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This paper examines ecosystems of trust and mistrust in media reporting and mediation of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. It foregrounds mistrust as a structuring and generative force shaping access, proximity, visibility, and silence in war knowledge production.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines trust and mistrust as affective social relations that structure media practices, access, and knowledge production in the context of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Based on ethnographic research with journalists, vloggers, displaced Ukrainians, and their hosts in the UK, I argue that media functions not merely as a channel of information but as a trusted communicative circuit - one that must be continually negotiated and can easily fracture. Across my interlocutors, trust emerges as a condition of access: at the frontline, it determines which journalists are granted permission to enter specific spaces, return to particular military units, or document certain stories. These decisions are formally framed through security and censorship but are practically governed by personal relationships and reputational trust. When trust is damaged, access is withdrawn, shaping both journalistic practice and the public imagination of the war by rendering certain units, directions, or events invisible. In this sense, mistrust does not merely obstruct information flows; it actively reorganises them. Rather than opposing trust and mistrust, the paper shows how mistrust operates as a generative force: enabling selective engagement, ethical judgment, and the anticipation of agenda and bias. I further examine how “nodes of trust” emerge among mediators, activists, and audiences, translating emotional proximity into recognition, authority, and material resources. The paper concludes that trust and mistrust are central mechanisms through which war is made socially real, mediated, and morally intelligible far from the battlefield.

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Drawing on interviews and observations of recent Bulgarian protests, this paper argues that mistrust is a relational practice and its effects can be constructive or deconstructive, determined by the social roles and experiences of those practicing mistrust.

Paper long abstract

In the most recent wave of anti-government protests in Bulgaria, many public conversations focused on the relationship between protesters and the police and often pointed at a deep social mistrust toward the latter. Instructions on how to interact with the police and what to do if police violence occurs, previously limited to small activist circles, entered the mainstream discourse and were disseminated by opposition politicians, political influencers, and law firms. Taking new forms and scales, mistrust thus led to new organizational practices and volunteer efforts, proving to be a constructive social force. On the other hand, interviews with victims of police violence highlight mistrust as a deconstructive force, changing people’s attitudes toward the police and undermining the already fragile authority of political institutions and the police in particular.

In this paper, I offer a comparison in the forms of mistrust as practiced by government opposition, protest organizers and volunteers, and victims of police violence. My main argument is that mistrust, as practiced by opposition politicians and protest organizers can be a mobilizing and constructive force, but it can have the opposite effects on those who experience police violence. This analysis stems from an understanding of mistrust as a relational and directed practice and draws on observations, interviews, and text analyses, gathered in the context of an ongoing research project on police violence in Bulgaria from 2020 onward. The analytical framework I employ builds on existing anthropological literature on social mistrust, the state, and violent experiences.

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Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with Romanians in London during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper explores how migrants expressed their mistrust through COVID-19 conspiracy theories, showing both their destructive and generative role.

Paper long abstract

Speculating about the ‘nanocip’ inside the COVID-19 vaccine and later about geopolitical events like the invasion of Ukraine, Romanian migrants routinely employed conspiracies to make sense of their lives in London. These narratives drew on what Carey (2017) calls the ‘bureaucratic imagination’, articulating scepticism not only toward the pandemic, but also toward party politics and state authority more broadly. This translated into a surprising electoral outcome in 2020. Although previously supporting liberal candidates, a quarter of Romanians abroad voted for a new far-right party, now a major political force in Romania. Seen through conspiratorial reasoning, this electoral activation becomes less surprising.

Conspiracies coupled Romanians’ long-standing mistrust of the state with their novel discontent over the outcomes of migration, while also enabling them to imagine alternative futures. These speculative futures crystallised around the idea of a ‘plot of land to live off’ in Romania, a common migrant aspiration that often attracts ridicule and envy. Conspiracies about the post-pandemic world reframed these contested homes as spaces of refuge, removed from state intrusion and the inequalities of global capitalism.

