This paper will focus on entanglements of institutional trust and mistrust experienced within Further Education (FE) in England. Working with Donovan’s argument that the FE sector is, organisationally and politically, a ‘low trust environment’ (2019, p.189) it considers how members of colleges navigate, connect, and disconnect within the material and symbolic expectations of such working environments. Specifically, it will draw on emerging findings from a larger project on workplace belonging within FE to suggest that both trust and mistrust can be read rhizomatically within everyday micro-experiences of belonging at work.

This paper seeks to trouble more functional accounts of institutional trust, proposing that shared, reciprocal trust between different actors within the hierarchical strata of a college will always be frustrated by current neoliberal agendas of competition and accountability. Whilst trust has been seen as a ‘critical competence inside organisations’ (Lewicki et al, 2016, p.93) I posit that trust and mistrust are conjunctively negotiated within an education sector subjected to continual policy churn and imposed change. The paper will therefore focus on an analysis of the power struggles implicit within enactments of organisational trust and mistrust, and the different ‘tactics’ (De Certeau, 1988) used by some of my participants to create moments of solidarity and resistance within their working lives.

Theoretically, this paper adopts a multidisciplinary perspective of trust, considering how trust within the workplace can be viewed through philosophical, sociological, and post-structural scholarship. Trust and mistrust are positioned as distinct but overlapping affects produced and reproduced through historical and current experiences within workplaces. In considering trust in this manner, I aim to engage with the core conference themes, focusing particularly on how powerlessness and agency within everyday working lives might be creatively and dynamically explored.

This paper explores the psychosocial dynamics of mistrust and powerlessness amid radical social transformation. In the context of the 2019 Chilean revolt known as estallido [social outbreak], I conducted interviews with critical scholars to examine the experience of social change among politically engaged subjects. My material shows the contradictory place that power occupies in their accounts. While neoliberal reforms have profoundly eroded academic power in Chile and elsewhere, my interpretation suggests that powerlessness should not be understood solely as a condition imposed by managerial governance over universities. Rather, it can surprisingly function as a fantasmatic solution for enduring (dis)empowering events.

In participants’ narratives, competitive research grants – paradigmatic instruments of neoliberal governance – were consistently framed as spaces outside power, allowing academics to sustain an image of themselves as politically committed yet institutionally powerless. I argue that this rejection is supported by a fantasy of powerlessness that manages mistrust toward institutions while preserving a sense of political integrity. Ultimately, power is imaginarily equated with neoliberalism itself, making it extremely hard to consciously tolerate a socially empowering event like the estallido, thereby keeping things unaltered.

Drawing on a Lacanian account of desire, I conceptualise the fantasy of powerlessness as an unconscious mechanism that simultaneously responds to and reproduces neoliberal power relations. This dynamic helped subjects cope with the destabilising yet emancipatory call of the revolt by following the logic of privation, through which resistance to neoliberalism ends up perpetuating the very symbolic delimitation of power established by the neoliberal regime.

The paper contributes to psychosocial debates on political trust by showing how mistrust and powerlessness can become sites for libidinal investment rather than merely reactive positions, shaping the possibilities for political agency in contexts of neoliberal disempowerment.

Private tutoring has become an integral part of the schooling process for millions of students in India. Widely perceived by students and families as a necessary supplement to formal schooling, private tutoring has expanded rapidly alongside the formal education system. This paper examines the growth of private tutoring in India through the lens of trust and mistrust, arguing that this expansion is sustained by a pervasive mistrust in formal schooling and a corresponding, if fragile, trust in market-based educational solutions.

Drawing on qualitative research conducted with 166 participants, including students, parents, schoolteachers, school leaders, and private tutors, the study explores how different stakeholders articulated and negotiated trust in relation to education. Students frequently expressed a lack of confidence in schools’ capacity to adequately support learning and examination success. Parents similarly articulated anxieties related to academic competition, high-stakes examinations and uncertain futures, leading them to place trust in private tutoring as a form of security and risk management. Teachers and school leaders, meanwhile, describe systemic constraints (such as understaffing, overcrowded classrooms and overburdened curricula) that undermine their own confidence in schools’ ability to meet students’ needs.

These experiences are situated within a broader political economy of education shaped by neoliberal reforms and marketisation. In this context, mistrust in formal schooling fuels the expansion of a largely unregulated private tutoring sector, intensifying educational stratification and shifting responsibility for educational success from institutions to families. Trust in tutoring thus emerges not as a stable or benign orientation, but as a compelled and anxious response to institutional precarity.

This presentation examines how trust and mistrust are reconfigured within contemporary education systems. It explores how mistrust in formal institutions generates conditional trust in market actors, and how these dynamics shape agency, dependency and the capacity to imagine collective educational futures.

This paper explores the role of trust in pedagogical relationships, where power relations are inherently skewed. While psychoanalytic scholarship by Freud and Britzman has recognised psychoanalysis as an educational process, I examine if the patient (as a student) is different from a supervisee or a trainee in an embodied discipline. Utilising critical autoethnography, I compare and contrast my experiences as a dance disciple with my experiences as a psychoanalytical therapist and supervisee. The search for pedagogical or emotional care creates the very conditions in which faith in the other becomes necessary. Surrender, enabled by regression, is problematised utilising these specific contexts. I mobilise Winnicott's understanding of regression. While the authority figure provides a holding environment for the other, and invites trust, these relations can also be fraught with subjugation of one by the other. I ask— why we seek these relationships of care, help and dependence. Is trust more than an outcome enabled by reason that the other has our best interest in mind. Attachment theorists would affirm that trust a human relational need to lean on and rely on the other. This paper discusses the ethics of such pedagogical situations. The (interminable) analytical situation, elaborated by Felman acts as a departure point to think about themes of power within an educational context. Drawing on Rubin's thinking on the circulation of bodies and power, I interrogate what is exchanged within these pedagogical relationships.
This paper relates to the conference theme as it examines the phenomenon of trusting the unknown within an educational-relational dynamic. I argue that while trust is the condition of learning, a degree of mistrust functions as its necessary counterpart to protect one’s healthy narcissism, against the risks of surrender in relations where power is never fully symmetrical, as elaborated by Freud in On Narcissism: An Introduction.