16.9. Trusted Futures: With or Without Technologies – A Book Dialogue with Sarah Pink

You’re warmly invited to a book dialogue with Professor Sarah Pink! Join us on Tuesday, September 16 at 15:00 in Room F3003 (Tekla Hultin), located in the Main Building of the University of Helsinki (Fabianinkatu 33), for a discussion centered on the newly published book Can We Trust Technology? (Routledge, 2025), co-authored by Sarah Pink and Emma Quilty. The event will begin with reflections from Professor Minna Ruckenstein (University of Helsinki), Professor Kirsimarja Blomqvist (LUT University) and Researcher Pekka Mäkelä (University of Helsinki). Following their insights, Professor Pink will respond with her own commentary and presentation, opening the floor for a dialogue with the audience.

Livestream: https://video.helsinki.fi/unitube/live-stream.html?room=l69

About the book

Can We Trust Technology? examines the contemporary crisis of trust, where people’s trust in organisations and in emerging technologies is decreasing. As governments, industry organisations and research funders are investing millions in the quest to design technologies people will trust, this book asks if it is plausible to think tech workers and research designers can produce trustworthy technologies and, moreover, if it is realistic to assume everyday users of those technologies will ever truly trust them? Drawing on incisive analysis of the contemporary context and ethnographic research with those who develop and use technologies, the book reconsiders dominant assumptions about trust, arguing for a shift in thinking away from motifs of trustworthy technology and toward a vision for trusted futures.

Sarah Pink is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab and FUTURES Hub at Monash University, Australia.

Her recent books include Emerging Technologies/Life at the Edge of the Future (Routledge 2023) and the co-authored Design Ethnography (Routledge 2022).