Events and Seminars
| Event | : | Trust, Mistrust and Community |
|---|---|---|
| Venue | : | St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London TW1 4SX |
| Date | : | 12/06/2026 - 13/06/2026 |
| Duration | : | 2 Days |
| Extra Info | : | Annual Conference of the Association for Psychosocial Studies (APS) Trust is a fundamental aspect of human life, bound up with care, security, dependence, interdependence, and the unknown. Both trust and mistrust are necessary, if not foundational, to individual relationships, political and social life. They affect the ways in which we lean on and critically evaluate the socio-technical systems, analogue and digital, that form the infrastructures of contemporary societies. Trust also draws on fantasy as a constructive dynamic, enabling imaginations that contain aspects of the unknown and the incomprehensible. Mistrust on the other hand fuels dystopian imaginaries that stimulate conspiracies, cultural contagion and echo-chambers leading to social defences against invasion, contamination and overwhelm. Despite its apparent commonsense nature, trust rarely invites reflection. Related concepts such as faith, confidence, mistrust, and distrust form a complex family. In post-truth times, where misinformation and disinformation proliferate, deciding what or whom to trust has become both crucial and increasingly fraught. Trust and mistrust operate dialectically: trust is conditional and requires scepticism and criticality, while unmitigated mistrust becomes corrosive, undermines discernment and elicits paranoia. This can foster collapse into narcissistic isolation. The challenge today is how to understand and calibrate trust and mistrust without collapsing into distrust and powerlessness. Truth has long been linked to trust, yet many perspectives propose that truth itself is unstable and socially constructed. Can we bear this instability and the responsibility that it entails? |
| Organised By | : | The Association for Psychosocial Studies |
| Web Link | : | https://www.psychosocial-studies-association.org/conference-2026/ |