080036 SE M510 Methodology: Technologies of Trust (2021S)

What is trust and how can it be examined empirically from a sociocultural perspective?

The term trust has enjoyed much currency in the social sciences and humanities. Countless volumes have been filled by authors attempting to catalogue, typologize, and define conditions for/of/about trust. What trust is and what it's for has not found consensus. Trust functions differently depending on whether you look at it from an economic, political, psychological, philosophical, or technological perspective. In the seminar we will consider trust as a historically situated practice and norm which has become tightly interwoven with and conditioned by technologies and infrastructures.

Based on classic readings on trust as well as employing methodological creativity we will approach trust as cultural expectation and practice. We will attempt to examine in which situations and contexts trust plays a role, and how we might ascertain it as ethnographic object.

ATTENTION: This seminar is run in close collaboration with Prof. Shaila Galvin's MA-Seminar "Technologies and Infrastructures of Trust" at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Our goal is to share our insights from readings and assignments, and to learn from each other. The language of instruction at the Graduate Institute is English. Therefore, reading and speaking competence in English is required.