Finland provides an interesting case study on trust in the media in the digital era. The country is known to exhibit the greatest levels of trust in the political establishment and the government, as well as the media. In the Finnish “digital welfare state,” the news is an inseparable part of the mechanism, producing a high level of social trust within the welfare state system, and Finland features the highest level of media freedom and literacy in Europe. This multimethod study examines different understandings of trust by studying in what ways Finnish audiences experience trust in news, especially when consuming news on digital platforms, and what factors explain trust in different news sources. Our basic premise is that trust can be understood in three ways: as dispositions of individual actors, as the social organization and the relationship between different social nodes and the system, and as a constantly negotiated property of social relations. We apply this three-dimensional framework in two sets of audience survey research data (2019, 2020) and reflect the findings with a focus group and expert interviews as well as with two similar surveys a decade prior. Our results depict relatively high levels of trust in the media in Finland and surprisingly little change in audiences’ perceptions of trustworthiness compared to the earlier surveys. The most defining characteristic of Finnish audiences is critical trust. Audiences are aware of the impacts of digitization, especially the dangers of social media bubbles and disinformation. They also recognize market-driven imperatives of journalism yet appreciate legacy news media in its different digital forms. Our study indicates that a balance between skepticism and reliance on news outlets can exist in audiences’ perceptions of the trustworthiness of digital news.

Introduction to Race and Identity in the Study of International Political Economy Global Research in International Political Economy (GRIPE) Webinar and commentaries Organized 30 September 2020

On September 30, 2020, several of us dialed in to attend a webinar panel discussion on “Race, Identity and Culture in the (Post-)Globalization Era.” The participants shared their thoughts on how and why race factors into international political and economic processes. In the spirit of addressing the topic from a political economy perspective, it seems worthwhile to outline the decision calculus that determines why considering race in international political economy (IPE) research is a good idea. If the benefit b of accounting for race times the probability p of success outweighs the costs c weighted by the probability (1 - p ) of failure, race should be a key component of IPE research moving forward.

This comment elaborates on and extends the roundtable’s discussion by turning to the context of Indigenous peoples. Even setting aside normative motivations, expanded study of Indigenous peoples provides clear opportunities for theory development in international political economy and international relations more broadly. For example, the legal status of American Indian Nations’ 326 unique political jurisdictions can inform the political economy of marginalized identity groups in a non-Westphalian but nonetheless international context.

This comment responds to the recently held Global Research in International Political Economy roundtable on race in IPE. In particular, it argues that scholars of political economy could draw fruitfully on the notion of “whiteness as property” from the critical race theory subfield of law in order to trace the workings of whiteness, and race more broadly, as a material force in the economy.

What do algorithmic systems and viral pandemics have in common? They both expose and amplify structural social inequalities. They both appear neutral (think about the frequent use of the phrase ‘the virus doesn’t discriminate’), but they both result in outcomes that are worse for those with less power and privilege.

One of the most intriguing aspects of our augmented futures is how we will experience new social paradigms attached to bodily representation and identification. Digital and virtual space provide infinite possibilities for developing alternative manifestations and tools to express personal and social selves, but how we imagine these opportunities versus what we actually create are often two different things. There are two roadblocks to achieving such a transcendental experience. The first relates to existing gender-role cultures and biases, while the second is whether we will be able to let go of the intrepid role the body plays as an identity-defining-space.

Seventy-five percent of the world’s online population is from the global South, and nearly half is projected to be women. Yet public knowledge on the internet - exemplified by Wikipedia - is primarily constructed by (white) men from western Europe and North America. One in ten Wikipedia editors are estimated to self-identify as female. In other words, the internet of the majority is produced by the minority. But Wikipedia is only one example of the deeply skewed experience of the internet: from the design and architecture of the internet, to the production and reproduction of knowledge on the internet, this globalised “public sphere” not only reflects the structural and representative inequalities of our world, it can, in many ways, amplify and deepen them. Still, the internet’s socio-technical nature can also engender potentially emancipatory processes in which communities on the “margins” of both the physical and virtual worlds can produce and curate their own knowledge online. Whose Knowledge? is a global, multilingual campaign that aims to make public knowledge and the online experience less white, male, straight, and global North in origin. Using Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s exhortation to decolonize our methodologies, the Whose Knowledge? campaign has supported marginalised communities like Dalits from India and the diaspora, queer activists from Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Kumeyaay Native American Nation, to begin centering their knowledge online. The authors are feminist scholars, organizers, and technologists, and we describe the practices of decolonizing ourselves in this effort, in particular our approach to embedding feminist and anti-colonial values as we decolonize design, process, and metrics. We offer these possibilities and provocations for thinking further about a future feminist decolonized internet(s).

This is a comment on Katharina Lima de Miranda and Dennis Snower’s multidimensional approach for the assessment of human well-being. It applauds the authors for looking “beyond GDP” but urges them to go one step further and replace GDP as a measure of material well-being by growth national income and actual individual consumption. Unlike GDP, these alternative measures for material well-being can be used to single out activities by multinational entities that are largely unrelated to domestic well-being. I will show that multinational entity activities, like the relocation of corporate headquarters and IP assets to Ireland and Luxembourg, have grown in such a substantial way in recent years that they can bias assessments of both material and human well-being.