Ethics of trust in research settings; perspectives on trust trajectories and trusting relations when doing research

Session conveners: Liselott Sundbäck, Åbo Akademi (chair),
Areen Nassar, University of Jyväskylä
Kati Turtiainen, University of Jyväskylä,
Eveliina Heino, University of Helsinki

Session description

This session offers a forum for sharing and exploring the concept of trust in relation to research settings and as a methodological foundation. Trust is often mentioned as a key for “accessing” people involved in empirical research as interlocutors or co-researchers and for collecting information or co-creating knowledge. Especially when it comes to research on structurally “vulnerable” groups, trust is foregrounded. Ethical guidelines, such as the ethical principles for research with human participants by the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity foreground trust as a central feature, and as researchers we need not to do harm to those we involve in research processes. However, what does trust in relation to research processes actually entail? Can we grasp trust as an ethical principle in research? What are the possible negative sides of trust? And is trust even necessary? How can we, when centering trust, strive to create ethically sane research?

The main aim of this session is to explore trust shaping in relation to empirical research settings from a methodological perspective. We invite papers including, but not limited to, the following themes: trust breakages, trusting relations, absence of trust, necessities of trust, critique against trust as a means of instrumentalization and benefits of trust in research settings. Considering and embracing the temporality of trust, we look forward to papers exploring trust in relation to time in research settings, as well as presentations problematizing trust dynamics. We welcome presentations scrutinizing trust through the lens of innovative methodological approaches centering positionalities and power dynamics in research settings.

In this session, we accept a limited number of presenters and start with a presentation of the papers submitted, while continuing with a panel discussion involving the audience.

The language of the session is English.