Webinar—Beyond Checkbox Inclusion: Student Voices on Malperformative Practices in Academia

Canadian post-secondary institutions name their commitments to international student success while maintaining the conditions that produce precarity. This session introduces malperformative inclusion, the institutional capacity to demonstrate awareness of exclusion while sustaining what produces it, along with its spatial form, malperformative aesthetics.

The session draws on a completed Photovoice study with international business students at Thompson Rivers University on the unceded territory of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc. Participants photographed their own days and interpreted their images through the SHOWeD protocol, within a blended witnessing methodology that weaves Photovoice with Scholarly Personal Narrative.

Four findings emerged: malperformative aesthetics, an architecture of empty promises where new facilities stand empty because the students who funded them are at work, refuges of enough where students build counter-spaces of sufficiency against institutional scarcity, and ghost data, where one student’s withdrawal before photography began mapped the outer limit of who can take part in research about precarity at all.

Attendees of this webinar will work through short prompts to identify these patterns in their own institutions and will leave with three interventions developed in the study, each built with accountability measures so that implementation does not become another performance.

Please note BCCIE discourages the use of AI Notetakers at our webinars. If you need to bring one for language or other assistive purposes, please email events@bccie.bc.ca 

Presenter

• Amy Tucker, Open Learning Faculty Member, Bob Gaglardi School of Business and Economics, Thompson Rivers University