Introduction Technologies and infrastructures of trust

Abstract

What do we mean when we talk about trust? Contemporary discourses figure trust variously as a problem, an aspiration, an object of intervention, and something to be dispensed with all together. While the current moment demands new ways of thinking about trust, so too does scholarly work on trust demand similar renewal and reconsideration. To accomplish this, we depart from approaches that engage trust as a diagnostic for analysing other phenomena or objects of study, often with an emphasis on its instrumental importance. Our special issue instead approaches trust as something that itself needs to be problematised. The individual articles demonstrate the theoretical and methodological possibilities afforded through ethnographic study of the practices, technologies, and infrastructures that are often claimed as necessary to produce or sustain it.