Growing mediation, your practice and beyond

The 5^th Annual Mediation Clinic Conference 2025 will take place online on Friday 28 March 2025 (1030am – 430pm UK Time)

Facilitator: Dr Vanessa Collingridge 

Keynote Speaker:  Michael Jacobs.  The Mediation Dilemma: Resolution or Peace? 

“We have to start this process by taking on a new mission – we have to embrace the challenge of helping people stay with conflict.”

Bernard Mayer

There is something very seductive about seeing mediation within the scope of ADR. The underlying narrative suggests that mediation can and should focus on ‘resolving disputes’. In this sense, mediation becomes an answer to a problem – in this case the problem of conflict – with the implication that mediation can make the problem ‘go away’.

I have serious doubts both about the accuracy and helpfulness of such a presumption.

The ideology of ‘conflict resolution’ promotes certain beliefs about the nature of conflict. First and foremost, that it is resolvable. That where there was once conflict, there can now be a conflict free space.

My experience is that conflict isn’t something that we can make ‘go away’. Conflict is an integral part of human existence. We can no more make it disappear than we can halt the passage of time.

If conflict is a given, then what we need most from conflict practitioners is to help people learn how best to live in a conflictual world. To assist those ensnared in conflict to figure out how to disentangle themselves. This isn’t about magically making conflict vanish, but building the capacity to ‘do conflict’ in less destructive and dire ways.

Fundamentally, this is mediation as a peace-making process. Peace not defined as the absence of conflict, but as the ability to step into conflict without getting infected. My aim is to address these two different paradigms – conflict resolution versus peace-making – with the hope that mediators come to understand the real potential of our work.

Workshops Include:  

• Making Mediation Clinics Essential: The Benefits for Students, Institutions and Wider Society with Dr Jayne Bryan (University of Warwick)
• Building your practice by helping to develop our field with Ewan Malcolm
• Different Song, Familiar Tune – Learning and Adapting in Mediation with Gordon McKinlay and Dr Roy Poyntz
• How the Mediation Clinic helped me build my practice with Patrick Scott 
• Workplace Mediation in ACAS with Ron Inwood
• A place of safety transformed – journey to the Upside Down world of Community Mediation with Rhona Wilson.                              

Roundtable Discussion:    Pathways to a Career in Conflict Resolution with Victoria Harris. The panel are:  Joanna Gosling, Duncan Jarrett OBE and Kelly Stricklin Coutinho.

Strathclyde students go free but must register. 

Purchase tickets from our Online Shop. 

The flier for the programme can be downloaded here.