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.

This paper presents data from in-depth individual interviews with 8 women working as nannies in some of the most affluent areas in the UK. Nannying, a form of paid domestic labour, is structured around definitions of women’s work, family roles, and the hierarchies of race, class, and nationality. Historically, wealthy families in the UK have relied on domestic workers, or ‘servants’, to perform household tasks, such as cleaning, cooking, and childcare. In recent decades, especially among dual earner families, a neoliberal logic to childcare positions care as either a market commodity or the responsibility of the family. Combined with a cultural preference for intimate, ‘motherlike’ care (rather than collective care in institutions or nurseries), this dynamic has driven growing demand (from those who can afford it) for flexible childcare arrangements, such as nannies and au-pairs. Nannying and childcare are a particularly personal and intimate form of domestic work, a job which includes high levels of emotional labour, isolation, exploitation, and the requirement to navigate intimate and often awkward environments marked by power asymmetries. This research employed a psychosocial, voice-centred, listening guide analytic method, which drew attention to concealed voices within the nannies’ narratives. These voices speak to the burden of acting as a substitute parent: being employed to ensure the care and welfare of children while lacking the autonomy to fulfil that responsibility. The harms nannies experience may arise from this contradiction: they are entrusted with caring for children yet denied the trust to do so. This presentation addresses the conference theme by 1) exploring trust within a labour context shaped by class, inequality, and intimacy, and 2) examining how trust relates to domination, and feelings of powerlessness and agency – both of which have implications for community building.

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...