The term “ADR” is certainly familiar to not just those of us in the teaching and practice of mediation, but legal practitioners as well. In this post, I want to share some thoughts about the evolving nature of the “A” in ADR and how this is both reflective of the changes that have occurred in…
Mediation doesn’t require special premises. It can be conducted in any type of place. There are Native Title mediations for Indigenous Australians that can happen at least in part on the land in question, under a tree or on a hill side. Mediations in the workplace often happen in the place where the dispute originally…
Picture a group of 30 trial lawyers in an almost empty room, loudly chanting, ‘Big Booty, Big Booty, Big Booty!’ Now imagine a pair of them trying to have a conversation without using the letter ‘S’. How about two of them vying for the attention of a third by, at turns, singing, crying, jumping up…
Like many of us I am constantly torn between simplicity and complexity. The world is complex: that’s a given. But a beautiful morning or a lover’s kiss is simplicity itself, and it’s a fool who overcomplicates it. And so with mediation, the profession/activity/vocation that has grown on me like a skin these last nineteen years….
This blog is inspired by a page from Monty Python’s ‘Big Red Book’ entitled ‘Why Accountancy is Not Boring.’ (Apologies to those who have not come across the Pythons’ rather English form of humour – for the original piece see http://arago4.tnw.utwente.nl/stonedead/publications/sketches/accountancy.html) Apologies too to accountants everywhere who, in the 1970’s, were probably as easy a…
I am writing this from outside my home country, on a two-week assignment. It’s not a “mediation” as we might typically know it – not yet, anyway – but rather an early stage engagement with a long-standing and profoundly deep-rooted conflict. My job at this stage is simply to listen to how some of those…
Desire. I have some transcripts from real-life family mediations to analyse and reading the transcripts, it struck me that I was reading about desire. This sent me back to my 1985 language, literature and culture textbook, Modern Literary Theory, and to psychoanalytic and linguistic theories. Thinking also about Nadja Alexander’s post about the Carlo Scarpa…
