In conjunction with the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2025–2026 Forum on Truth, this interdisciplinary symposium engages experts in an exploration of truth(s) contested or revealed in crises across panels on (1) Institutions of Learning, (2) Land and its Technologies, and (3) Borders. In the framing, we take our cue from Sara Ahmed (2010), who understands crisis, perceived and described, as constructed; a crisis necessitates the identification and defense of shared norms and values, a world and its inhabitants, against that which threatens. The articulation of crisis thus reveals and contests truth(s) that are, by presentation, matters of survival. Held at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, this one-day symposium will begin with a highly anticipated keynote featuring Dr. Althea Wasow from University of California, Santa Barbara. The day's discussions will bring together scholars from various disciplines to expand upon questions of crisis, its meanings and manifestations in the modern and contemporary world, and the role of truth in surviving. 

Symposium Agenda

8:30 am–9:20 am
Breakfast

9:20 am–9:30 am
Welcome Remarks

• Ayako Kano, Director, Wolf Humanities Center; Professor, Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania
• Julia Verkholantsev, Topic Director, Forum on Truth, Wolf Humanities Center; Associate Professor, Department of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania

9:30 am–10:45 am
Keynote: The Prison and Moving Images: The Aesthetics and Politics of Truth-Making **
What constitutes a moving image practice of abolition? Through her research on filmmaking in carceral spaces and media-making by filmmakers who are or were formerly incarcerated, scholar and filmmaker Althea Wasow explores crucial approaches to moving-image practice committed to abolition in our historical moment marked by "truth in crisis." In advance of Dr. Althea Wasow’s keynote lecture, we invite you to watch her short film, the wannabe (2006, 24m), which can be viewed here.

• Althea Wasow, Assistant Professor, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
  
  Moderator: Jennifer Sierra, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

11:00 am–12:30 pm
Institutions of Learning
How do we come together to examine, verify, and convey truth? How are these collective processes institutionalized, and then troubled? Exploring different mediums, methods, and social contexts, the experts on this panel reveal existential crises faced by institutions centered on learning as they contend with the concept of truth, and what this means for collective building and conveying of knowledge. 

• Julia Alekseyeva, Assistant Professor, Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania
  Towards a Critique of Cinema-Truth  **
• Emily Ng, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
  Beyond Certitude: Devotion and Negation in Charismatic Pedagogy
• Ege Yumusak, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
  Collective Distraction at the University  **
  
  Moderator: Chris Halsted, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

1:45 pm–3:15 pm
Land and its Technologies 
How do people perceive, measure, and convey to each other the truth of terrain, environment, climate and atmosphere in crisis? The experts on this panel examine how technical projects in the 20th- and 21st-century sought to render land and rivers in flux, in change, in disaster into images, models, and data, and how these fraught processes continue to inform infrastructure, policy, and shared reality.

• Nikhil Anand, Daniel Braun Silvers and Robert Peter Silvers Family Presidential Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
  Desiccation: Dry Land Technologies and the Making of the Urban Climate
• Samuel Driver, Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, Dickinson College
  Present, Looming, and Enduring: Temporalities of Environmental Crisis in the Work of Rodchenko, Nigaryan, and Mikhailov  **
• M. Susan Lindee, Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
  Rivers in Exact Miniature: Modeling Truth in the Mississippi Basin  **
  
  Moderator: Delbar Khakzad, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

3:30 pm–5:00 pm
Borders
What are "borders"? How do they relate to truths central to identity and survival? The experts on this panel demonstrate through studies on migration, translation, enforcement, and depiction that borders, more than just demarcators of terrain and territory, are sites of individual, institutional, and national crises that impact what types of lives are legible and liveable.

• Alex Brostoff, Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, Georgetown University
  Thirteen Truths in Thirteen Titles; or, Cuíer Clarice, Queer Migrations  **
• Hardeep Dhillon, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
  The Battle for Birthright Citizenship and the Children of Immigrants Ineligible to Naturalize
  
  Moderator: Spencer Small, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

5:00 pm
Closing Remarks

• Caitlin Adkins, Research Associate, Wolf Humanities Center; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Civilizations and Languages, University of Pennsylvania

5:15 pm
Reception