Course Code: ADR 5115
Academic Year: 2025-2026
This course is designed to examine ADR clients' and practitioners' vulnerabilities from a variety of perspectives. This interdisciplinary course draws on the experience, lived and statistical, of vulnerable populations; interpersonal neurobiology; law; and intercultural conflict studies; in order to support students in hosting trauma-informed and power-balanced ADR processes. This course will introduce how ADR practitioners: (a) manage various vulnerabilities that inform conflicts; and (b) support their clients' unique vulnerabilities as they seek to resolve their legal and informal disputes. This course also provides ADR students with the opportunity to build skills required to manage difficult situations in negotiation processes and in broader societal interactions. ADR practitioners, especially mediators, host difficult conversations. This course examines how various vulnerabilities, including those exacerbated by social and systemic biases, can play into the 'difficult' part of these conversations and how they can be managed to foster productive conversations, negotiations, and third-party awarded decisions.