Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-5-2023
Manuscript Version
vor
Abstract
Building trust between academic medical centers and certain communities they depend on in the research process is hard, particularly when those communities consist of minoritized or historically marginalized populations. Some believe that engagement activities like the creation of advisory boards, town halls, or a research workforce that looks more like community members will establish or reestablish trust between academic medical centers and racialized communities. However, without systematic approaches to dismantle racism, those well-intended actions become public performativity, and trust building will fail. In this essay, we draw upon foundational ethical principles of trust, distrust, and trust building; apply the concept of bounded justice to performative trust acts; and center the works of Black and Indigenous feminist bioethicists to revisit some of the wisdom and valuable lessons they have contributed. Rebuilding trust is hard to do because people and institutions are often not honest about how hard it is and there is no simple box-checking task that can disentangle our society's injustices, but there are steps to take in this direction. Individuals and institutions can recognize valuable relevant work that has already been written, partake in critical reflection, and then apply insights gained to take both small and sustainable steps toward transformational change and deeper trust.
Keywords
academic medical centers, bioethics, community engagement, justice, racism, trust
Publication Title
Hastings Center Report
Grant
T32 HG010030
Rights
© 2023 The Authors. Hastings Center Report published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Hastings Center. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Melissa Creary and Lynette Hammond Gerido, “ The Public Performativity of Trust,” in “Time to Rebuild: Essays on Trust in Health Care and Science,” ed. Lauren A. Taylor, Gregory E. Kaebnick, and Mildred Z. Solomon, special report, Hastings Center Report 53, no. 5 (2023): S76–S85. DOI: 10.1002/hast.1527