What This Research Asks, Where It Takes Place, and How It Was Designed

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity, or it becomes the practice of freedom.”

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970/2018, p. 34

This study explores how international business students experience and theorise the gap between institutional inclusion rhetoric and lived belonging. It investigates what I call the architecture of exclusion: the integrated system of economic, spatial, epistemic, and performative mechanisms through which the neoliberal university simultaneously recruits international students as essential revenue sources and positions them at the margins of belonging. I use the word “architecture” deliberately: exclusion here is far from accidental or incidental. It is built in, load-bearing, and structurally reinforced across multiple institutional systems at once.

The research uses a participatory visual methodology called blended witnessing, developed specifically for this study, to centre international students as experts on their own experience. Blended witnessing braids Photovoice (a method in which participants use cameras to document their own realities; Wang & Burris, 1997) with Scholarly Personal Narrative, in which the researcher weaves their own story alongside participants’ stories (Nash, 2004). The full dissertation, Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Belonging, Precarity, and Possibility with International Students in Higher Education, was submitted to the School of Leadership Studies at Royal Roads University in 2026. Findings and participant-generated analysis will be shared on this site following the doctoral defence.

The Research Site

The study was conducted at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, located on the unceded territory of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwépemcúl’ecw, the traditional and ancestral lands of the Secwépemc Nation. The university’s location on Indigenous land is analytically central rather than incidental: it frames the contradiction of offering “belonging” to international students on territory that the institution itself occupies without consent.

The Brown Family House of Learning at Thompson Rivers University: a striking glass curtain-wall building with a curved roofline, a silhouette of a wolf sculpture visible at the roofline, green lawns in the foreground, autumn trees to either side, and a bright blue sky above.
The Brown Family House of Learning, Thompson Rivers University’s library, on the unceded territory of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc. The wolf on the roofline is a coyote sculpture — a trickster figure in many Indigenous traditions, and perhaps an unintended emblem of an institution that promises transformation while practising extraction. Photo Credit: Jesal Thakkar, Research Assistant. With Permission, 2025.

TRU enrolled approximately 7,400 international students in 2023, representing roughly 45% of the total student population and contributing an estimated $180 million in tuition revenue (Thompson Rivers University, 2023). International students pay approximately $28,000 annually in tuition, while domestic students pay approximately $6,000. This fourfold differential positions the university as what Stein and Andreotti (2016) describe as an institution structurally dependent on international student revenue while remaining culturally organised around domestic student norms.

Five international flags flying on tall flagpoles at Thompson Rivers University. A single person in dark clothing walks alone across the wide empty plaza in the foreground. The flags of India, Hong Kong, Japan, and others are visible. Student residences appear in the background.
The international student flag plaza at Thompson Rivers University. A single person crosses an empty campus. The flags name the countries whose students fund this institution. The empty plaza asks where those students actually are, and how welcome they feel in the spaces their tuition built. Photo Credit: Jesal Thakkar, Research Assistant. With Permission, 2025.
Aerial view of Kamloops, British Columbia, showing the Thompson River winding through the city centre, with the surrounding hills and mountains of the Interior in the background. The research site, Thompson Rivers University, sits on the hillside on the right.
Kamloops, British Columbia, viewed from above: the Thompson River winds through the traditional and unceded territory of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, where this research was conducted. Photo Credit: Jesal Thakkar, Research Assistant. With Permission, 2025.
Thompson Rivers University entrance sign with Canadian, British Columbia, and other flags flying against a blue sky. A pathway leads into the campus grounds.
The entrance to Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia — the institution where this research was conducted and where I taught for twenty-five years. Photo Credit: Jesal Thakkar, Research Assistant. With Permission, 2025.

I spent twenty-five years at TRU, seventeen of them teaching organisational behaviour, business ethics, leadership, and diversity to predominantly international student populations. This prolonged insider positioning informs the study’s design: I know the institution’s corridors, its rhythms, and the structural conditions that shape how international students move through its spaces. I also know the experience of institutional precarity from the inside, having worked on semester-by-semester contracts for the entirety of my teaching career. That experience is background and data together.