This paper highlights how mistrust functioned simultaneously as a generative social force – enabling critique and political dissent – and as a destructive one, reinforcing exclusionary moralities and supporting far-right political parties. By tracing this Janus-faced dynamic, it aims to emphasise the continued importance of mistrust as a form of sociality shaping political possibility in a polarised world.

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This paper focuses on how Russian-speaking people in Germany with Soviet/post-Soviet backgrounds transform distrust of German healthcare into practices of preparedness and control

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the ambivalence of distrust as a form of risk management in health-related practices among Russian-speaking people in Germany with Soviet or post-Soviet backgrounds. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, I show how participants limit reliance on public healthcare and assemble informal infrastructures of care that compensate for perceived gaps and generate institutional frictions. In this ethnographic case, treating distrust and mistrust as discrete categories is analytically limiting; instead, I trace how low reliance on institutions is assembled, maintained, and mobilised through informal infrastructures of care.

Participants often describe German medicine as insufficient: too slow, overly formal, inattentive, or unable to provide what they consider adequate treatment. These encounters generate a strong deficit. Even when this deficit is not systemically measurable, it is deeply felt and becomes real in its consequences. In response, participants mobilise “preparedness” practices such as stockpiling medicines, exchanging drugs and advice in online chats, sharing “life hacks”, consulting doctors online and "consulting" one another in Russian-language chats, seeking treatment abroad, and turning to alternative methods.

I argue that distrust here is neither a fixed cultural trait nor a generalised suspicion towards everything. It is situational, activated when formal pathways are experienced as unreliable or insufficient. The resulting preparedness practices help participants secure what they define as “enough” care and regain a sense of control. These practices are rational responses to uncertainty that stabilise everyday life for participants, but they can also produce unintended pressures and extra workload on healthcare services and institutional regulations.

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Based on ethnographic interviews with mothers in Zagreb corporations, the study shows how maternity leave exposes unspoken mistrust, sensed through exclusion and diminished recognition, shaping women’s perceptions of security and strategies of coping.

Paper long abstract

This research centers on mothers employed in Zagreb-based corporations in Croatia. Specifically, it focuses on maternity leave (typically lasting one year, with exceptions), which is an understudied topic in domestic cultural anthropology. Drawing on in-depth qualitative ethnographic interviews, it presents findings on varied experiences of returning to work following the leave. In this research mistrust emerged as an immediate by-product of maternity leave due to the woman’s workplace absence. Beyond enabling polarizing gender stereotypes, the prism of mistrust and distrust (Mühlfried 2018) illuminates relations between women employees and corporate employers. Results show that mistrust toward female employees does not simply arise during maternity leave. Instead, trust and mistrust often coexist throughout women’s careers before maternity, stemming from the latent belief that loyalty to the employer will eventually be divided with or replaced by motherhood. The active weakening of trust in relations begins with implicit, unarticulated employer re/actions and strategies at the pregnancy announcement. Women sense it through withheld information, “being spared” of or excluded from projects or meetings etc. It is much more emphatically sensed upon workplace return, as quiet annulment of prior years of "proving" one’s competence and loyalty to the employer, degradation, removal from rewards and merit systems while at leave etc. The findings show that mothers’ mistrust of the corporation also manifests in eroded senses of security, noticing unexpected changes, perceiving "blind spots" in maternal realities beyond the mother-child relationship, and open expressions of distrust toward the employer, leading to diverse actions, strategies and ways of coping.

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Different reporting infrastructures within GDM care in Danish and Canadian hospitals produce distinct regimes of doubt. Yet this lingering mistrust proves productive in compelling dialogue/confession/avowal, restructuring the encounter, and enabling better, more patient-centered care.

Paper long abstract

Across Danish and Canadian healthcare contexts, gestational diabetes (GDM) management is a numbers game: focused on patients’ glycemia and the healthcare provider's (HCP) confidence in these reported numbers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Vancouver and Copenhagen, I explore how clinical mistrust persists, even in Denmark, where societal trust is generally high, and even in hospitals equipped with technology meant to mitigate doubt.

