Reflections on Congress: Themes and Experiences Over a 6-day Conference

So I am back from Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences and what a wonderful 6 days it was. I have so many thoughts and concepts to process and I am sure that I will be taking the conversations I had with folk with me for many months to come. I wanted to use this blog to reflect on some of the themes and experiences over the 6 days I was there (and sorry I couldn't make it for the last day of one of the conferences I was registered for) and also an opportunity to open space for continuing discussions about other folk's experiences and ideas they encountered. I am going to organize the blog under larger themes below.

Mentorship

One of the things that acts as a sort of hidden curriculum around conferences can be summarized as "how to do conferences." When in graduate school very rarely do advisors show their advisees how to conference, or talk about the expectations of what happens at a conference. This can get exacerbated at something like Congress where there are 50 different associations having their conferences at the same time (or with overlapping days). 

I wanted to support a few graduate students that I am working with to navigate Congress. So on 2 of the 6 days I was there I dedicated my time to supporting that work. I showed them what happens at the book exhibits where instructors have conversations with editors around potential new book projects, I discussed how you can make decisions about attending different things when there are competing sessions that all sound great, I supported conversations and awareness about presentation preparation and accessibility, you know those kinds of things. 

Mentorship around conferences and conference attendance is something that we need more of in the different places we are in and I would love to see more active organization around mentorship models for conferences. I have seen associations have things like "this is my first conference" badges for name tags, which is a start, but also does a certain kind of disclosure work that can actually work in tension with the kind of hierarchies that are already built in to conference spaces. 

One thing that I loved that Congress did this year is on the name badges they put the name, had stickers for pronouns, but then listed the association conference that you were attending and not your institution. I know a lot of folk complained about that, and I think the complaint of not having institutions listed goes back to the reason why it was great they didn't have them listed. It forces a conversation about so where do you work/teach so you can make connections, but more importantly it avoids that super awkward people staring at your name badge to see if you are someone "worthy" of speaking to if you happen to work at a place they value. 

These are all things they never "teach" us in grad school and you end up learning the hard way with more conferences. I will say that the opportunity to chat with so many grad students at this conference was a highlight for me, and I would love for us in general to think more about how we operationalize our mentorship in these spaces.

Trust

So many papers that I attended touched on the idea of trust or more specifically the lack of trust we are seeing in HigherEd now. A lack of trust between instructors and students, a lack of trust between instructors and institutions, a lack of trust between students and the concept of post-secondary institution as we understand it. A lot of this is motivated by conversations about generative AI that were also plentiful at Congress (I was on a roundtable about this topic for ACCUTE) but also about the socio-economic situation we are in in HigherEd right now.

It was nice to see people willing to talk about severed trust. I have been bringing up this crisis of trust for months now in the spaces that we are in, and in general the response has been crickets or not wanting to talk about the elephant in the rooms we are in. One of the things that Congress also allowed was the space for the rebuilding of trust between folk who had not been in the same spaces for a while. This works both for the folk who were on campus at George Brown and the folk who were joining sessions virtually through Zoom or the conference platform. Often folk who do the kind of work I do say that it is very difficult to find folk who are aligned with the thoughts and work that you do in your institution, I know this is true for me and why Congress was so important because it reminded me that folk like me exist out there, just not in the place I happen to be in at the moment. So conferences, especially mega-large conferences like Congress can be problematic for numerous reasons, but what remains is that these connection spaces (however we design them in the future) are so needed because the reality on the ground is that folk are isolated and need space to find their people.

Wayfinding

Another topic that came up during Congress was wayfinding. In particular there were some folk who found the St. James campus difficult to navigate in terms of the room numbers and the Waterfront campus difficult to navigate because of the proximity of the building names being so close and some associations not realizing the difference between the 3 buildings. I was lucky as someone who used to teach at St. James that I could help folk navigate spaces when they had questions or were lost. There was also literally a contingent of volunteers and folk in blue shirts there to guide folk around.

