National Mediation Conference | The Australian Dispute Resolution Research Network

Photo Credit Tim Hughes Creative commons

The date for the next National Mediation Conference has now been set. Originally the bi-annual conference was to be held in September 2018, but it was delayed.

The Board of National Mediation Conference has now confirm that the next National
Mediation Conference – NMC2019 – will convene in Canberra at the National Convention Centre on 15 – 17 April 2019. This is just before the Easter/Passover break.

A website will be established shortly and we will announce on this blog the URL.

The Board of National Mediation Conference have stated:

The Board of National Mediation Conferences Ltd is looking forward to a very successful conference in 2019, and welcomes interest and participation from the mediation community, as well as from the broader ADR community.

The 14th National Mediation Conference will be held from Tuesday 9 – Thursday 11 September 2014. Chosen from delegates’ feedback, the selected theme for 2014 is “Pathways to Resolution: the Challenge of Diversity”.

The conference website has just been launched and can be found here.

Conference Co-conveners Tania Sourdin and Walter Ibbs explain what the conference is and how it works

The Conference will bring together diverse practitioners, policy makers, researchers, managers, judges and leaders in the field of mediation, negotiation and dispute resolution to explore the diversity of experience, conflict, intellectual outlook, cognitive style, cultural competence and many other attributes that contribute to the richness of the resolution environment.

This Melbourne NMC is especially exciting for those of us who do research in the field of dispute resolution, as for the first time the National Mediation Conference will be combined with the Research Forum of the National Alternative Dispute Resolution Advisory Council (NADRAC). The two great dispute resolution research events in Australia will now be combined. It is going to be a dispute resolution ideas fest and we should all expect to walk away mind-boggled and tongue-tied. Sourdin and Ibbs write ‘This addition will provide delegates with the opportunity to meet and engage on the latest trends and issues in ADR research.’ The 2 day Research forum will start on the last day of the NMC and will continue the next day also.

Since the demise of NADRAC, it is not clear what the status of the research forum will be. But there are many working hard behind the scenes to ensure that it goes ahead regardless.

The call for papers is now open and abstracts can be submitted from now until 21 February 2014 here.

The theme of the conference is ‘Diversity’.

The Conference Organisers are particularly interested in presentations that support this theme. The concurrent sessions will be grouped into the following general streams and presenters should nominate to which stream their presentation or poster will relate.

The streams are: