Can trust be built into systems that users have determined to be untrustworthy? Should we be thinking of trust as something that is declining or improving, something to be built into AI and other data-centric systems, or as something that is produced through a set of relations and in particular locations? Where else, besides large institutions and their technologies, is trust located? How do other frames of trust produce community-centered politics such as politics of refusal or data sovereignty? What can community-based expertise tell us about how trust is built, negotiated, and transformed within and to the side of large-scale systems? Is there a disconnect between the solutions to a broad lack of trust and how social theorists, community members, and cultural critics have thought about trust?
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In our work together, we aim to move away from a concept of trust that is inherent to the object (e.g. information as trustworthy) or a concept of trust that is overly normative (prescribing trust as a goal that should be achieved), and toward a concept of trust as a relational process. We will work toward an empirical grounding of how trust is stymied, broken, established, reestablished, co-opted, and redirected among the powerful and among communities who have never been able to fully trust the institutions that shape their lives.