CURB sponsors Social Justice Mediation workshop

SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIATION TRAINING

Tuesday to Saturday 19^th – 23^rd March 2013

A few places are still left in this intensive 5-day mediation training using a social justice lens.  The course will be conducted by Dr. Leah Wing and Dr. Deepika Marya of the Social Justice Mediation Institute based at UMASS Amherst.  The course is a mediation training which includes an exploration of how identity and power imbalances affect the development and resolution of conflict.

What we will be doing:

Participants will explore the relationship between social justice and how conflicts develop and are resolved through lectures, interactive activities, analyses of (actual) videotaped mediation sessions, skill improvement, and roleplays. 

Participants will receive a mediation certificate upon successful completion of the training. 

Why a social justice approach to mediation?

The Social Justice Mediation Model was developed in response to the pattern that has emerged in the field of mediation revealing that mainstream mediation is not equally serving all segments of the population.  Despite the demonstrated success of mediation, recent research shows that it also routinely reproduces privilege both structurally within the institution and interpersonally between disputing parties.  In this training, we will undertake a critical examination of how and why this occurs in the mainstream approach to mediation and we will investigate a new strategy that accounts for privilege and works to undermine it.

After having considered challenges facing conflict resolvers by racism, classism, sexism and other forms of social inequities, participants will be trained to mediate using a social justice lens while helping disputing parties reach mutually agreeable solutions.

This model is built upon theoretical frameworks grounded in the fields of Postcolonial Studies, Critical Race Studies, Multicultural Education, and Conflict Resolution.  Its unique approach is not offered by any other training institute or trainers and has been utilized by over 100 campuses and organizations across the U.S.  So far, over 2500 people have been trained in this model.  It has been praised for preparing mediators to effectively respond to the realities of multicultural conflicts in organizations and communities.

Social Justice Mediation Institute Presenters

Deepika Marya, Ph.D.

Deepika Marya is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Theory and Literature in the English Department at the University of Southern Maine, U.S.A.  A dispute resolution trainer since 1997, Deepika introduced critical theory to the field of mediation and integrates conflict resolution theory with multicultural approaches to conflict.  She has trained at dozens of public and private educational institutions and organizations across the U.S. and is a lead trainer for the Social Justice Mediation Institute.  Deepika has also provided consultation services for educational institutions and worked with colleges and universities in the development and implementation of peer mediation programs and has provided trainings on communal tension and conflict resolution in India.   

Leah Wing, Ed. D.

Leah is director of the Social Justice Mediation Institute and has taught dispute resolution since 1993.  She is a member of the faculty in the Legal Studies Program in the Political Science Department at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and her recent research and teaching applies Critical Race theory to mediation and reconciliation in colonized and postcolonial societies.  Beginning in 1985, Leah has been a mediator and trainer for educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profits.  Leah has served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Conflict Resolution from 2002-8 and has been a member of the editorial board of Conflict Resolution Quarterly from 2002 to the present.  She is a member of the Storytelling Subcommittee of the Healing Through Remembering Project, Belfast.  Leah is Co-Director of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (USA).

The Context

Mediation is touted as a neutral and effective process for resolving disputes and reducing tensions.  However, despite some demonstrated success, research reveals that mediation also routinely reproduces racial and other social identity group privileges structurally within institutions and interpersonally between disputants (Baker et al, 2000; Cooper, 2001; Wing, 2009; Wing 2012).  This creates particular hazardous and unfair conditions for those who are steered into mediation, promised an empowering and fair process only to experience disproportionate lack of access to the attributes so valued in mediation:  neutral management of a process which is to offer empowerment in both the process and outcome to all disputing parties (Grillo, 1991).

What causes the disproportionate negative impact of such privilege in mediation?  Research has demonstrated that the belief in neutrality in a society still rife with racial and other social identity group privileges and inequalities is a main culprit (Delgado et al, 1995; Grillo, 1991; Wing, 2009).  A careful examination of mediation and legal theory elucidates the central role in the hegemonic narrative that neutrality plays in how to prevent racial bias, in particular, in dispute resolution forums (Flagg, 1997; Matsuda, 1995; Ross, 1995; Wing, 2009).  However, despite this pervasive narrative valorizing neutrality as a salve for racial inequality, a critical examination of the strategies that mediators are supposed to employ in order to perform neutrality begins to unearth patterns of practice that, instead, replicate racial domination and privilege (Cobb, 1994; Cobb and Rifkin, 1991).  In actuality, then, research has demonstrated that if mediators perform as they have been trained, they replicate racial power imbalances present in the dominant narratives of society and structures of our institutions (Grillo, 1991; Wing, 2002; Wing, 2009). 

Since mediation is a process through which disputing parties narrate their own stories—unlike a judicial proceeding in which representatives often narrate for them and only according to fixed rules of evidence—then we can see that access to full and complete narration is key to full and fair participation.  And beyond the so-called empowering experience of being able to tell your own story and ‘to be heard’ in mediation, story presentation is an essential step in the mediation process:  this is true since mutually acceptable future stories (agreements) are crafted based on the stories the participants had presented as problematic (Cobb and Rifkin, 1991).  Thus, unless one can fully narrate what their concerns are, then, research demonstrates, one’s input into the agreement is drastically reduced—resulting in a material result of lesser value (Chew, 2001; Wing, 2002). 

Research on the process of narrative construction has illustrated how stories about race, racial discrimination, racialization, ethnicity, mother tongue, and culture, among other identity-related topics, are routinely excoriated from the mediation by mediators’ strategic interventions  (Wing, 2002; Wing 2009).  While clearly not everyone telling a story about these topics are people of color, it is people of color who are disproportionately negatively impacted in society and organizations when these stories are not allowed to be told (Cooper, 2001; Delgado et al, 1995; Grillo, 1991). 

Therefore, the central tenet of mediation theory and practice—neutrality--actually provides cover for practices that undermine the complete narration of stories by all disputants.  In a field that is passionate about providing procedural fairness, this is highly problematic to discover for mediation practitioners, disputants, and those who refer them to the process.  For those dedicated to racial justice, social justice, and equality, it adds to the concerns that have already existed about the privacy and individuation of disputes in mediation that can undermine larger structural change and institutional accountability (Delgado et al, 1995; Riger, 2001).  It was a desire to address and prevent the replication of racial and other social identity group privileging within mediation processes that these presenters have constructed an approach to mediation focused on racial and social justice.