Through Our Eyes: A Photovoice Study of Belonging, Precarity, and Possibility with International Students in Higher Education

Purpose: This Photovoice study explored how international business students at Thompson Rivers University experience and navigate precarity within academic capitalism. Grounded in critical pedagogy and the critical-transformative paradigm, the research sought to understand belonging, exclusion, and possibility from participants' perspectives, using participant-generated photographs as primary evidence.Methodology: The study employed blended witnessing, an innovative approach that weaves Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) with Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004) within a participatory action research framework. This approach integrated Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith et al., 2009), trauma-informed ethics, and relational accountability (Wilson, 2008). Five international business students were recruited; one (Gamma) withdrew prior to the photography phase due to work commitments, leaving four active participants (Alpha, Beta, Delta, Epsilon) who documented their experiences through photographs and participated in collaborative debriefing sessions using the SHOWeD protocol. Data analysis employed participatory decoding, kitchen-table analog analysis, and NVivo verification, including a coding-for-absence strategy that treated Gamma's withdrawal as structural data. Findings: Four themes emerged through participant photographs and collaborative analysis: (1) Malperformative Aesthetics, where institutional spaces perform inclusion symbolically while withholding it materially; (2) Architecture of Empty Promises, where gleaming facilities stand empty because the students who funded them are at work; (3) Refuges of Enough, where students create counter-spaces embodying sufficiency against institutional logics of scarcity; and (4) Ghost Data, where Gamma's withdrawal reveals how precarity silences participation before it can occur. Across these themes, participants documented a time tax of immigration, economic, linguistic, and affective labour that extracts temporal resources from those the institution claims to serve. Contributions: This dissertation makes four scholarly contributions to social sciences scholarship: Empirical contribution: Documenting the time tax. Through participant photographs and Gamma's withdrawal, this study provides visual and narrative evidence that a primary barrier to international student success is temporal extraction rather than linguistic deficiency.Theoretical contribution: Malperformative aesthetics. This concept extends Ahmed's (2012) work on non-performativity into spatial and visual registers, demonstrating how institutional spaces perform inclusion symbolically while withholding it materially. Methodological contribution: Blended witnessing and ghost data. The methodology braids Photovoice with Scholarly Personal Narrative within a participatory action research framework, operationalizing ghost data by treating participant attrition as a structural finding rather than a methodological failure. Conceptual contribution: The mindset of enough. Emerging from participants' testimony, this concept reframes student survival strategies as a sophisticated refusal of institutional scarcity rather than as passive coping mechanisms. Practical Implications: The study proposes three evidence-based recommendations grounded in regenerative sufficiency: (1) Curricular Work Integration crediting survival labour within academic programmes; (2) the Open Door and Protected Corner Protocol balancing extended access with sanctuary preservation; and (3) the First Ten Minutes pedagogical intervention prioritizing relational check-ins before content delivery. Each recommendation includes accountability mechanisms to guard against malperformative implementation.Limitations: Sample size (four active participants), single-site data collection, and the post-permit cap temporal context (Summer 2025) limit statistical generalisability while supporting theoretical transferability. The researcher's positionality as a white settler woman researching racialized international student precarity represents a limitation addressed through protective divergence but not fully resolved.

Author dc:creator

• Tucker, Amy

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• White, Brian

• College of interdisciplinary studies

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.25316/IR-20996

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:null:10613/29470