Paper short abstract

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 When trust is damaged, access is withdrawn, shaping both journalistic practice and the public imagination of the war by rendering certain units, directions, or events invisible.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.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on long-term fieldwork among lottery players, small-scale gamblers, and cryptocurrency traders, it shows how mistrust toward the state, financial institutions, and expert knowledge does not necessarily lead to social withdrawal or nihilism.

Paper long abstract

I examine mistrust as a productive social force through ethnographic research on speculative economic practices in Turkey during periods of prolonged economic crisis. Rather than approaching mistrust as the erosion or absence of trust in institutions, I analyse how mistrust becomes an everyday orientation through which people navigate uncertainty, evaluate authority, and imagine alternative futures. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among lottery players, small-scale gamblers, and cryptocurrency traders, it shows how mistrust toward the state, financial institutions, and expert knowledge does not necessarily lead to social withdrawal or nihilism. Instead, it generates speculative socialities grounded in calculation, moral judgement, and collective interpretation. Participants neither fully reject nor fully endorse official systems of value and regulation. They engage them ambivalently, playing with rules, probabilities, and promises while remaining acutely aware of their fragility and potential deception. I argue that this form of mistrust is not simply critical or destructive, but methodologically generative. It produces shared repertoires of reasoning about luck, risk, fairness, and responsibility, enabling people to act in conditions where certainty is unattainable and authority is contested. At the same time, such mistrust can intensify social differentiation, reinforcing distinctions between those perceived as savvy, cautious, or exposed to loss. By situating mistrust within speculative practices rather than institutional breakdown alone, the paper contributes to debates on mistrust as a structuring principle of social life. It suggests that mistrust operates as a mode of relating that both sustains critique and opens new, if uneven, possibilities for collective life in a polarised world.

Paper short abstract

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.

Paper short abstract

This presentation explores mistrust among Evenki reindeer herders as a diagnostic condition rather than social breakdown. Through predation idioms linking animals, the state, and mining, it shows how mistrust guides vigilance, coexistence, and moral repair in a disrupted taiga.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines mistrust as a key analytical lens for understanding contemporary multispecies relations among Evenki reindeer herders in Eastern Siberia and Russian Far East. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it argues that mistrust should not be seen as the collapse of social relations but as a diagnostic condition revealing how relations among humans, animals, landscapes, and institutions become unstable under environmental degradation, extractive expansion, and state withdrawal. Focusing on the idiom of predation, the talk shows how wolves, bears, state authorities, and mining companies are evaluated within a shared moral framework that distinguishes balanced, reciprocal relations from excessive, one-sided appropriation. Mistrust thus emerges as a form of relational vigilance and ontological labor through which Evenki continue to navigate risk, negotiate coexistence, and attempt to repair fractured worlds in an increasingly unpredictable taiga.

Paper short abstract

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.

Paper short abstract

Based on my ethnography Untrusting (CUP 2026) in Rio and Recife, I show that trust in policing is often built through racialized and gendered violence, while mistrust sustains social life. I argue untrusting is democracy’s ethical maintenance and a necessary recalibration of authority.

Paper long abstract

Based on my ethnography Untrusting (Columbia University Press 2026), grounded in long-term fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and Recife, I reconsider the place of trust and mistrust in democratic policing. Scholars and policymakers often imagine trust as something institutions can engineer, measure, and restore. Yet in contexts of exceptionally high police violence, my research shows that trust in policing is often produced through racialized and gendered harm, punitive expectations, and managerial metrics that reward coercive interventions. In a seeming paradox, many residents expressed trust not when police acted lawfully, but when they punished “known” offenders, defended local honor, or performed recognizable hierarchies.

By contrast, mistrust proved essential to sustaining everyday life where the state arrives through suspicion rather than care. Practices of untrusting—reading police intentions, interpreting danger, anticipating harm, and protecting kin—formed a crucial repertoire through which residents navigated the uncertainty and lethal potential of police encounters. Rather than signalling democratic decline, mistrust reveals the ethical and political labor people undertake to survive systems not designed with them in mind.

I theorize untrusting as democracy’s ethical maintenance: a stance that refuses the demand to perform compliant trustworthiness and instead foregrounds vigilance, critique, and selective relationality. Ethnographically, mistrust generates forms of care and solidarity the state cannot provide; analytically, it shows how authority is recognized, contested, and recalibrated. Taking mistrust seriously exposes the limits of trust as the dominant metric of democratic reform.

Paper short abstract

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.

Paper short abstract

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.

Paper short abstract

This study analyzes the gendered dimensions of mistrust and its critical scope through participatory action research with migrant women. It identifies two critical moments in the formation of mistrust through institutional encounters across their trajectories.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on biographical interviews and participatory action research, this paper analyzes the gendered dimensions of mistrust and its critical significance through the experiences of migrant women confronting French institutions. Within a research group comprising approximately fifteen migrant women, NGO workers, and researchers, collective discussions reveal institutional "false promises" as a central concern. We examine the gendered underpinnings of this phenomenon through participants' narratives shared in both individual interviews and group discussions.

Our analysis identifies two critical moments in the formation of mistrust through specific institutional encounters. First, participants recount their settlement and regularization processes in France: embedded within particular family configurations, they find themselves vulnerable to employers upon whom their administrative advancement depends. They describe experiences of "betrayal" that interweave affective relationships, domestic labor, and administrative procedures.

