Explaining and Being Impartial in Mediation
Explaining and Being Impartial in Mediation
We are excited to welcome Professor Elizabeth Stokoe to deliver a webinar exclusively for members of the CMC Community and Peer Mediation Working Groups. The event will focus on how mediators explain impartiality as part of describing the mediation process to potential and actual clients, as well as what impartiality looks and doesn’t look like in actual interaction with parties.
REPORT BY VICTORIA HARRIS
Today, members of CMC Community and Peer Mediation Working Groups will be attending an exclusive webinar delivered by Professor Elizabeth Stokoe.
The webinar will focus on how mediators explain impartiality as part of describing the mediation process to potential and actual clients, as well as what impartiality looks and doesn’t look like in actual interaction with parties. Using anonymised recordings of real inquiry calls to community and family mediation, as well as some mediation meetings themselves, we will examine what is effective and less effective in terms of explaining and manifesting impartiality for the trajectory and outcome of different stages of the mediation process.
As adult mediators, impartiality can present challenges. This webinar will look at how we can best explain this concept to peer (school age mediators) mediators and enrich our ability to be impartial, for the benefit of the mediation process and its participants.
Elizabeth Stokoe is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at The London School of Economics and Political Science. She conducts conversation analytic research to understand how talk works – from first dates to medical communication and from sales encounters to mediation and crisis negotiation. Her research on mediation fed into a new communication approach for the Ministry of Justice in 2014. In addition to academic publishing, she is passionate about science communication, and has given talks at TED, Google, Microsoft, and The Royal Institution, and performed at Latitude and Cheltenham Science Festivals. Her books include Talk: The Science of Conversation (Little, Brown, 2018) and Crisis Talk (Routledge, 2022, co-authored with Rein Ove Sikveland and Heidi Kevoe-Feldman). During the Covid-19 pandemic she participated in a behavioural science sub-group of the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and is a member of Independent SAGE behaviour group. She is a Wired Innovation Fellow and in 2021 was awarded Honorary Fellowship of the British Psychological Society.
