A guide to the theoretical and methodological concepts that recur throughout this research
The terms below are drawn from existing scholarship and from original theoretical and methodological contributions developed through this study. All are defined here as they are used in the dissertation and on this website. Where a term is original to this study, I indicate this explicitly and note the existing scholarship it builds upon. Additional terms generated through participant analysis will be added to this glossary following the doctoral defence.
Academic capitalism. The reconfiguration of universities under market logics that prioritise revenue generation and competitive positioning. Under academic capitalism, knowledge shifts from a public good to a private commodity, and students shift from learners to consumers and revenue sources. The term helps explain why international students pay four times the tuition of domestic students while receiving equivalent or lesser institutional support. Source: Slaughter & Rhoades (2004).
Architecture of exclusion. The integrated system of economic, spatial, epistemic, and performative mechanisms through which institutional exclusion operates. These mechanisms reinforce each other: economic precarity limits time for campus engagement, spatial separation reduces opportunities for epistemic recognition, and performative inclusion masks the operation of all three. I use the metaphor of architecture deliberately: exclusion is far from incidental; it is structurally built in. Original to this study.
Artificial scarcity. The institutional production of resource limitations that serve extractive logics rather than reflecting genuine constraints. The university claims there is never “enough” to support students while demanding everything from them. This concept names the gap between an institution’s financial capacity and its stated inability to act. Original to this study.
Asymmetrical precarity. Shared structural insecurity across marginalised populations with dramatically different stakes and consequences. Contract faculty and international students both experience conditional belonging, yet the stakes of failure differ enormously: job loss versus deportation. This concept insists on structural connection without collapsing difference. Original to this study.
Binocular vision. The metaphor for blended witnessing: 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 eye alone could provide, revealing the architecture of exclusion as an integrated system. Original to this study.
Blended witnessing. The methodology developed for this study, braiding Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) with Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004) through protective divergence. The method maintains participant voice primacy while making researcher positionality visible as analytical data. The term “witnessing” signals an ethical stance: to be present to another’s experience and carry that testimony forward with the seriousness it deserves. Original to this study.
Community Cultural Wealth. A framework recognising six forms of capital that communities of colour cultivate and carry: aspirational (maintaining hope despite barriers), linguistic (multilingual skills and communication styles), familial (kinship-based knowledge and community history), social (peer networks), navigational (skills for moving through hostile institutions), and resistant (knowledge of strategies for resisting subordination). Counters deficit models that frame marginalised students as lacking. Source: Yosso (2005).
Critical-transformative paradigm. A research paradigm holding that inquiry should serve the interests of marginalised communities and contribute to social transformation. Rejects the positivist assumption that research can or should be value-neutral, and insists on the political nature of all knowledge production. This paradigm shapes every aspect of this study’s design. Source: Mertens (2009).
Epistemic injustice. The systematic marginalisation of certain knowledge systems, ways of knowing, and knowers from institutional legitimacy. Fricker (2007) identifies two forms: testimonial injustice, in which a speaker’s credibility is deflated due to identity prejudice, and hermeneutical injustice, in which someone lacks the conceptual resources to make sense of their own experience because dominant frameworks have withheld those resources from them. Source: Fricker (2007).
Epistemicide. The structural destruction of knowledge systems that fail to conform to dominant Western academic frameworks. In business education, this manifests when relational, intergenerational, and community-embedded economic knowledge is rendered illegitimate by curricula organised around Anglo-American management theory. The grandmother’s wisdom is killed, actively erased rather than left to fade. Source: de Sousa Santos (2014).
Epistemology. The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge: what can be known, how it can be known, and whose ways of knowing count as legitimate. In research design, epistemology sits between ontology (what exists) and methodology (how we study it), shaping the relationship a researcher is permitted to have with participants and with data. This study works from a constructivist-interpretivist epistemology, holding that knowledge is co-constructed in context rather than discovered in objective isolation. That position is what makes participatory visual methods, and the centering of participant voice, coherent rather than merely politically appealing. Source: Creswell (2014); Guba & Lincoln (1994).
Ghost data. Participant attrition treated as structural finding rather than methodological failure. Ghost data maps the outer limits of participation under conditions of precarity: when the most precarious participant disappears before data collection can occur, that disappearance is itself the finding. It asks what the system takes before testimony can exist. Original to this study; builds on Mazzei’s (2007) concept of inhabited silence.
