In an age of technological growth, globalization, and neoliberalism, the ways we build trust are being dramatically transformed. Simultaneously, funding for education has become subject to market- and data-driven directives, neglecting the needs of vulnerable communities and ecologies. How do we learn to trust and trust in learning when our communities and connections are increasingly distant, ephemeral, and mediated? How do we avoid falling to game-theoretically governed social, economic, and informatic relations? What aspects of trust are under-considered in efforts for learning and change? Where are the flows of trust in above/below-ground networks (institutions, organizations, grassroots movements, communities of practice, etc.)? What’s left to learn, if anything, from posthumanism? Is trust even a useful conceptualization of relations anymore?

PHuN (post-human network) invites submissions and proposals for papers, demos, workshops, media, artistic and practice-driven worksto their 4th annual meeting. Please send submissions to this form by December 13 (form also accessible via post-human.net). Topics could include but are not limited to:

• Trustful learning, trustful organization, trustless learning, trustless organization

• World building and world making, RPG, role-playing, games, reality coding 

• Sartorialism, textiles, weaving, cooking and baking as trust-based art

• Philosophical and pedagogical optometry (is hindsight 2020?) 

• Currency and blockchain as game theoretical trustless systems  

• #metoo, whisper networks and bad faith, consent and non-consent

• Cults of toxic masculinity, nice guys, neckbeards, and edgelords

• Legal apparati, critical legal theory, sovereignty, and political theology

• Big science and radical empiricism (are they incommensurable?)

• Social media, cryptography, and the future of the secret

• Surveillance, big tech, self surveillance, and privacy

• Paranoid readings, Psychotherapy, Transference

• Deep Fakes and New Media

• Debt, guilt, and potlatching; learning as debt, and student debt   

• Alternative schooling, public and radical pedagogies

• Propaganda, public opinion, manufacturing consent, chill effects 

• Education, nationalism, and identity

• Anti-blackness & indigenous erasure in posthuman discourse

• Connectivity hypotheses and forces of subjectification 

• Clarke’s Law, black boxes, and models faith in incomprehensible technology

• Craft, work, and technical knowledge  

• Collaborative story-telling, ARGs, MMOs, and virtual relations 

• Prometheanism, climate change, climate education, and giga-engineering

• Trust and belief in the (post)human being

• Interspecies learning, post-humanities learning, symbiosis and mutual aid

• Anarchist pedagogies; mutualisms, communalisms, cooperatives and learning

• Yelp reviews and anonymous crowd sourcings of value

• The marketplace of ideas as a model of peer-review

• Trust and faith, fidelity and religion, truth and courage

• Automation, machine learning, algorithmic faith, golems

• Paperclip problems, machinic anxiety, Roko’s Basilisk and Modern Life

• Vaporware, faketech and venture capital confidence schemes

• Demons, angels, and trustworthy aliens

• Trust in non-state governance and social media  

• The project of the university and its ecclesiastical origins

• Process theology, Whitehead’s cosmology, and theory of education  

• Espionage, agents provocateurs, infiltration, and spycraft

• Steerspeople, trimtabs, helmsmen, Charon, and biopower 

• Crises of faith, leaps of faith, confronting others as trustworthy

• Trust and “letting go” in the midst of mystical experience

• Non-techno-determinist models of transhumanism and body-hacking

• Transgressive art, scholarship, and expression.

• Anthropologies and etymologies of trust

• Conspiracy theories, hyperstitions, and worldmaking

Bibliography

Baier, Annette. Moral Prejudices.

Bang, Megan, and Ananda Marin. “Nature–Culture Constructs in Science Learning: Human/Non-Human Agency and Intentionality.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching.

Bang, Megan, and Shirin Vossoughi. “Participatory Design Research and Educational Justice: Studying Learning and Relations Within Social Change Making.” Cognition and Instruction.

Beer, Stafford. Designing Freedom. 

Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman Humanities.” European Educational Research Journal. 

Brekke, Jaya Klare. “Disassembling the Trust Machine: Three Cuts on the Political Matter of Blockchain.” PhD Thesis, University of Durham. 

Case, Nicky. “The Evolution of Trust.”

Curtis, Adam. The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?

Dewey, John. Experience and Education.

Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. 

Friere, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 

Giroux, Henry. “Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Resistance: Notes on a Critical Theory of Education Struggle.” Educational Philosophy and Theory.    

Gore, Jennifer. The Struggle for Pedagogies.

Land, Susan, and David Jonassen.Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments.

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.

Littman, Walter. Public Opinion. 

Malzacher, Florian, Ahmet Ögüt, and Pelin Tan, editors. The Silent University: Towards a Transversal Pedagogy.

Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Understanding. 

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift.

Meranze, Michael, and Christopher Newfield. “Remaking the University.”

Morgenstern, Oskar and John von Neumann. Games and Economic Behavior.  

Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study.  

Pask, Gordon. Conversation, Cognition and Learning.

Pedersen, Helena and Barbara Pini. “Educational Epistemologies and Methods in a More-than-Human World.” Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Quinn, Jocey. “Theorising Learning and Nature: Post-Human Possibilities and Problems.” Gender and Education (2013).

Rose-Antoinette, Ronald. “if the earth is the pedagogy….” Inflexions.

SenseLab. “The Go-To How-To Guide to Anarchiving.”

Siddiqui, Jamila. “Restyling the Humanities Curriculum of Higher Education for Posthuman Times.” Curriculum Inquiry.

Von Foerster, Heinz. Understanding Understanding.

Whitehead, Alfred North. The Aims of Education.