Trust in a Post-Covid World
Exploring 'trust' through participatory interventions in Birmingham, UK
Policymakers are seeking ways to heal broken relations of trust, resulting from high and unequal rates of transmission and mortality, economic deprivation, and a sense of political abandonment experienced by some communities as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
'Building trust' has been seen by policymakers as central to both encouraging the uptake of Covid-19 vaccinations and encouraging groups who have experienced structural racism, historical exclusion and those who are recent migrants, to seek healthcare in the UK. However, efforts to define trust remain abstract and elusive, eliding the complex forms of intimacy and suspicion that allow us to relate to one another in times of crisis.
Trust has become central to UK and EU policymaking on viral containment and vaccine distribution.
This project emerged from two ethnographic projects conducted during the pandemic. The first was , led by Nikita Simpson and Professor Laura Bear. The second was Ethnographies of Disengagement, led by Elizabeth Storer and Iliana Sarafian.
These research projects revealed the centrality of trust through different phases of pandemic policy. Importantly, these projects led to questions about the evolution of the concept of trust, as well as the forms of racial and economic disempowerment erased from discourse on trust policy.
Project overview
This research project used participatory methods to investigate what trust means among Somali and Roma communities living across the Midlands in the UK. Concurrently, it focused on how policymakers working in these communities understand the concept of trust, and build trust relations through community engagement and service provision.
The team used innovative, participatory methodologies to investigate both local, cosmological understandings of trust, and to understand what constitutes a trusting relationship with local and national forms of bureaucracy.
Project objectives
The project sought to amplify perspectives excluded from national understandings of the Covid-19 pandemic, and of post-pandemic recovery. It was guided by the following aims and objectives:
- to understand how trust is defined (and contested) within community groups with respect to their position in society and their relationship to the healthcare system.
- to understand which forms of authority are considered 'trustworthy' arbiters of information.
- to understand how Covid-19 interventions interface with wider practices of group solidarity, and encounters with local healthcare systems and the state.
- to develop and validate a toolkit of participatory methods through which trust relations might be investigated by community groups and policy makers.