In one hospital, the glucose readings are automatically uploaded from the patient’s glucometer to the clinic’s computer - patient testimony is bypassed, and distrust of self-reporting is built into the system. At the other hospitals, patients keep a manual log of their sugars, affording a different form of trust that can be suspended if HCPs suspect something may be ‘off’. Despite these differences, mistrust persists in both cities, and HCPs ask for honesty and invite patients to confess if their numbers are not exact.

Following Holmes & O'Byrne's "confession technè" and Mayes's account of pastoral power, I argue that this request for avowal/confession is the providers' strongest clinical tool. This speech act reconfigures the relationship and becomes a form of repair; like a broken bone, that bond grows stronger for having been broken and mended.

Mistrust within GDM care is often productive. It opens a truthful, patient-centered exchange, where the patient decides what and how information is disclosed, and knows herself better in accounting for doubt. Confession/avowal, I suggest, is the mechanism by which mistrust, across divergent infrastructures, generates new forms of sociality, rather than dissolving them.

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The paper explores the role of mistrust in redefining hierarchies between conventional and folk medicine in Georgia and, consequently, in the experimentalisation of individual healing pathways.

Paper long abstract

The paper examines how mistrust challenges the hierarchy between conventional and folk medicine in Georgia. Using the example of an ethnographic study of women who have lost their hair due to alopecia areata. Alopecia areata falls under the category of autoimmune diseases. Autoimmunity is defined as loss of normal self-tolerance (Stojanovich, 2010: A271). Intolerance towards oneself creates paradox and confusion and challenges the conventional view of the integrity of the body and self (Cohen, 2004). In the face of uncertainty, trust is crucial for achieving ontological security (Giddens, 1991:3). However, often in the healing process, people may feel more ontologically secure if they trust none of the paths completely but try them all. The futility of visits to a dermatologist may lead people to turn to folk medicine, or conversely, folk medicine may be the first source of treatment, as it does not involve going through medical bureaucracy or buying expensive medications. Thus, folk healers can play an important role in the healing process, but society may still perceive them as deviants, so trust in them may always be accompanied by suspicion. While Georgian doctors often get lost in medical translation and fail to gain trust. The phrase most often used to describe them is "They are fortune tellers." In the sense that the path to healing they predict seems to transcend reality just as much as the fortune tellers’. Therefore, mistrust can undermine the existing hierarchy between folk and conventional medicine and make healing pathways more experimental.

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This paper examines how mistrust shifts from a disciplinary mood embedded in craft transmission to a generalized atmosphere shaped by poly-crisis in an industrial zone in Istanbul, showing how this transformation reconfigures relations of labor, authority, and knowledge under prolonged uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

Mistrust is often framed as the absence of trust, social cohesion, or productive relations (Mühlfried 2018). Ethnographic fieldwork in IMES, an industrial zone in Istanbul, challenges this view, showing that mistrust has historically functioned as a constitutive mood within craft transmission. In workshops founded during the 1970s and 1980s, masters disciplined apprentices through distance, silence, and occasional punitive acts. Embedded in everyday practice, mistrust prevented errors, tested commitment, and shaped future masters. Harsh and hierarchical, it remained relational and productive.

Today, many masters refrain from teaching, while younger workers increasingly experience this as a withdrawal of knowledge. This raises the question: why do masters no longer wish to teach apprentices?

This paper examines the transformation of mistrust within workplace hierarchies, generational relations, and state-led vocational programs. Under structural pressures and economic crisis, mistrust has shifted from a craft-based, disciplinary mood to a generalized atmosphere. Masters mistrust employers who penalize minor errors; employers mistrust young workers who may leave once skilled; and apprentices mistrust vocational programs that promise stability but deliver precarity. Detached from craft transmission, mistrust now targets institutions, economic conditions, and the state, shaping everyday strategies, behaviors, and survival tactics in precarious work environments.

By tracing this shift, the paper illuminates how ongoing crises reorganize relations of labor, authority, and knowledge in contemporary industrial zones, highlighting the affective dimensions of work, learning, and generational negotiation.