This academic workshop brought together those who are investigating trust and digital technologies from various angles, disciplinary traditions, and global perspectives. It examined how different disciplines and epistemologies understand trust, with the goal of developing theories that specify how trust — as well as mistrust — shape how data-centric technologies unfold and should unfold. 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 worked 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.
