The Questions This Study Asks
Research questions are ethical commitments before they are methodological ones. They signal whose experience is centred, what counts as knowledge, and where the researcher chooses to look. The questions guiding this study were designed from the outset to position international students as knowledge holders rather than research subjects: to treat what they show me as theory-generating data rather than illustrative anecdote.
The Central Research Question
How do international business students at Thompson Rivers University experience and theorise the gap between institutional inclusion rhetoric and lived belonging?
This question is intentionally double. It asks about experience, and it asks about theorising. The first half asks what students live through. The second half asks what they make of it: what sense they generate, what language they develop, what structural patterns they name. In a study grounded in Photovoice, participants are analysts of their own conditions. They are witnesses and theorists. Both.
The Sub-Questions
Four sub-questions structure the inquiry:
- How do international business students experience belonging and exclusion within the institution?
- What barriers do international students navigate daily that remain invisible to faculty and administrators?
- What bridges toward genuine belonging do students identify or create?
- What theoretical frameworks or counter-narratives do international business students generate regarding their institutional positioning?
The fourth sub-question reflects this study’s deepest methodological commitment: that the people most affected by a structural condition are often its most perceptive analysts, and that their theorising deserves to be received as scholarship.
What These Questions Are Waiting For
This site is a living document, updated as the dissertation moves toward its final defence. The questions above will be answered in full through the visual findings, participant narratives, and conceptual contributions shared after the defence. What this page offers is the shape of the inquiry: the questions that sent four students out with cameras to photograph what the institution refuses to see.
The answers are coming. The questions are already doing work.