Over the past four years, the media outlets we trust, the scientific findings we ponder, and the social mores we subscribe to have increasingly become a matter of political ideology in public discourse. Institutional and social trust has eroded. Differences are emphasized, and similarities recede into the background. The consensus-building approach of solidarity movements to solving some of the world’s most pernicious problems has been replaced by a system that champions individual, sectarian, and isolationist solutions. In a world that is now seemingly saturated with “fake news,” climate denial, xenophobia, misogyny, we are left to ask who and what is deserving of our trust, what differentiates “truth” from “fiction,” and how to repair the fissures that threaten to further degrade our planet.

The Graduate Student Symposium calls for proposals for paper, poster, art, performance, and multi-media presentations that consider widely questions of trust violation and reparation of the most pressing problems commanding our attention today including but not limited to: race relations, immigration policies, climate change, political representation, the defense of democracy, scientific facts, ethnic, gender and sexual identities.