A Critical Policy Moment

The study captures a moment of acute policy upheaval. In January 2024, the Canadian federal government announced a 35% reduction in study permit approvals, framing this cap as necessary to address housing pressures and programme integrity concerns (Government of Canada, 2024). This policy shift transformed international students from celebrated “global citizens” into political scapegoats for housing and healthcare crises they played no role in creating.

At the institutional level, this policy reversal created immediate anxieties around enrolment projections and revenue models. At the student level, it produced a pervasive sense of conditional belonging: the right to remain was suddenly debatable, and policy-induced anxiety became a defining feature of the educational experience. The participants in this study documented their lives during this specific window of temporal precarity. Their photographs carry that historical context.

The Central Question

The study addresses one central research question and four sub-questions. These questions were designed to position students as knowledge holders rather than research subjects, treating what they show me as theory-generating data rather than illustrative anecdote.

Central Research Question: How do international business students at Thompson Rivers University experience and theorise the gap between institutional inclusion rhetoric and lived belonging?

Table 1
Research Sub-Questions

#Sub-Question
1How do international business students experience belonging and exclusion within the institution?
2What barriers do international students navigate daily that remain invisible to faculty and administrators?
3What bridges toward genuine belonging do students identify or create?
4What theoretical frameworks or counter-narratives do international business students generate regarding their institutional positioning?

Note. These questions position students as knowledge holders and treat their visual narratives as theory-generating data rather than illustrative examples.

Methodological Design

The study employs blended witnessing, a methodology I developed that braids Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) with Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004) and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA; Smith et al., 2009) within a critical-transformative paradigm (Mertens, 2009). IPA is a qualitative approach that analyses how individuals make meaning of their lived experiences, attending to each person’s account in its particularity before identifying patterns across cases. International business students were invited to photograph their daily lives on campus using their own smartphones, producing visual evidence of the gap between what the institution promises and what it delivers. Simultaneously, I wove my own narrative of institutional precarity alongside theirs, maintaining analytical separation through what I call protective divergence: a deliberate strategy of keeping my story and participants’ stories parallel without allowing mine to colonise theirs. The full methodological rationale is described on the Methodology page.

What This Study Contributes

The dissertation is designed to make four original contributions to the social sciences. These contributions emerge from the integration of the theoretical framework (described on the Literature Review page) with the participatory visual methodology. I describe them as anticipatory here because the empirical grounding of each will be shared following the doctoral defence.

Table 2
Four Anticipated Scholarly Contributions

ContributionTypeWhat It Addresses
Time taxEmpiricalDocuments the compounded temporal extraction international students experience through immigration, economic, linguistic, and affective labour, which depletes academic capacity while remaining invisible to institutional metrics.
Malperformative aestheticsTheoreticalExtends Ahmed’s (2012) concept of non-performativity into spatial and visual registers, examining how university architecture and signage perform inclusion symbolically while withholding conditions for genuine belonging.
Blended witnessing and ghost dataMethodologicalDevelops a participatory methodology that braids participant photography with researcher reflexivity. Proposes treating participant withdrawal as structural evidence rather than attrition.
Mindset of enoughConceptualProposes a counter-logic that reframes student survival strategies as sophisticated resistance to what I term institutional artificial scarcity.

Note. These contributions are framed as anticipatory. The empirical grounding of each contribution through participant visual evidence will be shared on this site following the doctoral defence.

Dissertation Structure

The full dissertation unfolds across six chapters, a Coda, an Afterword, and seventeen appendices. Chapter One establishes context, positionality, and research questions. Chapter Two constructs the five-domain theoretical framework. Chapter Three details the blended witnessing methodology. Chapter Four presents visual findings. Chapter Five develops evidence-based recommendations. Chapter Six offers a critical accounting of the study’s limits and contributions. The Coda returns to the research site one final time. The Afterword tells the story of the researcher who became the data.

The main entrance to Thompson Rivers University, summer.
The main entrance to Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia. This is the institution where this research was conducted and where I taught for twenty-five years. Photo Credit: Jesal Thakkar, Research Assistant. With Permission, 2025.