How Five Disciplines Reveal the Architecture of Exclusion as a System
“If colonialism is the practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another, then the study of how colonialism works and what it produces is a study of how the practice of domination shapes the knowledge that gets produced.”
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 1999/2021
To fully grasp what I call the architecture of exclusion within the neoliberal university, I cannot rely on a single disciplinary lens. A sociological analysis might explain the economic drivers, yet it misses the emotional toll. An ethical analysis might illuminate the moral failure, yet it misses the bureaucratic mechanisms that sustain it. This dissertation therefore weaves together five distinct yet interconnected domains of scholarship. Each strand contributes essential analytical capacity while remaining insufficient on its own. Together, they reveal the architecture of exclusion as a system rather than a collection of isolated problems.
Table 6
Five-Domain Theoretical Framework
| Domain | Key Theorists | What It Reveals | Core Concept |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sociology | Slaughter & Rhoades (2004); C. Robinson (1983); Bourdieu (1984); Standing (2011) | The university as extractive engine: converting student presence into capital while maintaining precarity | Academic capitalism; racial capitalism; asymmetrical precarity |
| Communications | Bourdieu (1991); Rose (2016); Wang & Burris (1997) | How linguistic hierarchies and the colonial gaze silence knowledge systems the institution refuses to recognise | Symbolic violence; Photovoice as epistemic intervention |
| Ethics | Noddings (2013); Fricker (2007); Freire (1998); Ginwright (2018) | The gap between institutional duty of care and lived harm; the wrong done when student knowledge is dismissed | Epistemic injustice; healing-centred engagement |
| Leadership | Ahmed (2012) | How diversity rhetoric absorbs critique and contains institutional risk rather than effecting change | Non-performativity; malperformative inclusion |
| Education | Kimmerer (2013); Wilson (2008); de Sousa Santos (2014); Yosso (2005) | The curriculum as site of knowledge system destruction; counter-narratives of community cultural wealth | Epistemicide; Community Cultural Wealth |
Note. Each domain contributes distinct analytical capacity. Together, they converge on a single claim: that international student precarity is a designed outcome stabilised through institutional practices that obscure extraction beneath the language of inclusion.
Sociology: The University as Extractive Engine
Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) developed the concept of academic capitalism to describe the integration of colleges and universities into market logics. Under academic capitalism, the university ceases to function primarily as a public good and becomes a market actor. Knowledge shifts from public resource to private commodity, and students shift from learners to consumers. This “consumer” model is, however, applied unevenly. While domestic students are subsidised by the state, international students are exposed to full market volatility, paying roughly four times the tuition of their domestic peers, with no corresponding increase in institutional support.
I extend this framework through Cedric Robinson’s (1983) concept of racial capitalism, arguing that the international student dynamic is racialised as well as economic. Racial capitalism names the process through which capitalism extracts value from the racial identity of others, treating racialised difference as a resource to be monetised. The “international student” is overwhelmingly a racialised subject from the Global South. The institution extracts value from their “diversity” (for brochures) and their finances (for budgets) while rendering their actual lives precarious. I develop the concept of the time tax to name the compounded temporal extraction experienced through immigration labour, economic labour, linguistic labour, and affective labour. Time itself becomes an enclosed resource extracted from those the institution claims to serve.
Guy Standing’s (2011) concept of the precariat (a class defined by permanent temporariness) frames the structural position of both international students and the contract faculty who teach them. I develop asymmetrical precarity to name this connection: shared patterns of institutional treatment that rhyme without being identical, vulnerabilities that overlap without being interchangeable. I can lose my job. My students can lose their country.
Communications: The Politics of Voice
Bourdieu’s (1991) analysis of linguistic capital 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 often face symbolic violence (Bourdieu’s term for the imposition of meaning systems that make social hierarchies appear natural and inevitable) when their multilingual repertoires are framed as deficits rather than assets. The student who speaks four languages yet apologises for “broken English” has internalised the institution’s hierarchy. This internalisation silences the very knowledge systems that could enrich the classroom.
Visual methodologies offer a counter-narrative to this textual hegemony. Rose’s (2016) critical visual methodology treats photographs as constructed arguments requiring interpretation rather than transparent windows onto reality. Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) transforms the international student from the object of the institutional gaze (viewed in marketing brochures, counted in spreadsheets) into the subject who looks. This epistemic shift is central to the study’s design.
