CALL FOR PAPERS

• Theme: The Cultural Imaginaries of (Dis)Trust (download full pdf)
• Publication outlet: Literatūra
• Email proposals to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2025
• Full chapter deadline: 1 June 2026

With this volume, we aim to think about the cultural configurations of trust and trustworthiness (and lack thereof) not only as a set of dispositions, cognitions, and affects, which reaffirm the tenacity and viability of social relations (Jones 2012), but also as ‘a form of corporate governance’ (Barbalet 2019) as well as a ‘transitional infrastructure’ (Berlant 2022) that bring to relief the contradictory modalities of nonsovereign relationality inherent in the political ecologies of late modernity. How does the dialectic of trust/distrust operate in the reproduction of life and its social institutions? What does it mean to suggest that trust constitutes the implicit givenness of our world and unfolds the ‘affective depth’ (Utley 2014) of our experience of vulnerability? What does the phenomenology of trust make visible in crisis ordinariness? What poetic forms do trust and distrust take in cultural imaginaries? How do trust and its ethical siblings help (or hinder) scholars of the humanities and creative artists reimagine, reconfigure, or renew commitments to new pluralities or collectivities?

We invite contributors to address any of the questions asked above, or any of the following additional questions or topics, or your own trust-related question or topic: 

• What theoretical problems are raised by the idea of the decay of trust? How does it relate to ‘permacrisis’ and/or ‘crisis ordinariness’?
• Trustworthy and/or trusting – institutions, texts, or readers?
• Can and should we read trust historically? What would that entail?
• ‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst’: how does hope relate to trust in addressing the political impasse between hope and resilience and creating the imaginaries of the future?
• How do postcolonial and decolonial frameworks reframe trust in relation to sustainability and ecological justice?
• How might concepts such as slow violence, multispecies justice, and speculative futures expand our understanding of trust?
• What alternative epistemologies of trust emerge from marginalized communities?
• How can literature, art, and cultural production intervene in the breakdown of trust?
• Respond to or situate the idea of trust in any of the following contexts:
  • as a genre of self-knowledge
  • as a crisis-epistemology
  • as a form of affective judgment
  • as a (neo-liberal) governance of the self in conditions of uncertainty and risk
  • as a (neo-)conservative measure
  • in cultural memory and mnemonic politics
  • in the construction of the idea or possibility of truth
  • in the dynamics of sincerity, suspicion, and surveillance
  • in the posthuman ecologies of alien agency: AI, nonhuman animals, elemental forces, etc.
  • in the microecology of disaster: catastrophe, comedy, awkwardness, intimacy, work, care work, noticing, dissociating, etc.
  • in Indigenous trauma and the aesthetics of survivance
  • in climate emergency and/or ecological criticism
  • in questions of moral and/or legal (un)accountability
  • in the ethics of vulnerability