From an investigator's perspective: Challenges and opportunities in building and maintaining rapport in cross-cultural investigative interviewing contexts

Purpose Given the geopolitical context of war, terrorism, human trafficking and organized crime, the pursuit of justice increasingly relies on effective interactions between individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds. Interviewers who fail to communicate effectively with interviewees from different cultural backgrounds to themselves risk derailing investigations, jeopardize the safety of potential victims and compromise the delivery of justice. Building rapport constitutes a critical component of effective investigative interviewing and is associated with enhanced investigative outcomes (i.e. detailed and informative accounts). The main objective of the current research was to explore the perceptions of investigators, experienced in the conduct of cross-cultural interviews, with respect to building rapport in interviews with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted 13 focus groups with a culturally diverse sample of investigative professionals to examine their perceptions of challenges and opportunities pertaining to building rapport in cross-cultural interviews. Findings Given the exploratory nature of the research objective and the absence of prior research on this issue, the authors used a qualitative approach to reflect on key themes and subthemes in our data. The authors extracted four key themes as underpinning approaches to building rapport in cross-cultural interviews: i) preparation; (ii) situational awareness (during the interview); (iii) relationship building through communication; and (iv) hierarchy in interviews. Practical implications These results highlight the value of cultural competence and benefits of cultural humility in the domain investigative interviewing. Originality/value Understanding the challenges and opportunities for improved investigative interviewing in cross-cultural contexts is crucial for research, training and practice going forward

Insider/Outsider: Arlene Bowman’s Navajo Talking Picture

Arlene Bowman’s Navajo Talking Picture (1986) portrays the filmmaker’s grandmother as a reluctant documentary subject, filmed against her wishes on her Navajo reservation. Upon its release, the film confounded critics by seeming to replicate an objectifying gaze weaponized against Native Americans since settler colonialism and throughout histories of documentary and classical Hollywood. What was Bowman doing, pursuing her elder with such ferocity? As this article discovers, language and translation offer clues. Aware of the importance of language to place-based identity, Bowman approached translation as a political question in the film. She did not speak Navajo, and had little idea what her grandmother was saying as she filmed her – though hostile body language spoke loudly. In some scenes, Bowman enlisted an interpreter. In others, she added English dubbing in post-production. Drawing on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of the ‘insider/outsider’ filmmaker, this article argues that Bowman foregrounds her troubles with translation to examine her own situated – and estranged – identity. Seen today, amidst global discussions of Indigenous land rights and environmental racism, the film remains powerful and provocative in its performative indictment of extractivism’s reach

Rebels without a cause: Collective narcissism and political contrarianism

In this paper, we examine the relationship between collective and individual forms of narcissism and two contrarian political orientations that are oppositional and purposefully destructive—need for chaos and anti-establishment orientation. In three studies (total N = 4144), we demonstrate that (1) national collective narcissism independently predicts higher need for chaos and anti-establishment orientation, (2) non-narcissistic ingroup satisfaction independently predicts lower levels of both contrarian orientations, (3) grandiose narcissism independently predicts higher need for chaos but not anti-establishment orientation, and (4) vulnerable narcissism independently predicts higher levels of both outcomes. We provide evidence for these relationships in cross-sectional regression analyses and in panel analyses that examine within-person construct changes from before to after the 2023 Polish election and better account for time-invariant confounders. Together, these findings suggest contrarian orientations may reflect a (frustrated) narcissistic demand to be recognized as better than others, both collectively and individually

Internationalisation and Securitisation in UK Higher Education

This paper provides an analysis of the current condition of the UK Higher Education sector, which it treats as an ‘exemplary case’. It examines two distinct and interrelated elements of the ‘polycrisis’ - internationalisation and securitisation. It argues that UK higher education is shaped by both an internationalised and now faltering business strategy and by the contested consequences of Britain’s geopolitical and military choices. Internationalisation is now perceived by policy-makers to give rise to new security risks, a perception which is linked to a concern for securitisation, and a consequent threat to academic freedom. By placing securitisation policies and internationalisation in the same frame, the article considers the significance of the Prevent Duty both for academic freedom and for the recruitment of international students. It concludes that UK higher education has not found a way of overcoming its policy tensions and that unless changes take place at Government level its new reluctance to prioritise international recruitment will worsen problems of funding and lead higher education into a renewed spiral of austerity to adapt aggressive austerity policies

The affective flows of creative writing research: How do bespoke research assemblages provide the methods and methodologies needed to open up new possibilities in creative writing research?

This article builds upon our previous work on creative writing methods and methodologies (2021) by looking specifically at how New Materialist research methodologies (Fox & Alldred 2015) can be usefully applied to research into creative writing. Drawing upon our own research and our teaching about research into creative writing, we show how the New Materialist approach is especially supportive of research into creative writing because it offers researchers the chance to develop their own bespoke ‘research-assemblages’ (400) which can combine creative writing across different design modes using qualitative and quantitative research strategies. So, for example, as researchers we and our students have been able to create assemblages where a mixture of freewriting, reflective writing, autoethnography, multimodal research and Action Research has been put together to research the effects of creative writing activities connected with researching parks and their ecologies, examining the trauma of diasporic communities, using Google Streetview to improve descriptions of place, using digital storytelling to explore activist citizenship, and so on. The New Materialist emphasis upon ‘affect’ (how one thing is affected by another) and ‘affective flows’ (the ways in which affect plays out in various situations) is particularly supportive of research into creative writing because it puts the research emphasis upon investigating the complex interactions that take place when writers write and readers read their writing. Furthermore, the New Materialist concept of ‘lines of flight’ where thoughts, ideas, feelings, concepts are ‘deterritorialised’ (402) is relevant to creative writing which is often seeking to disturb, to defamiliarise, to prompt deeper thought and feelings. An ethics of social justice underpins our practices and in examining our own and our students’ work, we show how using New Materialism can be very helpful for creative writers and researchers into creative writing, providing a coherent but flexible framework through which creative writing can be meaningfully studied

The Accelerations

A memoir/ personal essay about my mother

D3X: Dependency Driven, Decentralised Execution for Scalable AI Teams

Current agent frameworks such as OpenAI Deep Research and Manus AI rely on centralised planner–executor–verifier loops that re-append growing scratchpads at each step. While feasible for small pipelines, this pattern scales poorly: prompt load grows superlinearly (often quadratically) with the number of subtasks, and execution tends toward sequential behaviour, increasing cost and latency. We introduce a Dependency–Driven, Decentralised eXecution (D3X), a protocol that compiles a user request into a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of subtasks. Control is event-driven via a lightweight Operations Manager that activates nodes as soon as parents complete; execution is decentralised across workers that receive only dependency-local context and can run local self-review loops without blocking peers. When new information emerges, a Subtask Refiner edits only the affected subgraph, preserving progress elsewhere. An Aggregator then combines leaf artifacts into the final result. Under bounded parent summaries and dependency only routing, D3X reduces total prompt load from quadratic to near-linear in n - d (for fixed summary budget), and wall-clock time approaches the critical path with sufficient parallelism. More generally, latency follows Θ( τ[L + (n−L)/ w ]) plus low, event-driven scheduling overhead and linear-time aggregation. In our evaluation, we observe mean speed-ups up to 4.00× and input-token reductions up to ∼ 83% (37–83% across tasks)