Trust, Mistrust and Community
Annual Conference of the Association for Psychosocial Studies (APS)
12-13 June 2026
St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London TW1 4SX
General enquiries: apsconference@proton.me
Call for Papers
Deadline: 10 February 2026
Submit here: https://www.conftool.net/aps-2026/
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?
We welcome contributions that may help us deepen our understanding of these aspects of our entangled conscious and unconscious psychic, social and political lives.
Papers may address the following and other aspects:
- The role of trust in the therapeutic alliance and the effect of current social dynamics in relational and therapeutic practices
- Trust, mistrust and the challenge of community building in an age of individualism
- Political trust, mistrust and distrust, feelings of powerlessness and the possibilities of agency
- The difference between mistrust and distrust in political and social life: the border between critical thinking and persecutory feelings
- Trust, agency and their relation to the dynamics of rupture and repair
- The entangled relations between truth and trust and/or truth and knowledge
- Achieving basic trust: developmental challenges in the age of fake facts and false facts
- The portrayal of issues related to trust in popular culture
- Trust in the media and mediatised mistrust
- Trust in not knowing
- Intergenerational and intersectional dynamics of trust and mistrust
- Trust in nature, the non-human and the other-than-human
- Trust in the future
Participation: We invite clinicians, practitioners, and academics from various disciplines such as arts, humanities, and social sciences, and other fields to contribute. We welcome submissions for academic papers, but also for experiential events and artistic productions. Individual paper presentations are 15 minutes long.
As well as new thinking and exchange of ideas, our conferences have always stimulated working relationships, partnerships and collaborations. We therefore encourage in-person attendance to foster the engagement of our psychosocial community through social events, interpersonal encounters, meals, and coffee breaks. We will work hard to make this conference an enlivening and convivial experience able to hold and metabolise the anxiety and disquiet that the theme of crisis will provoke. We hope to include an experiential stream of containment, transitional experience and reflexivity in parallel to scholarly and practitioner focussed papers. However, we also offer online participation for those who cannot attend in person due to health, environmental or financial considerations.
Conference organising committee
Jacob Johanssen (St Mary’s University)
Lynn Froggett (University of Lancashire)
Lita Crociani-Windland (University of the West of England)
Marilyn Charles (Austen Riggs Center)
María Mirón (Universidad de Monterrey)
David Jones (The Open University)
Rhea Gandhi (University of Edinburgh)
Liz Frost (University of the West of England)
Thi Gammon (University of Nottingham)