Problem Statement: The Gap This Study Was Designed to Close

The specific gap in knowledge this dissertation addresses

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Every dissertation answers a question that existing scholarship has left open. This page names the specific gap this study was designed to close: what it is, why it matters, and why the field needed the particular kind of evidence this study was built to produce.

The Gap This Study Addresses

A substantial body of scholarship documents the structural conditions facing international students in Canadian and global higher education. Researchers have mapped the economic mechanisms of academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), the labour precarity of contingent faculty (Kezar et al., 2019), the rhetorical contradictions of diversity discourse (Ahmed, 2012), and the epistemic marginalization produced by colonial curricula (Bhambra et al., 2018). This literature is theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded. It is also primarily researcher-directed.

The specific gap is this: we know a great deal about what is happening to international students, but we know considerably less about how international students themselves theorize what is happening to them. The literature centres researcher interpretation. It underutilises student knowledge. International students appear in this scholarship as subjects of analysis, as data points in enrolment figures, as recipients of policy consequences, and as case studies in institutional failure. They appear far less often as theorists of their own conditions.

This is a methodological problem with conceptual consequences. When the researcher holds the exclusive analytical authority, the frameworks generated by the research remain bound by what the researcher already knows to look for. The concepts that get produced are concepts the researcher could have produced without the participants. That is a form of epistemic waste.

The Second Gap: Faculty and Student Precarity in the Same Frame

A second gap exists in how the literature handles the relationship between faculty labour conditions and student experience. Studies of academic capitalism and the gig academy have examined contingent faculty with considerable rigour (Kezar et al., 2019; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Studies of international student experience have examined student marginalization with equal care (Sidhu, 2006; Stein & Andreotti, 2016). The two bodies of literature rarely address each other.

This dissertation closes that gap by developing the concept of asymmetrical precarity: the argument that contract faculty and international students share structural patterns of institutional treatment that rhyme without being identical. Both populations are contingent. Both are managed as expendable when institutional priorities shift. Both are celebrated rhetorically while being denied the conditions that would make their flourishing possible. Holding both in the same analytical frame reveals something neither lens can see alone: the institution’s management of dispensable populations as a coherent, if unacknowledged, system.

The Third Gap: Methodological Innovation

A third gap is methodological. Participatory visual methods, including Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997), have been used productively in community health research and equity-oriented social science. Their application to postsecondary educational research remains underdeveloped. More specifically, no existing methodology braids participatory visual inquiry with Scholarly Personal Narrative in a way that maintains the analytical separation between researcher story and participant story while allowing both to illuminate each other.

Blended witnessing, the methodology developed for this study, addresses this gap directly. It offers a model for how researchers can bring their own positionality into the analysis as data rather than as bias, while protecting participant testimony from appropriation by the researcher’s narrative authority. This methodological contribution is designed to travel beyond this study to any research context in which researcher experience and participant experience occupy the same structural terrain.

The Problem Statement

Canadian universities have constructed a model of international higher education that is structurally extractive, epistemically marginalizing, and rhetorically contradictory. International students are recruited as revenue sources, positioned as diversity assets, and subjected to conditions, including prohibitive tuition differentials, immigration-linked precarity, and curricula that systematically devalue their prior knowledge, that the institution’s own discourse of inclusion claims to oppose. Existing scholarship has documented these conditions rigorously but has done so primarily through researcher-generated analysis rather than through the theoretical frameworks that affected students themselves produce.

The problem this study addresses is therefore twofold: a structural problem in the world, and an epistemological problem in the research. The structural problem is the architecture of exclusion. The epistemological problem is a research tradition that studies that architecture without adequately centring the knowledge of those who live inside it.

What a Solution Required

Closing these gaps required a study that could do four things simultaneously: position students as knowledge producers rather than research subjects; hold researcher and participant experience in the same analytical space without collapsing them; generate conceptual tools with theoretical portability beyond a single institutional context; and return the knowledge produced to the communities that generated it before presenting it to academic audiences. This site is that return.

Gap	What Is Missing	This Study’s Response
Student as theorist	International students appear as research subjects rather than as knowledge producers in their own right	Photovoice positions students as the primary analysts of their own experience; visual testimony is treated as theory-generating data
Parallel precarity	Faculty labour conditions and student experience are studied in separate literatures with minimal cross-referencing	Asymmetrical precarity holds both populations in the same analytical frame, revealing the institutional logic that produces both
Methodological innovation	Participatory visual methods are underdeveloped in postsecondary contexts; researcher narrative and participant narrative lack a principled integration model	Blended witnessing braids Photovoice with Scholarly Personal Narrative through protective divergence, maintaining analytical separation while enabling solidarity
Knowledge return	Research findings are typically shared at academic venues before communities that generated the knowledge receive them	This site makes findings accessible to participants and public audiences before the doctoral defence; the site is the return

Table 1
Knowledge Gaps and This Study’s Responses
Note. The four gaps addressed by this dissertation correspond to four original contributions described in the Study Overview.

References

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.

Bhambra, G. K., Gebrial, D., & Nisancioglu, K. (Eds.). (2018). decolonizing the university. Pluto Press.

Kezar, A., DePaola, T., & Scott, D. T. (2019). The gig academy: Mapping labour in the neoliberal university. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sidhu, R. K. (2006). Universities and globalization: To market, to market. Routledge.

Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2016). Decolonization and higher education. In M. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_479-1

Wang, C. C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309