Relational Sovereignties and Trust Cultures: Rethinking Public Communication in the Philippines and Aotearoa

This essay reflects on how trust is lived, performed, and morally negotiated in public life, drawingon the author’s experience as a Filipino scholar trained in Aotearoa New Zealand. It brings intodialogue two distinct yet resonant cultural contexts to explore how communication research mighttake more seriously the emotional, relational, and historically situated nature of trust. By revisitingFilipino concepts such as tiwala and pagsunod, and Māori-inflected values like manaakitanga andwhanaungatanga, the essay proposes a tentative framework of relational sovereignties—understood as culturally embedded performances of care, legitimacy, and belonging. Theseinsights are offered not as a new paradigm but as a small invitation to widen the frame ofcommunication research beyond rationalist and procedural models. At a time when publicdiscourse is increasingly shaped by automation, disinformation, and institutional erosion, thisessay calls for renewed attention to the subtle, soft, and often overlooked dimensions of trust:silence, recognition, moral proximity, and the felt experience of being held. In doing so, it gesturestoward a more relationally attuned and culturally grounded understanding of communication inboth postcolonial and settler-colonial settings.