Conference session

Where We Hesitate: Ethical Pause, Credibility, and Institutional Life is a roundtable conversation examining how legitimacy, trust, and authority are produced through relational work at the margins of universities and public institutions. The session centers on a guiding question: What do moments of ethical pause reveal about how power, credibility, and belonging are negotiated in everyday institutional life? Drawing from practitioner experience across boundary-spanning roles such as fundraising, community engagement, equity and inclusion work, and public-facing institutional labour, the conversation attends to forms of work that are relational, interpretive, and ethically charged, yet often positioned as peripheral to decision-making and recognized knowledge. These roles frequently require proximity to wealth, prestige, and institutional authority, while simultaneously being shaped by racialized and gendered norms that determine whose judgment is trusted and whose labour is rendered invisible. Participants will reflect collectively on micro-moments of hesitation, discomfort, or quiet refusal as sites where institutional logics become visible. Through guided discussion, the session invites attendees to consider how professional experience functions as knowledge, how credibility is unevenly distributed, and what possibilities for cultural transformation may emerge from within institutions that are slow to change. This session will be of particular interest to scholars and practitioners interested in higher education, institutional power, moral economies, and the everyday ethics of organizational life.