Special Workshop

A special workshop will be conducted by John Winslade on Friday afternoon. The workshop is not included in the conference registration fee and will be $125.00 per person. Places will be limited and you can book when registering for the conference.

When:  2 - 5pm, Friday 5 May
Cost:   $125.00 per person

Re-authoring the relationship story through narrative mediation
John Winslade

The narrative perspective is a simple and yet profound departure from commonly held  assumptions about the conflicts that embroil people.  It proposes that people live their lives according to stories rather than according to inner drives or interests.  It privileges stories and the meanings within stories over facts and causes.   In the stories we tell ourselves and each other, we all seek to establish coherence for ourselves and produce lives, careers, relationships and communities.   Therefore when we work with people to overcome the divisiveness of a conflict, we find it more productive to work with the stories in which the conflict is embedded than to pursue objective reality.

Stories are of course socially and culturally constructed.   Moreover, stories that come to dominate over other stories are complicit in the creation of power in social relations.  Working from a narrative perspective places the cultural world, and power relations within it, at the centre of the process of mediation rather than as an afterthought on the outside.

As well as being theoretically robust and socially just, the narrative approach to mediation has a distinctive method.  It sets out to help people separate themselves from conflict-saturated stories and gives them the opportunity to re-author relations in more peaceful, cooperative and respectful ways.   From this alternative relational position, the resolution of conflict can often happen much more smoothly than in a problem-solving approach. The aim of this workshop will be introduce participants to the ideas and practices of a narrative perspective in mediation.

John Winslade

John Winslade (PhD) is an Associate Professor at California State University San Bernardino. He also teaches a mediation course at Cal State Dominguez Hills University and another at the University of Waterloo in Canada.  Until 2003, he was Director of Counsellor Education at the University of Waikato and he still returns regularly to New Zealand to work part-time at Waikato University, including a Masters course on mediation in the School of Education.  He is a member of the editorial board of the Conflict Resolution Quarterly journal. With Gerald Monk, John was the author of the groundbreaking text, Narrative mediation: A new approach in conflict resolution (2000, Jossey Bass). He has since written a series of articles on narrative mediation and has taught workshops on this subject in the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Denmark, Netherlands, Cyprus & Israel.

John Winslade was the co-author of the groundbreaking text, Narrative mediation: A new approach in conflict resolution (2000, Jossey Bass). He has since written a series of articles on narrative mediation and has taught workshops on this subject in the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Denmark, Netherlands, Cyprus & Israel. He is a board member of the Conflict Resolution Quarterly and teaches mediation in several universities in three countries.  

Agenda

• Building an externalizing conversation

• Finding gaps in a conflict story
  Opening a counter-narrative

• Developing a counter-narrative

These topics will form the basis of a practice based workshop. They will be elaborated through mini-lecture, video demonstration, practice exercise and role play, and discussion and reflection.