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
• Julia Verkholantsev, Topic Director, Forum on Truth, Wolf Humanities Center; Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies

9:30 am–10:45 am
Keynote: The Prison and Moving Images: The Aesthetics and Politics of Truth-Making
Moderated by Jennifer Sierra, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

• Althea Wasow, Assistant Professor, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara 

11:00 am–12:30 pm
Institutions of Learning
Moderator: Chris Halsted, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

• Julia Alekseyeva, Assistant Professor, Department 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

1:45 pm–3:15 pm
Land and its Technologies 
Moderator: Delbar Khakzad, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

• 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

3:30 pm–5:00 pm
Borders
Moderator: Spencer Small, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

• Alex Brostoff, Assistant Professor, Department 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
• Mina Magda, Assistant Professor, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University
  Imperial Vision in Living Color: Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii Against the Grain

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