My research examines how trust, legitimacy, and authority are sustained in contexts where institutions are fragile and uncertainty is enduring. Working across communication, sociology, and political theory, I develop a programmatic account of how publics make authority believable—or at least survivable—under such conditions. Rather than treating trust as a stable outcome, I approach it as a form of ongoing moral and communicative work embedded in everyday public life.

This agenda unfolds through three interconnected lines of inquiry that build on my earlier work while extending it toward new empirical and theoretical horizons.

Trust Cultures and Relational Legitimacy.
The first line of inquiry theorizes trust as a moral and communicative infrastructure rather than an individual attitude or institutional outcome. Building on my work on the Dengvaxia controversy and subsequent publications, I show how publics draw on vernacular moral grammars to evaluate authority, sincerity, and care. Over the next phase of the agenda, this work focuses on consolidating the theoretical foundations of trust cultures through book-length and flagship journal outputs, while extending the concept beyond health crises to governance and mediated public life. Its core contribution is to reposition trust as ongoing, culturally grounded moral work through which legitimacy is enacted and contested.

Scandal, Constructivation, and Ambivalent Governance.
The second line of inquiry develops the concept of scandal constructivation—a process through which controversies become politically meaningful through discourse, affect, and narrative. Rather than treating scandal as a mechanism of accountability, I argue that in many Global South contexts it operates as a form of ambivalent governance, simultaneously destabilizing and stabilizing authority. This program expands empirically across Philippine and Southeast Asian cases, integrating analysis of media discourse, patterns of circulation, and public interpretation. Its contribution lies in reframing scandal as a cultural and political process through which legitimacy is negotiated, deferred, or reconfigured.

Infrastructural Legitimacy and the Politics of Repair.
Extending these concerns, a third and emerging line of research turns to material and sociotechnical systems, particularly infrastructure and disaster governance. It asks how publics continue to sustain trust in systems that repeatedly fail but remain necessary. Anchored in the case of flood control controversies in the Philippines and expanded comparatively across Southeast Asia, this program develops the concept of “repair without correction” to capture how legitimacy persists even in the absence of substantive institutional transformation. Its contribution is to position infrastructure as a moral and communicative problem of authority, care, and endurance, rather than a purely technical domain.

Cross-cutting strand: Knowledge, AI, and neurodivergent scholarship.
Across these programs, I examine how knowledge production itself constitutes a form of trustwork. This strand explores generative AI as a cognitive and epistemic infrastructure while advancing a more inclusive and reflexive account of academic practice. It foregrounds how participation, cognition, and legitimacy are negotiated within contemporary knowledge systems.

Trajectory (2025–2030).
Taken together, these lines of inquiry converge on a broader theoretical claim: public life in fragile democracies is sustained not through stable or fully restored trust, but through continuous processes of negotiation, repair, and endurance. Over this period, my goal is to (a) consolidate the theoretical foundations of this program through major publications, (b) expand its empirical scope across Southeast Asia, and (c) build toward a synthetic account of trust, legitimacy, and democratic endurance in the Global South.