About Ashley (Asli) & This Project
About this Project
This project grew out of a need to sit with questions that do not resolve easily.
I am an educator and a doctoral student working within higher education, often positioned on both the giving and receiving ends of institutional structures. I teach, assess, design curriculum, and support students, while also moving through the system as a learner shaped by its policies, expectations, and limits. This dual position allows me to experience how decisions made at institutional levels are lived in classrooms, offices, and everyday interactions.
I have worked and studied in Turkey, in Istanbul, within European-centered and historically elite institutions, where I completed my first master’s degree. I later completed a second master’s degree at the University of British Columbia and am currently a doctoral student at UBC, while also working in private post-secondary institutions in British Columbia. Moving across these contexts has allowed me to experience higher education through multiple systems, cultures, and governance structures, and to notice how power, legitimacy, and access shift depending on where knowledge is produced and who is authorized to hold it.
Rather than offering arguments or solutions, this space uses reflective narratives to explore how power, memory, land, knowledge, and legitimacy move through educational systems. Some pieces are grounded in lived experience. Others use metaphor. All of them are shaped by proximity rather than abstraction.
This project was created as part of an assignment for EDST 521: Foundations of Higher Education (Winter 1_2025), a course offered by Dr. Arig al Shaibah. The course invited critical and creative engagement with the historical, political, and ethical foundations of higher education, encouraging forms of inquiry that move beyond traditional academic argument.
I am especially interested in moments where institutions appear reasonable, benevolent, or progressive while simultaneously closing doors, redistributing responsibility, or limiting who is allowed to belong. These are not dramatic moments. They are often quiet, procedural, and widely accepted. That is what makes them difficult to see.
This project does not claim neutrality. It also does not seek persuasion. It is an invitation to pause, to notice, and to think alongside stories that may feel uncomfortably familiar.
Begin your exploration
Choose a path to start your journey:
The Doorway, how stories shape universities
Foundations of Land, what lies beneath the campus
Archive of Silences, what institutions forget
Hall of Apologies, gesture, recognition, limits
Room of Entanglement, working within contradictions
Futures Under Construction, uncertain pathways ahead
Higher Education Uncovered is a reflective digital project that explores what often remains unseen in universities. Based in Vancouver, BC, and shaped by my work and study across different higher education systems, this space attends to the foundations beneath academic institutions: land, memory, power, knowledge, and legitimacy.
Rather than revealing secrets or offering explanations, the project invites slower engagement with the stories, tensions, and contradictions that shape higher education from within. Through narrative writing and metaphor, it creates room to notice how institutions come to feel natural, neutral, or inevitable, and what is made invisible in the process.
This is an invitation to look beneath the surface of higher education and to sit with its complexity rather than resolve it.
Discover the Unseen Stories
Written from the perspective of an EdD student working within higher education, this site explores the foundations of universities from a Vancouver-based context. It reflects on land, reconciliation, climate uncertainty, artificial intelligence, and the shifting legitimacy of knowledge. Through narrative writing and lived experience, the project invites deeper engagement with the tensions that continue to shape higher education today..