Technologies of (Mis)Trust: Anthropological Perspectives

Beginning of October 2026

 Dr. Lena Kaufmann, UNIFR

Prof. Silvia Lindtner, University of Michigan 

From automated decision-making systems to biometric borders, social media, digital health

infrastructures, and experiments in governance, technologies shape how trust is produced,

distributed, and contested. While technologies embed trust, they also generate new tensions,

uncertainties, dependencies, and social negotiations. This module invites PhD students in

anthropology to explore how technologies – understood broadly to include material, social,

embodied, digital, bureaucratic, and symbolic forms – intersect with practices, imaginaries, and

infrastructures of trust in diverse ethnographic contexts.

Technologies of trust are not restricted to digital innovations. They include long-standing tools and

arrangements such as stamps, signatures, uniforms, identity documents, and standardised

procedures. These technologies – whether analogue or algorithmic – mediate authority, structure

accountability, and enable or constrain relationships of care, control, and cooperation. Trust, in

turn, is not only a conceptual lens but also a methodological challenge in ethnographic research. It

connects to long-standing anthropological concerns with legitimacy, relationality, and the

management of uncertainty and risk.

At the same time, technologies that claim to enhance trust - from rating systems and monitoring

devices to contracts, platforms, and predictive models - can also (re)produce forms of exclusion,

dependency, mistrust, and tension. This raises critical questions: Who designs and governs

technologies? What kinds of frictions or tensions arise around their use? How is trust negotiated,

denied, or reconfigured in settings such as hospitals, courts, farms, bureaucracies, or online spaces?

This module offers an open forum for discussing the entanglements of technology, trust, and tension

across anthropological subfields. It invites contributions from students working in digital

anthropology, material culture, economic anthropology, political anthropology, environmental

anthropology, legal anthropology, STS, medical anthropology, the anthropology of ethics,

migration and mobility, and beyond. Topics might include: expertise, labour, skills, and automation;

data sovereignty and (digital) citizenship; the (geo)politics of technologies and infrastructures;

infrastructures of care and control; transparency and opacity in algorithmic systems; trust in

technological imaginaries and futures; or the everyday negotiations of trust in bureaucracies,

markets, food, and rural environments.

By centering anthropological insights in contemporary debates about technologies and the future,

the module creates space for critical reflection on the social, (geo)political, economic, ecological,

material and ethical stakes of technological transformations. The aim is to support doctoral

students in developing theoretically grounded, methodologically and empirically rich approaches

to exploring socio-technical relations (beyond commonsense notions of technology) in their own

research, and to strengthen related sensitivities and reflexivity. This includes thinking across

disciplinary boundaries and how anthropology can contribute to related public debates.

Crêt-Bérard (tbc)

Participation fee: CHF 60 

For students of the CUSO universities (Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel and Fribourg) and from the universities of Bern, Zürich, Luzern, Basel and St. Gallen, accommodation and meals are organised and covered by the CUSO doctoral program in anthropology. 

Travel expenses will be reimbursed via MyCUSO based on half-fare train ticket (2nd class) from the student's university to the place of the activity.

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