Grandmother’s wisdom. Non-Western, relationally embedded knowledge systems that students carry from their home contexts, including intergenerational business practices and community-based economic logics. Functions throughout this study as a metonym for epistemically legitimate knowledge that the institution renders illegitimate. The term originates from a catalysing classroom moment in September 2022, when a student asked where her grandmother’s textile business knowledge belonged in the case study analysis.
Healing-centred engagement. An approach that moves beyond trauma-informed care (“What is wrong with you?”) toward politically grounded, culturally responsive collective wellbeing (“What is right with you?”). Where trauma-informed care focuses on individual harm, healing-centred engagement asks about collective strengths, assets, and sources of sustenance. Source: Ginwright (2018).
Institutional gaslighting. The systematic denial, minimisation, or reframing of structural harm experienced by marginalised members of an institution, in ways that cause those members to question their own perceptions and experiences. Institutional gaslighting occurs when universities respond to documented patterns of exclusion by attributing student or faculty distress to individual deficits, cultural misunderstanding, or personal sensitivity rather than to the structural conditions producing that distress. It differs from interpersonal gaslighting in that the mechanism is bureaucratic and diffuse: no single actor is responsible, yet the effect of discrediting lived experience is systematic and cumulative. In this study, institutional gaslighting appears when the gap between what the institution promises and what it delivers is absorbed into diversity rhetoric rather than addressed through structural change. Original to this study; builds on Ahmed (2012) and Fricker (2007).
Institutional violence. The harm produced by institutional systems, structures, and policies operating as designed, rather than by individual actors behaving badly. Institutional violence does not require intent: it operates through the ordinary functioning of bureaucratic processes, funding models, policy frameworks, and evaluation systems that consistently produce harmful outcomes for particular populations. In this study, institutional violence describes the cumulative harm of semester-by-semester contract renewal for faculty, the four-fold tuition differential for international students, and the study permit cap that converted international students from “global citizens” to political scapegoats without their circumstances changing. The concept insists that naming harm requires attending to structure, not only to behaviour. Original to this study; builds on Galtung’s (1969) concept of structural violence and Bourdieu’s (1991) symbolic violence.
Kitchen table analysis. An analogue-first analytical approach drawing on feminist traditions of kitchen table reflexivity (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015) and slow scholarship (Mountz et al., 2015). Participant photographs are physically printed, arranged on a surface, and traced for emergent connections using coloured tags and yarn before digital coding begins. The approach treats the embodied act of handling photographs as analytically significant. Original practice.
Malperformative aesthetics. The spatial and visual register through which institutions perform inclusion symbolically while withholding the conditions that would make those spaces genuinely inhabitable. A locked lounge, a diversity mural in a hallway international students rarely use, a welcome banner in multiple languages above a door that closes at 5:00 PM: these are malperformative aesthetics. Extends Ahmed’s (2012) non-performativity into visual and architectural analysis. Original to this study.
Malperformative inclusion. Institutional actions that demonstrate awareness of exclusion while maintaining the conditions that produce it. Distinct from non-performativity (which implies failure) in that malperformative inclusion describes actions that succeed in absorbing critique, signalling awareness, and thereby stabilising extractive systems. The prefix mal- signals active harm rather than mere ineffectiveness. Original to this study; extends Ahmed (2012).
Mindset of enough. A proposed counter-logic that reframes student survival strategies as sophisticated resistance to institutional artificial scarcity. Rather than accepting that there is never “enough,” this orientation creates sufficiency through community, refuge, and relational practice. Students who share meals, study together, and build mutual support networks are doing far more than coping: they are refusing the institution’s scarcity logic. Original to this study.
Non-performativity. Statements or commitments that fail to bring about what they name. A diversity statement that substitutes for diversity action is non-performative: it names a goal and in doing so releases the institution from the obligation to achieve it. Source: Ahmed (2012).
Paradigm. A set of foundational assumptions about the nature of reality (ontology), the nature of knowledge (epistemology), and the relationship between the researcher and what is being studied (axiology), which together shape how research is designed and conducted. Thomas Kuhn (1962) introduced the concept to describe how scientific communities operate within shared frameworks of understanding until anomalies accumulate and a paradigm shift becomes necessary. In social science research, paradigm choices are rarely made explicit but always operative: the same social problem looks different depending on whether a researcher approaches it from a positivist, interpretivist, critical-transformative, or pragmatist paradigm. This study operates within a critical-transformative paradigm, holding that inquiry must serve the interests of those experiencing structural harm and must contribute to conditions that make that harm visible and addressable. Source: Kuhn (1962); Mertens (2009); Guba & Lincoln (1994).
