The TrustWorkers Project: Challenges and Methods of Building Trust into Public Scholarship

Abstract

This article grapples with a critical question in public humanities work: How should academics think of trust as a theoretical problem in current public health, policy, and academic debates but also as a practice of engagement with local communities and collaborators outside the academy? We recount our experience of the TrustWorkers project at Columbia University in 2022—a project focused on the critical role of Community Health Workers as trust builders during the pandemic—to illustrate our thinking on this matter and contribute new impulses to publicly engaged scholarship.