Mapping the Scholarly Conversation: Where This Dissertation Sits in the Field

The academic fields this dissertation enters, extends, and contributes to

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Every dissertation is a contribution to a conversation already in progress. This page maps the specific scholarly conversations this study is designed to enter: who the major voices are, what the field has established, what remains contested or underexplored, and where this dissertation positions itself. It is a companion to the Literature Review, which describes the theoretical lenses in depth. This page describes the communities of scholars whose prior work made this study possible and whose ongoing conversations these findings are designed to advance.

How to Read This Map

Each entry below identifies a field, the key scholars who have shaped it, the central claims the field has established, and the specific opening this dissertation enters. Reading across the table reveals the dissertation’s position: it sits at the intersection of six fields, drawing on each while contributing most substantially to three.

Scholarly Conversation	Key Voices	What the Field Has Established	The Opening This Dissertation Enters
1. Academic capitalism and labour precarity in higher education	Slaughter & Leslie (1997); Slaughter & Rhoades (2004); Kezar et al. (2019); Newfield (2016)	Universities have been restructured toward market logics, replacing stable employment and public accountability with contingency, flexibility, and extraction. The gig academy operates by managing both knowledge and workers as commodities.	This dissertation holds contract faculty and international student precarity in the same analytical frame, revealing the institution’s management of dispensable populations as a coherent system. Neither population has been studied alongside the other in this way.
2. International student experience in Canadian higher education	Sidhu (2006); Stein & Andreotti (2016); Bhambra et al. (2018); Thobani (2007, 2021)	International students are structurally positioned as revenue sources while being epistemically marginalized within institutions built around domestic norms. The rhetoric of diversity and global citizenship obscures rather than addresses this contradiction.	This dissertation introduces Photovoice as a method for centring student theoretical agency, and develops ghost data as a concept for treating participant withdrawal as structural evidence rather than methodological attrition.
3. Critical university studies	Ahmed (2012); Newfield (2016); Slaughter & Rhoades (2004); Robinson (1983)	The neoliberal university deploys the language of inclusion to serve the logic of extraction. Non-performativity names the pattern by which diversity statements substitute for diversity action. Racial capitalism names the racialised dimension of economic extraction.	This dissertation contributes malperformative inclusion, extending Ahmed’s analysis to name institutional actions that succeed in absorbing critique and signalling awareness while stabilizing the conditions they claim to address. The prefix mal marks active harm rather than mere failure.
4. Participatory visual methodologies and epistemic justice	Wang & Burris (1997); Fricker (2007); Wilson (2008); Mertens (2009)	Photovoice positions research participants as knowledge producers. Epistemic injustice names the harm done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. Transformative research creates conditions for communities to use knowledge on their own behalf.	This dissertation contributes blended witnessing as a methodology that braids Photovoice with Scholarly Personal Narrative through protective divergence, maintaining analytical separation between researcher and participant testimony while enabling structural solidarity.
5. Care ethics and trauma-informed research	Noddings (1984, 2013); Tronto (1993); Ginwright (2018); Wilson (2008)	Ethical action in research arises from relational attention to specific persons rather than from abstract principles. Care is a political practice rather than a private virtue. Healing-centred engagement begins from the assumption that participants carry capacities alongside, and beyond, any wounds.	This dissertation builds relational accountability into the research design itself rather than treating it as a post-hoc commitment. The website is the mechanism: findings are returned to participants and public before academic presentation.
6. decolonizing the curriculum	Battiste (2013); de Sousa Santos (2014); Tuck & Yang (2012); Fougere & Moulettes (2012); Kimmerer (2013)	University curricula, particularly in professional schools, operate as sites of epistemicide: the systematic destruction of knowledge systems that fall outside Western managerial frameworks. decolonization requires more than adding diverse content to unchanged structures.	This dissertation provides empirical grounding for what epistemicide looks like inside a specific business school classroom, and introduces the question of grandmother’s wisdom as a conceptual provocation: what counts as legitimate economic theory, and who decides?

Table 1
Scholarly Conversations This Dissertation Enters
Note. The dissertation contributes most substantially to Conversations 3, 4, and 5. The contributions to Conversations 1, 2, and 6 are primarily empirical: this study provides a case within existing theoretical frameworks, while the original conceptual work extends the frameworks in 3, 4, and 5.

The Conversations This Study Sits Outside

Clarity about scholarly positioning requires knowing what a study is as much as what it stands apart from. This dissertation is a qualitative, interpretive, participatory study. It is designed to generate theoretical concepts and deep contextual understanding rather than statistical generalizability. It stands outside the conversation about large-scale quantitative enrolment research, comparative international higher education systems studies, or psychological adjustment frameworks for international students. These are legitimate and important fields. They are simply different conversations from the ones this study was designed to advance.

Similarly, while this study is deeply informed by Indigenous methodological frameworks, particularly Wilson’s (2008) relational accountability and Battiste’s (2013) decolonizing education, it makes no claim to being an Indigenous research project. I am a settler researcher. The methodology I developed is indebted to Indigenous epistemologies while remaining grounded in a critical transformative paradigm (Mertens, 2009). That positioning is named rather than obscured.

The Conceptual Contributions at a Glance

Concept	Field It Advances	What It Does That Existing Concepts Do
Asymmetrical precarity	Critical university studies; sociology of labour	Names the structural resonance between contract faculty and international student conditions without claiming equivalence
Malperformative inclusion	Critical race theory; diversity studies	Extends non-performativity to name institutional actions that succeed at absorbing critique while stabilizing harm
Malperformative aesthetics	Visual sociology; critical geography	Applies the logic of performative failure to spatial and visual registers of inclusion
Ghost data	Qualitative methodology; research ethics	Proposes treating participant withdrawal as structural evidence, transforming attrition from a methodological problem into an analytical finding
Blended witnessing	Participatory visual research; qualitative methodology	Provides a principled model for braiding researcher narrative with participant testimony through protective divergence
Time tax	Critical university studies; international education	Names the compounded temporal extraction experienced through the convergence of immigration, economic, linguistic, and affective labour demands

Table 2
Original Conceptual Contributions and Their Scholarly Fields
Note. All six concepts are introduced in the theoretical and methodological chapters of the dissertation. Full empirical grounding will be shared following the doctoral defence.

References

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

Battiste, M. (2013). Decolonizing education: Nourishing the learning spirit. Purich Publishing.

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

de Sousa Santos, B. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers.

Fougere, M., & Moulettes, A. (2012). Disclaimers, dichotomies and disappearances in international business textbooks: A postcolonial deconstruction. Management Learning, 43(1), 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507611411576

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.

Ginwright, S. (2018). The future of healing: Shifting from trauma informed care to healing centred engagement. Occasional Paper. https://medium.com/@ginwright/the-future-of-healing-shifting-from-trauma-informed-care-to-healing-centered-engagement-634f557ce69c

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

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.

Mertens, D. M. (2009). Transformative research and evaluation. Guilford Press.

Newfield, C. (2016). The great mistake: How we wrecked public universities and how we can fix them. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. University of California Press.

Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education (2nd ed.). University of California Press.

Robinson, C. J. (1983). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press.

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

Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Johns Hopkins University Press.

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

Thobani, S. (2007). Exalted subjects: Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada. University of Toronto Press.

Thobani, S. (Ed.). (2021). Coloniality and racial (in)justice in the university: Counting for nothing? University of Toronto Press.

Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.

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

Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.