EVENT DESCRIPTION:

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This symposium will examine the conceptual boundaries, practical models, and pedagogical interventions to assess the potentialities and limitations of dialogue as a process for fostering productive disagreement or transforming conflict.

Can dialogue be understood as a distinct form of dispute prevention, resolution, management, or transformation? Are dialogues and their related concepts and practices, such as difficult conversations or civil disagreements, effective ways to handle conflict? Under what circumstances are they an appropriate process to address disagreements? How should dialogues be structured to promote understanding, more constructive disagreement, or meaningful conversations? How to apply dialogue principles to create broader social change rather than just individual transformation?  Is dialogue normatively desirable in the face of power imbalances, deep polarization, or intractable conflicts? What practical initiatives and community interventions can shed light on the use of dialogues to deepen understanding, strengthen connection, or transform human relations?

This convening brings together dispute resolution scholars, dialogue practitioners, legal scholars, and other scholars from related fields, including psychology, sociology, political science, media and communication studies, and philosophy to shed light on what dialogues and difficult conversations are, how they are (or should be) conducted, the contexts in which they are beneficial or detrimental, and the interventions that can serve as models for reimagining our relations to others.

 

AGENDA:

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Coming soon.

 

 

Registration Fees

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General Public (in-person): $25
General Public (virtual): Free

General Public with CLE credit (in-person): $85
General Public with CLE credit (virtual): $60

University students, faculty and staff: Free

Payment portal opens later this summer.

 

Participants

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Diana Acosta-Navas, Assistant Professor of Business Ethics, Loyola University Chicago

Diana Acosta-Navas is an assistant professor of management specializing in business ethics at Loyola University Chicago. She was previously an Embedded EthiCS fellow at Stanford University, based in the Center for Ethics in Society (EiS) and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). Diana holds a PhD in philosophy from Harvard University, where she also worked as an adjunct lecturer in ethics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She was a recipient of the Edmond J. Safra Center Graduate Fellowship during the 2017-2018 academic year and participated in the Embedded EthiCS program in 2019 and 2020. Diana studied philosophy at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, before completing a master’s program at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her research examines the role of digital platforms in fostering healthy public debate and the ethical implications of emerging technologies on the digital public sphere. She also explores human rights in post-conflict scenarios, focusing on the moral responsibilities of businesses to support peace-building processes. Diana was recently awarded a Summer Research grant for a project on the ethics of AI agents and AI-driven augmentation.

Hiro Arigaki, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution, UC Law San Francisco

Hiro Aragaki joined the UC Law SF faculty in 2022 as Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution. His scholarly interests cluster around the intersection of contract and procedure, and his work on ADR has been published in top U.S. law journals, such as the N.Y.U. Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Online. It has also won prestigious accolades, including being selected for the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum (2011), Honorable Mention in the AALS Scholarly Papers Competition (2013), and being selected for presentation at the Branstetter New Voices Workshop at Vanderbilt Law School (2014). Professor Aragaki has written extensively on federal arbitration law and is currently engaged in a number of long-term projects looking at mediation from comparative, development, and empirical perspectives. He has frequently been called upon to train judges and lawyers in ADR and consult on ADR reform projects around the world, most recently as an Advisor to the Expert Committee on Mediation, Supreme Court of India, and as an advisor to the judiciary of Kazakhstan on arbitration law reforms.

Kevin Coe, Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, Director, Edna Anderson-Taylor Communication Institute

Kevin Coe is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, where he also directs the Edna Anderson-Taylor Communication Institute. His research employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to better understand political communication, news media, and public opinion. He is the coauthor of two books, The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times (Oxford, 2021, with Joshua Scacco) and The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America (Oxford, 2010, with David Domke), as well as numerous research articles. Professor Coe teaches courses on media, strategic communication, political communication, and content analysis. He is a past Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Political Communication Section and the National Communication Association’s Political Communication Division. He earned his Ph.D. in speech communication at the University of Illinois, and his M.A. and B.A. at the University of Washington.

