Mediation & Popular Culture

Book excerpt: This book examines mediation topics such as impartiality, self-determination and fair outcomes through popular culture lenses. Popular television shows and award-winning films are used as illustrative examples to illuminate under-represented mediation topics such as feelings and expert intuition, conflicts of interest and repeat business, and deception and caucusing. The author also employs research from Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States of America to demonstrate that real and reel mediation may have more in common than we think. How mediation is imagined in popular culture, compared to how professors teach it and how mediators practise it, provides important affective, ethical, legal, personal and pedagogical insights relevant for mediators, lawyers, professors and students, and may even help develop mediator identity.