Becoming Trustworthy in Ethically Engaged, Relational Feminist Inquiry

In this article, we explore trustworthiness as an emergent practice grounded in feminist, poststructural, and relational ethics-rather than a static set of post hoc criteria. Through our work with one middle school in the southern United States, we show how trustworthiness became something continually negotiated through everyday encounters marked by grief, uncertainty, and care. Rather than offering new criteria, we trace how we worked to become trustworthy to that middle school community, in moments that called for attunement more than clarity and presence more than protocol. What began as a study of student well-being became an experiment in what relational, ethically engaged feminist inquiry could look like when the world, and our research within it, came undone.