This paper and presentation explore qualitative research conducted with mentors of international trainee teachers and their mentees, examining how cultural differences shape trust within cross‑cultural mentoring relationships. Drawing upon Clutterbuck (2022) and Passmore (2013, 2021), alongside Rosinski’s (2003) and Meyer’s (2014) Cultural Orientation Framework, the study interrogates how culture gaps may blur the lines of trust, creating spaces of both connection and mistrust in professional communities. In contexts where mentoring is intended to foster belonging and professional growth, cultural dissonance can challenge reciprocity, reflexivity, and the relational depth required for authentic trust.

The paper addresses the conference theme by situating these dynamics within the fast‑paced education environment, where time pressures and workload intensification often limit opportunities for reflective dialogue and mutual exchange. Findings highlight how mentors and trainees navigate tensions between professional guidance and intercultural understanding, revealing both the fragility and resilience of trust in a cross-culture mentoring relationship.. By foregrounding voices of international trainees and their mentors, the research underscores the need for intentional structures that support reflexivity, reciprocity, and cultural sensitivity. Ultimately, the paper contributes to advancing culturally responsive mentoring practices that strengthen trust and mitigate mistrust in global teacher education communities.

This paper presents a creative, co-produced research method that uses a materially constructed safety net alongside the Social Graces Model to explore trust, mistrust, and relational safety in organisational life. Developed with newly qualified social workers and their managers, the method centres on collaborative making as a means of generating organisational knowledge about trust as a relational process rather than an individual attribute.

Participants used the Social Graces Model to explore what they bring into a specific supervisory relationship, including experiences of trauma, power, and privilege, and how these shape expectations of trust, connection, and performance. As participants wove ribbons representing different Social Graces into individual nets, the process created space to get to know one another beyond the surface of the work relationship. Stories emerged through dialogue and embodied engagement, revealing how trust is negotiated, strained, and sustained within organisational contexts.

The researcher then connected the individual nets into a shared safety structure using a ‘common thread’ generated from participants’ contributions about what they need from the organisation in order to perform at their best. This act of connection transformed the artefact from a set of relational accounts into a collective organisational statement. A key and unexpected finding was that this process actively challenged hierarchical assumptions about trust and connection. Trust was not located primarily in managerial authority but emerged through mutual recognition, shared responsibility, and relational accountability across roles.

The safety net operates as a relational artefact that holds both trust and mistrust without reducing either to deficit. This work offers an original contribution to organisational and psychosocial research by advancing artefact-based, creative methods.

The presentation examines trust and mistrust as relational and organisational processes, showing how creative co-production can support exploration, deepen connection beyond role-based interactions, and recalibrate hierarchical understandings of trust and agency.

Trust is often assumed to underpin supervisory relationships within counselling training, particularly during initial meetings where safety, containment, and professional guidance are implicitly expected. For trainees entering placements within evaluative and hierarchical contexts, these encounters are further shaped by assumptions that accreditation, institutional affiliation, and professional role confer relational reliability. However, less attention is paid to what happens when this trust is fractured, evoking an overwhelming sense of unease. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of my experience as a trainee counsellor following an unsettling initial supervision meeting, this paper explores how trust in one’s embodied sense of knowing emerges in the absence of clarity, and how mistrust develops when both supervisory and institutional containment are experienced as insufficient.

The paper draws on Bion’s concept of nameless dread, alongside Winnicott’s ideas of the holding environment and impingement, to understand the paralysing and pre-verbal quality of the distress following this encounter. It considers how compliance and silence may be understood as protective adaptations that enable survival within an unsafe relational context while the true self remains concealed. From a person-centred perspective, this environmental failure was compounded by an absence of empathic attunement, congruence, and unconditional positive regard, further compromising the possibility of relational safety, making it difficult to trust my felt sense in the moment.

The paper moves from this singular experience to consider broader systemic implications, examining how early supervisory ruptures and institutional responses shape my developing professional identity and inform my conceptualisation of safety, trust, and power, influencing how I attune relationally with my clients.

This presentation addresses the conference theme by examining trust and mistrust as embodied and relational processes, exploring how trust may be recalibrated through relational thinking and the transformation of unthinkable experience into meaning, bringing about necessary scepticism without collapsing into corrosive mistrust.