarly Personal Narrative Strand: The Researcher’s Own Story

What follows is the complete Scholarly Personal Narrative strand that runs through my dissertation as Appendix N. This is my own story, written as research. It contains only the researcher’s own story, without participant data or participant photographs, or empirical findings. It contains the researcher’s account of the conditions that produced this study, the nineteen years of institutional experience that shaped every question I brought to it, and the ongoing reckoning with what it means to have taught inside a system I was simultaneously studying.

Scholarly Personal Narrative is the methodology developed by Robert J. Nash (2004) in which the researcher’s lived experience is woven into the scholarly argument as data and analysis simultaneously. The SPN strand in this dissertation is part of the study’s evidence base, presented as Appendix N because it stands as a coherent document in its own right rather than as a dispersed series of first-person passages. For the methodological justification of SPN as a legitimate research form, see the What Is a Scholarly Personal Narrative? page and the Methodology chapter.

Part One: Cold Coffee and the Beginning of a Question

The research began the way all honest research begins: with something I could neither explain nor set aside.

It was a Tuesday in November 2022. I had been teaching business ethics at Thompson Rivers University for seventeen years at that point (it is nineteen now) and I was sitting in my office between classes drinking cold coffee and grading a set of case analyses. The case was about supply chain ethics: a garment manufacturer, a contractor in Bangladesh, a fire, a question of liability. Standard curriculum. I had taught it a dozen times.

One of the papers I was grading stopped me. A student I will call Nadia had analyzed the case in a way I had never seen before. She had re-framed the entire supply chain question as a question of what the contractor’s workers understood about the system they were inside, and whether that understanding constituted a form of knowledge that the Western corporate framework structurally refused to recognize. The argument was sophisticated, original, and directly applicable to the institutional situation Nadia herself was navigating as an international student at TRU.

I gave her an A and wrote a comment: “This analysis is excellent. Have you considered graduate school?” She replied: “I have a study permit. I cannot apply to graduate programs here without first returning home. Also, I cannot afford it.”

I sat with that for a long time. The student who had just produced the most sophisticated analysis in my classroom that semester was unable to pursue it further because of a system that had extracted her tuition revenue and would soon extract her. Her knowledge, in Nadia’s own word when I later asked her, felt “disposable.” I disagreed with her. But the institutional evidence was unavailable to me that I was right.

Part Two: Nineteen Years Inside the Architecture

I have been a contract faculty member at TRU since 2005. Contract means semester-by-semester. It means no benefits when there is no contract, no office when there is no contract, no guarantee of continuation when the semester ends. It means teaching four or five courses a semester to approximate a living wage while colleagues on continuing appointments teach three. It means knowing, at the beginning of each semester, that your employment depends on enrollment numbers you cannot control and administrative decisions you are rarely consulted about.

For a long time, I held this as a private condition. I taught ethics while living inside a set of institutional conditions that a business ethics course would identify as structurally unjust. I named labour exploitation in case studies while being, by most standard definitions, an exploited worker. This is the contradiction I live inside, and it is the contradiction that made this research possible and necessary.

The concept of asymmetrical precarity emerged from this contradiction. I was precarious. My students were precarious. We were precarious in structurally analogous ways: both of us depended on institutional discretion, both of us could be removed without procedural difficulty, both of us arrived each semester knowing that our continuation was conditional. But the asymmetry between us was real and significant. My right to remain in Canada, to access healthcare, to live in my home, was unconditional. My students’ right to remain in Canada was tied to continuous enrollment. The precarity rhymed. It was in different registers.

Part Three: The January 2026 Semester

In January 2026, TRU sent me the Faculty Council Teaching Award and a layoff notice in the same month. The award was for nineteen years of service to the university’s teaching mission. The notice was for what the university described as “curriculum restructuring.” The course I had taught for a decade , the course through which most of the material in this dissertation passed, through which hundreds of international students had worked, was being discontinued.

I include this here because it is both data and context. It demonstrates, at the level of the researcher’s own experience, the mechanism this dissertation analyzes at the level of institutional structure. The institution performed its appreciation of my contribution while simultaneously discontinuing it. The teaching award and the layoff notice are a single gesture, read correctly. They are malperformative inclusion in the register of labour.

I want to be careful here. My situation is a data point, peripheral to the study’s central findings. The students I researched face this gesture at a different scale and with different stakes. But I include it because one of the methodological commitments of Scholarly Personal Narrative is that the researcher’s experience is allowed to be part of the evidence, and because leaving this event out would be a form of selective disclosure that would undermine the SPN methodology’s central claim.

Part Four: What I Brought to This Research and What It Did to Me

I came to this research with a theoretical framework already developed. Asymmetrical precarity, malperformative inclusion, ghost data: I had named these concepts before I met my research participants. That is a methodological risk, and I want to be honest about it. Pre-existing theoretical commitments can function as confirmation bias, directing the researcher’s attention toward evidence that confirms the framework and away from evidence that challenges it.

What this research did to me, analytically, was demonstrate that some of my pre-existing concepts were approximately right while others required significant revision. The concept of ghost data, for example, was originally focused on institutional data collection practices: the surveys that international students fill out, the feedback mechanisms that record their responses but produce no change, the information that enters institutional systems and is structurally unavailable to produce institutional response. What the research expanded was my understanding of what counts as ghost data. Participant knowledge, expressed in photographs and interviews, that the institution has no mechanism for receiving is also ghost data. The concept had to expand to accommodate what the participants showed me.

This is what good research does. It changes the researcher’s mind. I am a different scholar than I was when I designed this study, and the dissertation reflects that in ways I hope the examining board will read as evidence of rigour rather than inconsistency.

Part Five: What I Owe

I owe this research to every student who sat in my classroom and handed me their thinking, knowing it would be graded and returned rather than built upon. I owe it to Nadia, whose analysis stopped me in my tracks and whose situation I could describe but lacked the power to fix. I owe it to the students who participated in this study, who trusted me with their photographs and their words and their analyses of a system that had given them reason to be cautious about trusting anyone with institutional authority.

I also owe it to the discipline. For nineteen years I have taught students that ethical analysis requires the analyst to examine the system they are inside, including their own position within it. This dissertation is that analysis. It is the most uncomfortable piece of writing I have produced, and the most important.

Reference

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

Pages

Appendix N: The Scholarly Personal Narrative Strand