Second, following these initial disappointments, participants encounter various institutional support mechanisms for professional integration that simultaneously enact control, channel them toward subordinate employment, and promote civic activation. This institutional sequence operates across multiple policy levels, reproducing a gendered entanglement of affect, employment, and citizenship.

Explored through participatory action research, these two institutional sequences produce both affective and epistemic effects. The collective framework enables participants to contextualize and critically reflect upon their experiences, generating new forms of knowledge about institutional functioning while simultaneously opening possibilities for emotional processing and repositioning themselves in relation to institutions.

Paper short abstract

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.

Paper short abstract

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.

Paper short abstract

We discuss how mistrust between medics, patients, advocates, politicians, and tourism dismantles the binary of opposition and reveals possibilities for collaboration in chronic Lyme disease.

Paper long abstract

This joint presentation is by Ritti Soncco (medical anthropologist) and Morven-May MacCallum (author and Lyme disease advocate).

In Scotland, chronic Lyme disease remains a contested illness (Dumes, 2020), a stigmatised illness which remains unaccepted by the National Health Service. As chronic Lyme patients provide care for one another through patient support groups that reproduce biosociality and kinship, “biosocial fragilities” (Soncco, 2023) also reveals that carework often means emotional labour; mental, physical and financial reprecussions; and ultimately being excluded from care itself. The ensuing mistrust within patient groups reveals that being on the same side does not always mean collaboration.

We then explore further instances of mistrust - the failure of political petitions, the tension in medical knowledge, the construction of Scottish landscapes for tourism - and the collaborations born herein. We argue that mistrust in politics, knowledge production, and tourism dismantles binary tropes such as the “Lyme wars”, and reveals that being on opposing sides doesn’t exclude collaboration; and being on the same side doesn’t guarantee heterogeneity.

Our paper is a performance between two backgrounds: 16 months of multi-sited ethnographic research (Ritti Soncco) and 10 years of advocacy work as the face of chronic Lyme disease in Scotland (Morven-May MacCallum). We weave traditional ethnographic data collection (Ritti Soncco) with MacCallum's two semi-autobiographic novels "Finding Joy" (2017) and "Keeping Joy" (2023) and her storytelling practises into a performance dialogue that grew out of a provocative and productive mistrust between researcher and participant.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how trust/mistrust operates differently within GDM care in Canadian and Danish hospitals, showing how national welfare cultures and infrastructures differentially shape whether (mis)trust becomes part of productive dialogue or an wearying burden for pregnant patients.

Paper long abstract

Research on gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) has documented its rising prevalence and its psychosocial effects, yet less attention addresses how mistrust—as an affective and epistemic force distinct from mere lack of trust—shapes women's engagements with diagnosis and care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Canadian (Vancouver) and Danish (Copenhagen) hospitals, this paper examines how mistrust operates as a stratified force in pregnancy care, exploring how different 'regimes of (mis)trust' emerge from distinct welfare infrastructures and distribute burden differently across patient populations.

I argue that mistrust toward public institutions and medical expertise operates at multiple scales—from skepticism about screening and treatment protocols, to interpersonal doubt in clinical encounters, to everyday vigilance. In Denmark's universal healthcare system, patients exhibit "ambient trust" (Khanna 2018), producing more productive clinical encounters within a trusted framework. Conversely, Canada's fragmented landscape generates structural mistrust toward institutional access and continuity, transforming routine care into additional, exhausting labour.

The GDM diagnosis becomes a critical site where patients calibrate mistrust across biomedical authority, welfare institutions, and embodied experience. This calibration is not equally available to all. While some deploy mistrust to stimulate robust patient-practitioner dialogue, for others it signals profound relational issues that haunt entire clinical encounters.

By foregrounding mistrust as differentially productive, this paper illuminates how diagnostic moments crystallize broader patterns embedded in national welfare infrastructures, revealing uneven possibilities for patient agency and critique within polarized healthcare landscapes. Rather than treating mistrust as merely a barrier, I demonstrate its generative potential in shaping health futures.

Paper short abstract

In Bengaluru, India, second-opinion seeking in psychiatric care illustrates how mistrust of pharmaceuticals, voiced as “davai khate hi jao” (“keep eating medicines”), becomes productive. I argue this mistrust reorganises care and creates space for psychotherapy as an alternative evidentiary regime.

Paper long abstract

In urban, privatised medical settings across South Asia, seeking a “second opinion” is a common care pathway when a diagnosis or treatment plan feels questionable. This paper reads second-opinion seeking as a form of mistrust toward psychiatric aetiologies, diagnoses, and pharmaceutical regimes—and asks what that mistrust makes possible for psychotherapy. During my ethnography of a psychotherapeutic training programme in Bengaluru, I met Bina Rai at a tertiary mental-health hospital OPD. Bina was the mother and primary caregiver of P, a 21-year-old man in significant distress. She meticulously recorded P's treatment. P was diagnosed with depression and prescribed psychotropic medication of various doses by a psychiatrist in Gwalior, a mid-size urban centre in central India. The psychiatrist at the Bengaluru OPD concluded that medication for depression had precipitated into anxiety. After three years of P’s treatment, Bina’s mistrust of medical dependence, articulated as “davai khate hi jao, khate hi jao”, is an epistemic and affective force that opens the possibility for nonmedical sources of care such as psychotherapy. In a context where pharmaceuticalisation is often the first-line treatment and therapy remains stigmatised, this mistrust becomes generative: it reorganises care through second opinions and opens space for an alternative evidentiary regime.