Basically this wayfinding is something that will always exist, regardless of where Congress is held. People get used to navigating their own spaces and then it is difficult to navigate a new one. It is also important that the signage is there to support the folk in attendance. Part of this is that no institution is going to pay money to create all new signage for an event like Congress. Also SSHRC is not going to pay the money they need to (but should) to make sure temporary signage is robust. My running joke while I was there was to tell people to be happy they didn't put sessions at Casa Loma Campus because there are folk there since 1967 still trying to find their classrooms. And this is one of those funny not funny type things though. This is why disabled folk don't often attend conferences because the spaces are not made welcoming with signage and supports (like working elevators, and encouraging masking where possible). But I will say that this Congress hired an accessibility coordinator, Vanessa, who did an amazing job, along with Margrit the Academic Convenor, of putting in accessibility supports and asking accessibility questions that I had never experienced in previous Congresses. More of this please and congrats to the organizing team for that!

Two-Solitudes

I will end with this last theme before this post gets a bit too long. It was a bit sad to see in 2025, at a Congress being hosted for the first time at a college, to still see the two-solitudes discourse between colleges and universities being alive and well at this Congress. Instead of conversations about how colleges and universities should be working together to support each other, most of the conversation was about how different these spaces are and how still folk who are at universities feel they can learn nothing by being in sessions where the majority of the folk are working at colleges.

The other two-solitudes thing that I witnessed was around folk who are in staff roles (like myself) and those who are in instructor roles and how again instructors and faculty feel like there is nothing to be learned from the day-to-day of a staff role, whether it be in a faculty-facing or student-facing position. The hierarchies are real in academe, this is very true, and spaces like large conferences tend to exacerbate this. But in the crisis space we are in in academe we would actually achieve more with a holistic view of how to support HigherEd than a "this has nothing to do with the work I do" view when it comes to sessions and talks. I mean the theme of Congress this year was "reframing togetherness" like it would have been nice for that ethos to be modeled by some folk. 

Concluding Reflection

I will be honest and say the transition back to work space having been at Congress for 6 days has been incredibly difficult. Being at GBC and Congress allowed me to see colleagues and friends that I had not seen in a very long time. It was a reminder of how connected I am to different people and different spaces as someone who has worked in colleges and universities, as an instructor, but also in staff roles. A lot of people said to me "holy crap Ann do you know everyone?" And in some ways yes, but I am different person to each of the people I met there, to some I was their former professor, to others I was a former colleague where we could reflect fondly on the work we achieved together. To still others I was someone they only knew on social media space and now we got to meet in the great line from my friend Danielle, in "meat space." But it was a space that I didn't realize how much I needed until I was there "peopling" and seeing folk who mean so much to me, and in turn to be reminded of how much work I have done, and continue to do, and the supports that I continuously try to put out in the world to make equity work possible, or at least as a non-performative discussion. 

I had a friend who was at Congress who refused to wear their name badge, for reasons, and I have been thinking about this for the last couple of days. Because for some people I am someone they will recognize on the street without name badge, for others I am someone that they still recognized with my mask on in a GBC building. Kate said a hilarious thing in a session when something accessibility wise was not going well, and I started a sentence "Accessibility Ann says..." and Kate ended the sentence with "Accessibility Ann says do better." And I laughed because gosh that is how people know me, as the person who asks kindly, and often not so kindly when it has been the hundreth time asked for folk, associations, and institutions, to do better. I was seen in that Congress space in a way that I have not felt seen in a really long time. And I felt seen because I was surrounded by people in different roles and in different spaces who get me, and get the work that I do deeply. 

I came home thinking that the cup filling that happened there would keep me for at least the summer. Sadly a few days later my cup is already feeling empty because, well for the reasons why organizing spaces to meet like that regularly, and I don't mean only on campus, I mean in general, be it on Zoom, on social media, is important. Because folk in general don't feel seen in the spaces they are in regularly. They are often the unicorns saying the things no one wants to hear. So you need a place for a (did I just google collective noun for unicorns, yup I did and found out it is a Blessing).. you need a space for a Blessing of Unicorns to happen (I also like a Rainbow of Unicorns as a good collective noun). So thank you Congress and thank you Margrit and your organizing team for creating a space where a Rainbow Blessing of Unicorns could meet and remind each other why the work we do and the connections we create are important.