Dr Joshua Kelsall is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Warwick. He joined University of Warwick department in 2022 for The Ethics of Vaccine Acceptance Project. He previously held a position at the University of Stirling as a lecturer in Political Philosophy for a MsC course on the philosophy of human Rights. He completed his PhD Trust, Audit and Public Engagement, at the Universities of St Andrews and Stirling in 2021.

Joshua's main interests are in the philosophy of trust and testimony in the context of relationships between laypersons and experts. His research focuses on the philosophy of trust and trustworthiness. What does it mean to trust someone, and how does trusting change in different kinds of relationships? What does it mean to be trustworthy? And how can one build trust and trustworthiness?

His current research focuses on two kinds of trust. Epistemic trust and political trust. Epistemic trust concerns our dependence on others' testimony to gain knowledge. A paradigm case of this is a layperson trusting an expert. Political trust concerns the dependence on citizens on governments to represent and serve the public interest. In his contributions to the Vaccine Hesitancy Project, Joshua will examine how these two distinctive forms of trust shape different kinds of vaccine hesitancy: hesitancy grounded in political distrust and in epistemic distrust.