Worthy-of-Trust: A Feminist-Queer Ethic of Trustworthiness

In qualitative research, trustworthiness regularly centers external-to-the-research-process approval, grounded in concepts like triangulation. Drawing on feminist-queer theories and ethics, we attempt to “right” how researchers approach trustworthiness, proposing an intra-active shift from “trustworthiness” to being “worthy-of-trust,” from seeking readers’/reviewers’ trust to fostering trust with participants. We queer normative conventions of trustworthiness through an inquiry of practice emphasizing researchers be(com)ing worthy-of-trust with/from participants. With examples from our research, we emphasize worthy-of-trust practices as entangled and entangling with researchers, institutions, participants, and even technologies, while disrupting transactional enactments of trustworthiness, tied to “validity,” and insist on worthy-of-trust as perpetually negotiated and relational.