Trust, culture, institutions, and public life
Communication scholarship grounded in the Philippines, in conversation with Southeast Asia.
Karl Patrick R. Mendoza, PhD
Surin Pitsuwan Visiting Fellow
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Karl Patrick R. Mendoza, PhD
Surin Pitsuwan Visiting Fellow
Communication scholar of trust, culture, institutions, and public life.
I am the Surin Pitsuwan Visiting Fellow at Thammasat University.
My research asks how people keep living with institutions that repeatedly fall short of what they owe them. In the Philippines and across Southeast Asia, scandals break, inquiries open, and promises of reform are made, yet authority often carries on without being corrected and without being fully rejected. I study that endurance: how publics judge whether authority is still bearable, how scandals become meaningful, and how institutions hold on through controversy that never quite resolves.
The work runs in three streams. The first, on trust cultures and relational legitimacy, explains how people decide whether authority remains morally recognizable. The second, on scandal and its institutional consequences, explains how wrongdoing becomes public and why it so rarely leads to correction. The third turns the same questions on academic life, asking what conditions make inquiry possible for scholars who work under pressure and precarity.
I treat the Philippines as a place where theory about trust and legitimacy is made, not only applied. The concepts on the Key concepts page are the program's working vocabulary, each linked to the publication where it is defined.
I am the author of Navigating Trust, Journalism, and Health in the Age of Populism: The Dengvaxia Vaccine Scandal in the Philippines (Routledge, 2025). Trust Cultures and the Politics of Relational Legitimacy: Rethinking Trust from the Global South is in press with Routledge. Scaffolding the Self: Neurodivergence and the Moral Life of Academic Work is a completed manuscript seeking a new publisher.
Forthcoming book
Trust Cultures and the Politics of Relational Legitimacy: Rethinking Trust from the Global South
Routledge · Forthcoming, 1 December 2026
How do cultural expectations and relationships shape judgments of institutional authority? My forthcoming book develops this question from Philippine experience and the Global South.
Next public conversation
13 November 2026 · Thammasat University
A public lecture and pre-publication book launch in Bangkok.