Technologies of (Mis)Trust: Anthropological Perspectives

Beginning of October 2026

 Dr. Lena Kaufmann, UNIFR

Prof. Silvia Lindtner, University of Michigan 

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 and imaginaries of trust and mistrust in diverse ethnographic contexts. Examples may include patients navigating trust in health apps, villagers documenting land rights, migrants confronting biometric borders, officials implementing social credit systems, citizens avoiding registration, communities debating environmental statistics, worshippers investing faith in ritual objects, traders weighing reputations, or customers questioning product authenticity.

By attending to such everyday encounters, this module moves beyond a narrow commonsense notion of “technology” as industrial engineering or high tech—airplanes, computers, satellites—often associated with neutrality, progress, and modernity. While definitions vary, anthropologists broadly agree that technologies form part of wider “socio-technical systems” (Pfaffenberger 1992), comprising objects, actions, and their milieus (Hobbis and Ketterer 2025; see also Bruun and Wahlberg 2022; Coupaye 2022). Ethnographers have shown that technologies are embedded in cultural logics, social practices, gendered relations, and political economies (Lemonnier 1993; Suchman et al. 1999; Bray 2007), embodied in techniques and skilled practices (Mauss 1973 [1934]; Sigaut 1994; Ingold 2006). Far from being mere artifacts or tools, technologies are always situated, enmeshed in power relations and carrying symbolic, moral and political weight (Akrich 1992; Latour 1992; Horst and Miller 2019).

This raises questions about technologies and trust. Technologies can be designed to enhance trust, be it in food and water quality, governments, or markets. They are not restricted to digital innovations, but include long-standing tools and arrangements such as stamps, signatures, uniforms, identity documents, and standardized procedures. Whether analogue or algorithmic, they mediate authority, structure accountability, and shape relations of care, control, and cooperation. Simultaneously, they may (re)produce tensions, dependencies, exclusions, uncertainties and mistrust, inviting critical reflection: Who trusts whom, and what? Who is distrusted, where and when? Who designs and governs technologies? Who accesses, uses, or controls data? How is trust negotiated, denied, or reconfigured in hospitals, courts, farms, bureaucracies, laboratories, factories, or online spaces?

Anthropology approaches trust as relational and situated, embedded in specific cultural, political, and economic contexts. Ethnographies highlight the centrality of trust in interpersonal relations, economic life, religion, and the state (see Andreetta and Eiró 2024). Here, mistrust is not merely the absence of trust but is socially productive in its own right (Carey 2017; Mühlfried 2018). (Mis)trust pervades corporate and technological domains, often manifesting as normative assumptions (Corsín Jiménez 2011), especially when companies design technologies intended to foster trust (Pink and Quilty 2025). Meanwhile, “technologies and infrastructures of trust” produce, manage, and contest (mis)trust, closely tied to politics and power (Weichselbraun et al. 2023)—sometimes with unexpected consequences (Ballestero 2023). This gains new dynamics when crossing borders, for instance when countries such as China are approached with mistrust (Humphrey 2018), or when mistrust of Silicon Valley industries and models of progress fuels imaginaries of China as a new center of innovation (Lindtner 2020).

Moreover, (mis)trust can present methodological challenges and opportunities in ethnographic research (Mallon Andrews 2023), influencing what and who we study, how we document and write (Pink and Quilty 2025). It connects to enduring anthropological concerns with access, consent, legitimacy, risk in the field, research ethics, data management, and public (mis)trust in science. This includes “trust in anthropological theory and comparison” (Corsín Jiménez 2011)and in multidisciplinary collaboration (Leighton and Roberts 2020).

This module provides an open forum for examining these dynamics across anthropological subfields. It welcomes contributions from PhD students specializing in digital, economic, political, environmental, medical, and legal anthropology, STS, and the anthropology of technology, material culture, infrastructures, religion, ethics, gender, migration and more. Contributions may focus on ethnographic case studies—including everyday negotiations of (mis)trust in bureaucracies, markets, care systems, rural and urban environments—as well as on conceptual or methodological questions. By centering anthropological insights in contemporary debates on technologies and the future, the module fosters critical reflection on the social, (geo)political, economic, ecological, material, and ethical stakes of technological transformations. The aim is to support doctoral researchers in developing theoretically grounded, methodologically and empirically rich approaches to exploring socio-technical relations in their own research, while strengthening their awareness and reflexivity in this area. This includes thinking across disciplinary boundaries and how anthropology can contribute to related public debates.