Ethics: The Wrong Done to the Knower
Miranda Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice identifies two forms of harm that are directly relevant to this study. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker’s credibility is deflated due to identity prejudice, as when an accent leads a faculty member to underestimate a student’s intellectual capacity. Hermeneutical injustice is more structurally insidious: it occurs when someone lacks the conceptual resources to make sense of their own experience because those resources have been systematically denied by dominant frameworks. When a student’s grandmother’s business wisdom is rendered inadmissible by the case study method, the curriculum commits a hermeneutical wrong against her capacity as a knower.
Nel Noddings’ (2013) ethics of care insists that ethical action arises from the relational “space between” individuals rather than from abstract rules. In the context of international education, care ethics demands attention to specific, embodied student needs rather than mere policy compliance. Shawn Ginwright (2018) pushes further, distinguishing between trauma-informed care (“What is wrong with you?”) and healing-centred engagement (“What is right with you?”). The Photovoice design in this study is shaped by healing-centred principles: a space where students can reclaim agency over their narratives rather than performing their difficulties for institutional consumption.
Leadership: The Performance of Inclusion
Sara Ahmed’s (2012) concept of non-performativity explains how institutional diversity statements often fail to bring about what they name: the statement itself becomes a substitute for the action it describes. Ahmed demonstrates through institutional ethnography how diversity policies and committees operate within universities: the diversity statement becomes the achievement, and the environment remains unchanged. I extend Ahmed’s work into what I term malperformative inclusion: institutional actions that succeed in absorbing critique, demonstrating “awareness” of equity issues, and thereby stabilising the very extractive systems they claim to address. The prefix mal- signals active harm rather than mere failure.
I further extend this into the concept of malperformative aesthetics: the spatial and visual register through which institutions perform inclusion while withholding its material conditions. A university that builds a lounge for international students yet locks it during hours when those students are available to use it has produced a malperformative aesthetic: the space performs inclusion for recruitment purposes while serving as evidence of exclusion for anyone who attempts to inhabit it.
Education: What the Curriculum Kills
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass offers a generative metaphor for the modern university. Industrial agriculture operates as a monoculture: a single crop grown to the exclusion of all else, requiring immense inputs to survive. The business school functions similarly as an intellectual monoculture, prioritising Western capitalism to the exclusion of all other economic epistemologies. The grandmother’s wisdom represents a polyculture: a diverse, relational ecosystem of knowledge that is resilient and regenerative, and that has sustained communities through upheavals that Harvard case studies never anticipated.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) names the systematic destruction of knowledge systems epistemicide. 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. Decolonising the curriculum requires more than adding “diverse” case studies. It requires dismantling the assumption that grandmother’s wisdom is folk knowledge rather than legitimate economic theory.
Tara Yosso’s (2005) concept of Community Cultural Wealth provides the counter-narrative. Where deficit models frame marginalised students as lacking capital, Yosso identifies six forms of wealth that communities of colour cultivate and carry: aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant capital. A grandmother’s textile business represents an abundance of familial capital. The failure lies entirely in the institution’s inability to recognise these forms of wealth as legitimate contributions to the academic field.
Shawn Wilson’s (2008) concept of relational accountability insists that research creates relationships carrying obligations beyond publication. While I am a settler researcher using a settler methodology, I draw on relational accountability as an ethical compass: findings must be returned to the communities that generated them, and the institutional capital generated by this research must be leveraged toward the structural changes the methodology is designed to surface.
The Scholarly Conversations This Dissertation Enters
A literature review does two things: it maps a terrain and it marks a position. The five domains above describe the lenses this study uses. This section does something different. It names the broader scholarly conversations this dissertation is designed to enter. These are the fields that will receive the findings when the dissertation is complete, and the communities of scholars whose prior work made this study possible.
1. Academic Capitalism and Labour Precarity in Higher Education
The first conversation is the literature on academic capitalism. Slaughter and Leslie (1997) gave the concept its name. Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) sharpened it into a full analytical framework for understanding how universities restructure toward market behaviours as public funding contracts. Kezar et al. (2019) brought it to labour, coining the phrase the gig academy to describe what the university has become: an institution that has systematically dismantled stable employment in favour of contingent, flexible, expendable arrangements.
