DemTech

We are orgnizing a PhD course on trust.

Time: Monday, October 10th to Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

Course description: This PhD course aims to examine in ethnographic detail the notion of trust and its engagement with concepts and practices of information. As a multivalent concept with a high social currency (especially but not only in the modern West), trust has become a subject of study for numerous social sciences, encapsulating a wide spectrum of assumptions and perspectives. These include but are not limited to anthropological and sociological perspectives on risk society and audit culture, and STS (science and technology studies) and organizational approaches to understanding relations between technological infrastructures and trustworthy information.

In the “information age”, trust is often associated with free access to data and the idea of transparency. Issues of trust are brought into relief wherever there are perceived to be exchanges – or the possibility of appropriation - of information. However, these exchanges and the relations they entail take many different forms and include many different types of actors. More generally, trust is related to information in the sense that it is perceived to span the gap between what is known and what is unknown.

This PhD course looks to critically explore the notion of trust, with an emphasis on its relation to informational practices, calling on a broad range of social scientific approaches and engaging with a wide range of empirical contexts.

For more information please consult the course homepage.

Sign up here!