Manufacturing Trustworthiness in Qualitative Research as a Writerly and Readerly Accomplishment: Introduction to the Special Issue

This article introduces the special issue, “Manufacturing Trustworthiness in Qualitative Research.” Rather than viewing trustworthiness as an inherent product of high-quality research practices, this special issue considers how researchers manifest and construct appearances of trustworthiness within and through academic texts. Conceptualizing trustworthiness as produced within scholarly writing opens the idea of trustworthiness to broader scrutiny, but also to a wider array of possibility—if trustworthiness is not singular or solely produced through methodology, then it is malleable and full of potential. It is not one trustworthiness, but a million tiny trustworthiness manifested and proliferated across multiple research accounts and readerly engagements. This is our special issue’s conceptual play space that sometimes pushes on and against the notion of trustworthiness itself, and in which the authors, coming from a range of orientations, explore and tinker with their ideas of trustworthiness, highlighting how they produce their research as “trustworthy.” © The Author(s) 2025