Containment Listening: Theorizing the Interactional Choreography of Care That Neutralizes Critique in Trust-Based Academic Relationships

• In Event: Critical Considerations for Faculty Careers in the US and Abroad

Abstract

This paper introduces 'Containment Listening', a patterned interactional choreography in which seemingly caring, trust-based relationships in academia function to neutralize critique rather than foster genuine accountability. Through analytic autoethnography and constructivist grounded theory, it analyzes over 150 unpolished artifacts (notes, reflections, and conversation fragments) collected across four years. Extending feminist-of-color critiques of non-performative allyship and epistemic-injustice models of testimony, it theorizes five interlocking moves—trust leverage, surface validation, epistemic flattening, institutional maintenance, and coerced consensus—through which equity-literate, procedurally fluent listeners perform recognition while deflecting or absorbing dissent. The paper delineates essential conditions of relational trust and procedural authority, provides a vocabulary for naming these dynamics, it aims to equip scholars of color to identify and resist containment listening.

Author

• Shahnaz Masani, Michigan State University