Performative silence. The institutional practice of doing without saying: enacting material change that requires no reputational return and generates no institutional credit. The regenerative inversion of non-performativity. Where non-performativity says much and does nothing, performative silence does something and says nothing. Original to this study.
Photovoice. A participatory action research method developed for community health research in which community members use cameras to document their own lives, concerns, and strengths. The method then uses structured group discussion to analyse those photographs collectively and develop recommendations for change. Positions cameras in community members’ hands rather than in the researcher’s, making participants the experts on their own experience. Source: Wang & Burris (1997).
Protective divergence. The analytical strategy of maintaining deliberate separation between researcher experience and participant testimony to prevent appropriation while enabling solidarity. The researcher’s story and the participants’ stories run parallel without merging: resonant yet kept distinct. Original to this study.
Racial capitalism. The process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person. Robinson (1983) argued that capitalism has always depended on the racialisation of those from whom value is extracted. In the context of international education, the institution extracts both financial capital and “diversity capital” while externalising the costs of survival onto racialised students. Source: C. Robinson (1983).
Regenerative sufficiency. A proposed institutional design principle that restores time, space, and relational capacity to students in proportion to what has been extracted. Where artificial scarcity creates profitable enclosures, regenerative sufficiency opens them, returning resources rather than accumulating them. Original to this study.
Relational accountability. The recognition that research creates relationships carrying obligations beyond publication. Findings must be returned to the communities that generated them, and the institutional capital generated through research must be leveraged in service of those communities’ stated needs. Source: Wilson (2008).
SHOWeD protocol. A structured six-stage questioning technique developed for Photovoice group analysis: What do you See? What is really Happening? How does this relate to Our lives? Why does this situation exist? How could this Educate others? What can we Do? The protocol moves participants from literal description through systemic analysis to actionable recommendations. Source: Wang & Burris (1997).
Situated knowledges. The argument that only partial perspective promises objective vision. Haraway (1988) contends that the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” produces dishonest scholarship, and that acknowledging where we stand makes our seeing more reliable, rather than less so. All knowledge is produced from somewhere, by someone. Source: Haraway (1988).
Symbolic violence. The imposition of meaning systems that legitimise power relations by making them appear natural and inevitable. In higher education, Bourdieu (1991) identifies “Standard English” proficiency as a mechanism of symbolic violence: conflating one dialect with intelligence renders all others deficient without appearing to do so. Source: Bourdieu (1991).
Time tax. The compounded temporal extraction experienced through immigration, economic, linguistic, and affective labour that depletes international students’ capacity for academic engagement. Students working graveyard shifts to pay tuition, managing visa paperwork, performing emotional labour in every classroom interaction, and translating their identities for institutional legibility are paying a time tax the institution neither measures nor acknowledges. Original to this study; extends C. Robinson (1983).
Theoretical framework. The structured set of theories, concepts, and scholarly perspectives a researcher uses to interpret data and situate findings within existing knowledge. A theoretical framework is the intellectual architecture of a study: it determines what the researcher looks for, what vocabulary is available for naming what is found, and which scholarly conversations the research enters. It differs from a conceptual framework in emphasis: a theoretical framework foregrounds the established theories being drawn upon, while a conceptual framework maps the relationship between those theories and the specific concepts central to the study. In this dissertation, the theoretical framework draws across precarity theory, critical university studies, organisational sociology, epistemic justice, and care ethics. The full framework is described on the Conceptual Framework page. Source: Creswell (2014); Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña (2014).
Typology. A classification system that groups phenomena into distinct, theoretically meaningful categories based on shared structural features. In social science research, typologies are developed inductively from data or deductively from theory, and they do analytical work by making variation visible: rather than treating all instances of a phenomenon as equivalent, a typology asks how and why they differ. This study develops typologies of precarity and of institutional response, distinguishing between forms of conditional belonging that share surface features but operate through different mechanisms and carry different stakes. A well-constructed typology is a contribution to theory: it offers future researchers a vocabulary for seeing distinctions that were previously unnamed. Source: Patton (2015); Weber (1949).
Terms marked “Original to this study” represent conceptual contributions developed through this dissertation. All other terms are defined as they are used in this research and draw on the cited sources. Participant-generated concepts that emerged through collaborative analysis will be added to this glossary following the doctoral defence.
For the full academic reference list supporting these definitions, see the Annotated Bibliography page.