As a teenager still embedded in Mormonism, I listened as a new mother spoke in church. Sharing her love for her newborn, she immediately—and seemingly guiltily—devalued it in comparison to Christ’s love. Human love, she said, was fragile and could be unreliable, even her own as a mother. Her task was not to secure her child’s trust in her love, but to redirect it toward Christ: obedience, commandments, and the eternal life He alone could offer.

Within Mormonism, trust is systematically displaced from lived, embodied life onto a deathless ideal. Mortal life is framed as provisional—a test qualifying one for eternal life—where trust must be directed solely toward Christ, a figure who died and now exists in an incorruptible, deathless form. Extending André Green’s concept of the dead mother into the social, Mormonism functions as a cultural dead mother: a system that redirects the vitality of living—co-opting maternal libido—toward preservation through obedience, repetition, and the promise of life without death (Green 1986). Mothers guide both their own trust and their children’s away from spontaneous, relational life and toward the system. Within this matrix of massification (Hopper 2003), trust is trained to equate what feels calm, safe, and “right” with deadness masquerading as life.

Through a series of autoethnographic vignettes, I trace the formation, reproduction, and eventual destabilization of trust in death as life in Mormonism. These vignettes move between my childhood immersion, my later role as a mother reproducing it, and the gradual emergence of mistrust as the system fails to sustain lived experience. What initially appears as care and certainty increasingly reveals itself as stasis and preservation. In moments when this structure breaks down, the corpse anchoring the system becomes visible, and trust begins—tentatively and unevenly—to shift back toward living, creative life.

People never fully leave behind their earlier selves; rather, these younger versions and their associated mental states remain embedded in the psyche. Media can play a crucial role in activating such dormant selves. This paper draws on psychosocial interview data generated through a Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) approach with a 30-year-old married Vietnamese woman who reflects on how a Korean television drama that helped propel the global Korean Wave shaped her youth and life trajectory. For her, the 2002 romantic drama Winter Sonata evokes memories of her younger years, her experience living in South Korea as a student, and her first date with her husband there. The paper highlights how the interview space, shaped by the principles of free association and narrative openness, enables participants to pause, look back, and reconnect with feelings and dimensions of the self often left unspoken or submerged in the flow of busy adult life, allowing for a meaningful re-alignment of past and present selves and a sustained sense of continuity across time.

Surrogate mothers in India are often expected to trust the various stakeholders of the surrogacy process. However, this trust is unidirectional, given the significant power asymmetries, with surrogates being the least represented stakeholder within this arrangement.

Surrogacy in India has undergone significant reform following the enactment of the Surrogacy Regulation Act, 2021, followed by the Surrogacy Regulation Amendment Rules, 2024. This ruling banned commercial surrogacy in India and mandated that altruistic surrogacy arrangements be limited to close relatives only. While this shift aims to protect vulnerable women from exploitation, it raises concerns about whether it truly fulfills this intent.

Surrogate mothers have frequently reported a lack of access to the contracts they sign before the commencement of their surrogacy journey. These contracts, being legally binding, are often drafted without input from surrogate mothers, in a language they do not read or understand and often prioritise reproductive outcomes for the commissioning parents over the emotional well-being, bodily autonomy and informed consent of surrogate mothers. Additionally, they also report on medical interventions and procedures that are often introduced without their consultation at all stages of their engagement in surrogacy.

Many surrogates come from marginalised backgrounds and frequently report expectations that are placed on them to be the perfect mother-worker in this arrangement. They often engage in surrogacy as an economic necessity, which places them in a vulnerable position regarding trust. Trust within this system is precarious due to the unequal power dynamics. The expectation for reciprocity of trust, such as transparency concerning medical procedures and economic agreements, can be undermined by their need for financial enhancement. This study explores how power inequality within an Indian surrogacy landscape could shape surrogate mothers’ capacity to trust systems that govern their participation.

Mistrust doesn't necessarily equate to powerlessness in Indian surrogates. A reflective approach...

This paper explores the systematic destruction of human trust through the lens of the feature film The Pitesti Experiment (dir. Victoria Baltag). Based on the notorious re-education program in early Communist Romania (1949–1951), the film depicts the "most terrible barbarity of the contemporary world," where university students were subjected to a perverse psychological experiment designed to create the "New Man." Unlike traditional forms of incarceration, the Pitesti Phenomenon weaponized the victim-victimizer relationship, forcing prisoners to torture their own friends and family to prove their "re-education."

The analysis focuses on how the experiment deliberately targeted the fundamental pillars of human interdependence. By compelling detainees to renounce their faith, ideology, and—most crucially—their interpersonal loyalties, the regime didn't just extract information; it induced a total collapse of the self into a state of "narcissistic isolation" and paranoia. Through cinematic representation, the paper examines the "unnarratability" of this trauma and the film's role as a commemorative gesture that breaks the silence imposed by decades of state-sponsored disinformation. It interrogates the thin line between trust and survival, illustrating how the forced betrayal of one's social and spiritual fabric leads to a corrosive form of mistrust that lingers across generations.

How this presentation addresses the conference theme: The presentation addresses the theme by examining the "dialectics of trust and mistrust" in its most extreme, pathological form. It explores how the Pitesti Experiment functioned as a "dystopian imaginary" made real, where the unknown was not a space for imagination, but a source of constant, calculated terror. By discussing the film’s journey—from its independent, decade-long production to its role in uncovering "unstable truths"—this session reflects on how art can recalibrate historical trust in a post-truth era, fostering a collective "bearing of responsibility" for a past that was once violently erased.