Methodology

How I Designed This Research and Why the Method Matters

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Audre Lorde, 1984

I could have studied international students the traditional way. I could have designed a survey, distributed it to hundreds, run the numbers, and produced findings at the scale institutions prefer: generalisable, defensible, tidy. Instead, I designed a methodology that hands cameras to students and asks them to show me their university through their own eyes. This was a methodological choice. It was also an ethical one. This page describes the design of that methodology. The findings it generated will be shared following the doctoral defence.

The Paradigm: Critical-Transformative Research

This study is situated within the critical-transformative paradigm articulated by Mertens (2009), which holds that research should serve the interests of marginalised communities and contribute to social transformation. A research paradigm is the set of beliefs and values about what counts as knowledge, what counts as evidence, and what research is for, and it guides every decision a researcher makes. The critical-transformative paradigm differs from conventional scientific approaches in that it explicitly takes a political and ethical stance: research that ignores the power structures shaping the people it studies is anything but neutral. It is complicit. This paradigmatic commitment shapes every aspect of the research design: from the questions I ask to the methods I employ to the ways I will eventually present findings.

Within this paradigm, I adopt a constructivist-interpretivist epistemology with critical inflections. An epistemology is a theory of how we know what we know. A constructivist-interpretivist epistemology holds that knowledge is constructed through social interaction rather than discovered as fixed objective fact. Meaning emerges through interpretation, and interpretation is always shaped by the social positioning of both researcher and participant. The critical inflection demands attention to how structures of power (particularly those emerging from academic capitalism, Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004, and settler colonialism) shape the conditions within which meaning-making occurs.

Shawn Wilson’s (2008) concept of relational accountability provides the axiological foundation of this study: the ethical value system that orients every decision I make. Wilson, an Opaskwayak Cree scholar, argues that research creates relationships, and that those relationships carry 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. This commitment shapes the knowledge mobilisation plan and the eventual structure of this website.

Photovoice: Cameras in Students’ Hands

The participatory foundation of this study is Photovoice, developed by Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris (1997) for community health research. Photovoice is a participatory action research method in which community members use cameras to document their own lives and concerns, then come together to analyse those photographs collectively. The core principle is radical in its simplicity: the people who live an experience are the experts on that experience. Instead of the researcher deciding what matters and designing instruments to capture it, Photovoice positions cameras in participants’ hands and asks them to document their own realities.

Wang and Burris (1997) identified three goals for Photovoice: to enable people to record and reflect on their community’s strengths and concerns, to promote critical dialogue through discussion of photographs, and to reach policymakers. These goals aligned precisely with what I needed. I was designing a study about the gap between institutional rhetoric and lived experience, and I needed a method that would let the gap speak for itself.

After the photography period, participants gathered for a collaborative debrief session guided by the SHOWeD protocol, a structured questioning technique that moves from description through analysis to action:

Table 3
The SHOWeD Protocol

Letter	Question
S	What do you See here?
H	What is really Happening here?
O	How does this relate to Our lives?
W	Why does this situation exist?
e	How could this image Educate others?
D	What can we Do about it?

Note. Adapted from Wang and Burris (1997). The lowercase “e” in SHOWeD reflects the six-stage structure used in this study. The protocol structures collaborative meaning-making, moving participants from literal description through systemic analysis to actionable recommendations.

Scholarly Personal Narrative: Making the Researcher Visible

The reflexive strand of the methodology is Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN), developed by Nash (2004) and extended by Nash and Bradley (2011). SPN is a qualitative writing method that integrates personal experience into scholarly inquiry as a source of analytical insight rather than as mere contextual backdrop. It argues that refusing the “view from nowhere” (the pretence that the researcher is a neutral, disembodied observer) actually produces stronger scholarship, because it makes the lenses through which we interpret data visible and contestable.

Throughout the dissertation, SPN sections document my own experience as a contract faculty member navigating institutional precarity alongside the students I study. These sections function as analytical lenses that contextualise participant-generated data rather than as evidence of truth claims. My narratives illuminate what my positioning allows me to see while making transparent what it might obscure.

Blended Witnessing: Two Eyes, One Depth

I developed blended witnessing to name the specific ethical and analytical alignment that existing methodological terms failed to capture. Photovoice centres participant voice yet can render the researcher invisible. Scholarly Personal Narrative centres researcher reflexivity yet can overshadow participant testimony. Blended witnessing holds both voices in productive tension through what I call protective divergence: the deliberate analytical separation of researcher and participant narratives to prevent appropriation while enabling resonance.

