The Theoretical Lenses of This Study
Every research study looks at the world through a set of conceptual lenses. These lenses shape what the researcher knows to look for and provide the vocabulary for naming what is found. This page introduces the five theoretical domains that together form the conceptual framework for this dissertation. They are an integrated architecture, each one illuminating a different dimension of the same structural problem.
Domain One: Precarity and the Gig Academy
The first domain draws on scholarship about precarity in higher education. Precarity, as theorised by Guy Standing (2011), refers to more than economic insecurity. It describes the broader condition of existing without the protections, stability, and social recognition that allow people to plan, connect, and belong. In higher education, this condition is extensively documented among contract faculty whose positions are renewed semester by semester at the institution’s discretion, and increasingly among international students whose right to remain is conditioned on continuous enrolment, compliance, and payment.
Adrianna Kezar and colleagues (2019) use the phrase “the gig academy” to describe the contemporary university: an institution that has systematically dismantled stable employment in favour of contingent, flexible, precarious arrangements. That framework applies to the people who teach in universities. I argue it applies equally to the students those universities recruit.
Domain Two: International Student Experience
The second domain draws on scholarship documenting international student experience in Canadian higher education, including work by Sidhu (2006), Stein and Andreotti (2016), and Bhambra and colleagues (2018). This literature maps the contradiction at the heart of Canadian international education: students are recruited as revenue sources and celebrated as contributors to campus diversity, while navigating institutions structurally organised around domestic student norms, Western epistemologies, and English-language cultural assumptions. They pay more. They receive less. They are expected to be grateful.
Domain Three: Critical University Studies
The third domain situates the study within critical university studies, drawing on Chris Newfield (2016) and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) to understand how the neoliberal university operates as an economic institution that deploys the language of inclusion to serve the logic of extraction. The architecture of exclusion this study investigates is a structural feature of institutions designed to accumulate revenue while performing social mission.
Domain Four: Participatory Visual Methodologies and Epistemic Justice
The fourth domain draws on Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997), participatory action research (Freire, 1970/2018; Mertens, 2009), and epistemic justice (Fricker, 2007). Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, the wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower, provides the ethical foundation for this study’s methodological choices. Handing cameras to international students and asking them to theorise their own conditions is a methodological response to the epistemic injustice of a curriculum that had, for years, held no room for what they already knew.
Domain Five: Care Ethics, Trauma-Informed Practice, and Relational Research
The fifth domain draws on care ethics (Noddings, 1984; Gilligan, 1982) and trauma-informed approaches to research (Ellsberg & Heise, 2005) to frame the relational obligations this study generates. Research with populations navigating precarity, immigration anxiety, and institutional marginalisation creates ethical responsibilities that extend beyond standard research ethics protocols. This domain provides the vocabulary for understanding why witnessing, being genuinely present to another’s experience and receiving their testimony with seriousness, is an ethical stance before it is a methodological one.
How These Domains Work Together
These five domains do not each answer a separate question. Together, they allow this study to see the international student experience as simultaneously an economic condition (domains one and three), a pedagogical and epistemic condition (domains two and four), and a relational and ethical condition (domain five). A study using only one of these lenses would produce a partial picture. The integration is the contribution.
Full citations for all scholars referenced here appear in the Annotated Bibliography and Literature Review.