References

Akrich, Madeleine. 1992. ‘The De-Scription of Technical Objects’. In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law. MIT Press.

Andreetta, Sophie, and Flávio Eiró. 2024. ‘Trust in the State: Negotiating Legal and Bureaucratic Encounters’. Journal of Legal Anthropology. Journal of Legal Anthropology 8 (2): 1–14. doi.org/10.3167/jla.2024.080201.

Ballestero, Andrea. 2023. ‘Afterword: Trust: Too Much, Too Little, Never Just Enough’. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 41 (2): 105–11. doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410208.

Bray, Francesca. 2007. ‘Gender and Technology’. Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (Volume 36, 2007): 37–53. doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094328.

Bruun, Maja Hojer, and Ayo Wahlberg. 2022. ‘The Anthropology of Technology: The Formation of a Field’. In The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology, edited by Maja Hojer Bruun, Ayo Wahlberg, Rachel Douglas-Jones, et al. Springer Nature. 

Carey, Matthew. 2017. Mistrust: An Ethnographic Theory. HAU. 

Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. 2011. ‘Trust in Anthropology’. Anthropological Theory 11 (2): 177–96. doi.org/10.1177/1463499611407392.

Coupaye, Ludovic. 2022. ‘Technology’. In The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Lu Ann De Cunzo and Catharine Dann Roeber. Cambridge University Press. 

Hobbis, Geoffrey, and Stephanie Ketterer. 2025. ‘Technology’. The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, July 21. anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/technology.

Horst, Heather A, and Daniel Miller. 2019. Digital Anthropology. 1st edition. Routledge.

Humphrey, Caroline. 2018. ‘Introduction: Trusting and Mistrusting Across Borders’. In Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands, edited by Caroline Humphrey. Amsterdam University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2006. ‘Walking the Plank: Meditations on a Process of Skill’. In Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an Epistemological Framework, edited by John R. Dakers. Palgrave Macmillan.

Latour, Bruno. 1992. ‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’. In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law. MIT Press.

 Leighton, Mary, and Elizabeth F. S. Roberts. 2020. ‘Trust/Distrust in Multidisciplinary Collaboration: Some Feminist Reflections’. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2 (6): 1–27.

Lemonnier, Pierre. 1993. Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Cultures since the Neolithic. Routledge.

Lindtner, Silvia. 2020. Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation. Princeton University Press. 

Mallon Andrews, Kyrstin. 2023. ‘Ecologies of Mistrust: Fish, Fishermen, and the Multispecies Ethics of Ethnographic Authority’. American Anthropologist 125 (2): 283–97. doi.org/10.1111/aman.13828.

Mauss, Marcel. 1973 [1934]. ‘Techniques of the Body’. Economy and Society 2 (1): 70–88. doi.org/10.1080/03085147300000003.

Mühlfried, Florian, ed. 2018. Mistrust: Ethnographic Approximations. Transcript Verlag. 

Pfaffenberger, Bryan. 1992. ‘Social Anthropology of Technology’. Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1): 491–516. doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.002423.

Pink, Sarah, and Emma Quilty. 2025. Can We Trust Technology? Taylor & Francis.

Sigaut, François. 1994. ‘Technology’. In Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Tim Ingold. Routledge.

Suchman, Lucy, Jeanette Blomberg, Julian Orr, and Randall Trigg. 1999. ‘Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice’. American Behavioral Scientist 43 (November): 392–408. doi.org/10.1177/000276429904300303.

Weichselbraun, Anna, Shaila Seshia Galvin, and Ramah McKay. 2023. ‘Introduction: Technologies and Infrastructures of Trust’. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 41 (2): 1–14. doi.org/10.3167/cja.2023.410202.

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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