The metaphor I use is binocular vision. One eye, the participant’s, sees the lived experience of exclusion. The other eye, the researcher’s, sees the institutional mechanisms that produce that exclusion. Together, they generate depth perception that reveals what I call the architecture of exclusion as an integrated system. This draws on Donna Haraway’s (1988) concept of situated knowledges: the argument that only partial perspective promises objective vision, and that refusing the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” produces more accountable scholarship.

Table 4
Components of Blended Witnessing

Component	Source	Function in This Study
Photovoice	Wang & Burris (1997)	Centres participant expertise; generates visual evidence; positions students as experts on their own experience
Scholarly Personal Narrative	Nash (2004); Nash & Bradley (2011)	Renders researcher positioning visible as analytical data; first-person engagement with interpretive tensions
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis	Smith et al. (2009)	Systematic meaning-making analysis; each participant’s experience understood in its particularity before cross-case patterns are identified
Trauma-informed ethics	Mertens (2009); Ginwright (2018)	Protection during vulnerable disclosure; ongoing consent; participant wellbeing prioritised over data richness
Relational accountability	Wilson (2008)	Research as relationship carrying obligations beyond publication; findings returned to communities before academic audiences

Note. Each component contributes distinct methodological strengths. The integration enables analysis that honours participant voices while making the researcher’s positionality visible and contestable.

The Kitchen Table

Before entering a single image into analysis software, I designed the study to begin with what I call kitchen table analysis. This approach draws on feminist traditions of kitchen table reflexivity (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015) and what Mountz et al. (2015) term slow scholarship: a politics of resistance to the accelerated timelines of the neoliberal academy. The protocol involves printing participant photographs and physically arranging them on a surface, using coloured tags and yarn to trace emergent connections before digital coding begins.

Something in me resisted the idea of entering photographs into a database before sitting with them, moving them around, letting them speak to each other and to me. Jongeling et al. (2016) observe that the embodied act of sorting printed photographs prompts memories, bridges connections, and enables prioritisation in ways that digital sorting may obscure. The kitchen table phase was designed to honour this embodied way of knowing.

Following the analogue phase, data were entered into NVivo for systematic verification, allowing convergence or divergence between the two analytical modes to strengthen confidence in the emergent themes.

Designing for Absence

One of the methodological innovations I propose in this study is the concept of ghost data: participant withdrawal treated as structural evidence rather than methodological failure. Ghost data is my term for what happens when the most precarious participants, the very people a study of precarity most needs to hear from, are consumed by the conditions being studied before they can participate in research about those conditions. In any study of precarity, the most precarious participants may be least available for sustained engagement. If a participant withdraws because the very conditions the study examines have consumed their capacity, that withdrawal reveals something about those conditions that completed participation cannot.

Ghost data maps the outer limits of participation under conditions of extraction. It asks: what does the system take before testimony can occur? This concept builds on Mazzei’s (2007) work on inhabited silence and extends it into participatory visual methodologies where the absence of an image carries analytical weight.

I designed the study with the awareness that attrition in precarious populations is likely and should be analysed rather than dismissed. The ethical protocols include clear and unconditional withdrawal procedures, and the analytical framework includes provisions for interpreting absence as data.

Ethical Design

The study received dual ethics approval from both the Thompson Rivers University Research Ethics Board (File H25-04204, Board of Primary Record) and the Royal Roads University Research Ethics Board (File H25-00572). Ethical design centres on four commitments:

Table 5
Ethical Design Principles

Principle	How It Shapes This Study
Consent as ongoing process	Consent is treated as an evolving relationship rather than a one-time signature. Participants reviewed and renegotiated consent at multiple stages: initial recruitment, photography, debrief, and member checking.
Visual sovereignty	Participants retain ownership of all original images. Photographs are reproduced only with explicit permission, and participants may withdraw any image at any time. Faces of third parties are obscured.
Trauma-informed protocols	Data collection was designed with awareness that precarity produces vulnerability. Support resources (Here2Talk, Interior Crisis Line) were provided. Debriefs included emotional check-ins before analytical discussion.
Relational accountability	Findings are returned to participant communities before academic audiences. Participant review of interpretations is built into the timeline. The knowledge mobilisation plan prioritises community benefit.

Note. These principles are designed to ensure that the participatory methodology avoids reproducing the extractive dynamics it seeks to analyse. The research process should model the relational integrity the findings call for.