Most academic capitalism scholarship studies faculty labour or student experience separately. This dissertation studies them together, as populations whose precarity shares structural roots even though it operates through different mechanisms and carries entirely different stakes. That pairing is the contribution. Holding both in the same analytical frame reveals something neither lens sees alone: the institution’s management of expendable populations as a coherent, if unacknowledged, system.
2. International Student Experience in Canadian Higher Education
The second conversation concerns the structural position of international students in Canadian postsecondary institutions. Sidhu (2006), Stein and Andreotti (2016), and Bhambra et al. (2018) have mapped this territory carefully. Their findings describe a central contradiction: students are recruited as revenue sources and celebrated as diversity assets while navigating institutions built around domestic student norms, Western epistemologies, and English-language cultural assumptions. They pay more. They receive less. And when political priorities shift, they absorb the cost.
The 2024 federal study permit cap made this contradiction impossible to ignore. Students who had arrived under one set of institutional promises became subjects of a different political calculus without their circumstances changing. This dissertation contributes to this conversation by centering international student voice through Photovoice methodology, and by developing the concept of ghost data: the structural significance of participant withdrawal under conditions of precarity, as evidence about the system rather than noise in the data.
3. Critical University Studies
The third conversation is critical university studies: the scholarly tradition that examines the neoliberal university as an economic institution that deploys the language of inclusion to serve the logic of extraction. Newfield (2016), Slaughter and Rhoades (2004), and Ahmed (2012) are all working in this space, each from a different angle. Ahmed names it most precisely. Non-performativity is what happens when the diversity statement substitutes for the diversity action: the statement becomes the achievement, and the conditions remain unchanged.
This dissertation contributes the concept of malperformative inclusion to this conversation. It extends Ahmed’s analysis to name institutional actions that do more than fail to perform: they succeed in absorbing critique and signalling awareness while stabilising the very conditions they claim to address. The prefix mal- matters. The institution is doing something. What it is doing is actively harmful.
4. Participatory Visual Methodologies and Epistemic Justice
The fourth conversation concerns methodology. Wang and Burris (1997) developed Photovoice as a participatory action research method that places cameras in community members’ hands and uses structured group analysis to develop recommendations for change. Fricker (2007) provided the ethical foundation: epistemic injustice is the wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. A methodological response to epistemic injustice is an ethical response before it is a methodological one.
This dissertation contributes a new methodology to this conversation: blended witnessing. It braids Photovoice with Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004) through protective divergence, 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. They resonate. They do not merge.
5. Care Ethics and Trauma-Informed Research Practice
The fifth conversation is about what research owes the people it studies. Noddings (1984, 2013), Gilligan (1982), and Ginwright (2018) provide the ethical vocabulary. Wilson (2008) provides the methodological frame through relational accountability: the recognition that research creates relationships carrying obligations beyond publication. Findings must be returned to the communities that generated them. The institutional capital of the research must be leveraged toward the structural changes the methodology is designed to surface.
This dissertation builds relational accountability into the research design rather than treating it as a post-hoc commitment. The website you are reading is part of that design. Knowledge is returned before it is presented at academic venues. The site is the return.
6. The Canadian Postsecondary Policy Context
The sixth conversation is the specific policy landscape of Canadian higher education: a federally influenced but provincially governed sector with high rates of contract faculty employment, aggressive international student recruitment, and a growing gap between institutional equity rhetoric and the structural conditions experienced by the populations that rhetoric claims to serve. This is the landscape this dissertation is situated inside. It is the context that makes the research urgent rather than merely interesting.
This dissertation contributes to this conversation by providing empirical, participant-generated evidence of what these structural conditions produce in one institution at one moment. The conceptual tools developed here, asymmetrical precarity, malperformative inclusion, ghost data, blended witnessing, performative silence, are designed to travel. They can be applied to other institutions navigating the same pressures. That portability is part of the contribution.
For a deeper exploration of academic capitalism and the Canadian university specifically, see the Academic Capitalism and the Canadian University page in Section Three.
Together, these five domains converge on a single claim: that international student precarity is a designed outcome rather than an accidental by-product, stabilised through institutional practices that obscure extraction beneath the language of inclusion. The methodological implications of this analysis inform the design of blended witnessing: a methodology built to capture both visual testimony and the structural machinery that produces the conditions being documented.