Amy J. Cohen, Robert J. Reinstein Chair in Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law and honorary professor at the Faculty of Law and Justice, UNSW, Sydney

Amy J. Cohen is the inaugural holder of the Robert J. Reinstein Chair in law. Amy’s research focuses on two areas of sociolegal scholarship—alternative dispute resolution and informal justice, including among people building alternatives to the criminal legal system, and law and economic development, including the law and political economy of agriculture and food. Before joining Temple, she was the John C. Elam/Vorys Sater Professor of Law at The Ohio State University and Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney in the School of Law, Society, and Criminology, where she remains an honorary professor. Before joining Ohio State, she clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Amy’s current major theoretical project, with several colleagues, surfaces an emergent movement in law that examines how people use the language, legitimacy, and forms of law to imagine and enact alternative social and economic relations.

Emily de Schweinitz Taylor, Certified mediator, conflict coach, developmental psychologist, and member of the Utah Council on Conflict Resolution board

Emily de Schweinitz Taylor, Ph.D., is a certified mediator, conflict coach, and developmental psychologist focused on helping individuals and communities navigate conflict constructively. A former university ombuds and conflict resolution leader, she teaches courses such as mediation and history of psychology at Brigham Young University and conducts research at the intersection of psychology, religious identity, and conflict with the Cooperation for Science and Technology (COST) based in Europe. Emily serves on the Utah Council on Conflict Resolution board and volunteers as a civic dialogue moderator with Braver Angels. She is the host of Conflict Coach on BYU Radio and the author of Conflict Fluent and Raising Mediators.

James Holbrook, Emeritus Clinical Professor, S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah

Jim Holbrook graduated from the University of Utah College of Law in 1974, clerked for the Chief Judge of the federal district court in Utah, was an Assistant United States Attorney, and practiced as a trial lawyer for 28 years in Salt Lake City. From 2002 to 2019 he was a Clinical Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law where he taught negotiation, mediation, and arbitration courses. He has mediated and arbitrated over 4,000 cases and claims dealing with a wide range of legal and fee-dispute issues. He is the Director of Special Projects at the law school.

RonNell Andersen Jones, University Distinguished Professor and the Lee E. Teitelbaum Chair in Law, S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah

Professor RonNell Andersen Jones is the Teitelbaum Chair and a University Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. She is an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Professor Andersen Jones is a First Amendment scholar who teaches, researches, and writes on legal issues affecting the press. Her scholarship addresses the role of a free and independent press in a healthy democracy. She is a widely cited national expert on defamation, reporter’s privilege, and newsgathering rights. Her scholarly work has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Northwestern Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and the Harvard Law Review Forum. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and is co-editor, with Sonja R. West, of “The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, & the News in Changing Times,” published by Cambridge University Press. Professor Andersen Jones is also a regular public commentator on press freedom issues. Her op-eds have been published in several major news outlets, including CNN and The New York Times, and her research has been quoted in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, The Guardian, and dozens of other national and international publications. In 2023-24, she was Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. In 2025, she was a visiting scholar at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University.

Andrea Kupfer-Schneider, Professor of Law and Director of the Kukin Program for Conflict Resolution, Cardozo School of Law

Andrea Kupfer Schneider is a Professor of Law and Director of the Kukin Program for Conflict Resolution at Cardozo School of Law where she teaches and writes on negotiation, negotiation pedagogy, ethics, gender, plea bargaining, and international conflict. The author of leading textbooks and over 80 articles and book chapters, in 2024, Professor Schneider was awarded the Rubin Theory to Practice Award given by the International Association of Conflict Management (IACM) honoring meritorious and long-standing contributions at the nexus of theory, research and practice. She was named the 2017 recipient of the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work, the highest scholarly award given by the ABA in the field of dispute resolution. And in 2009, Professor Schneider was awarded the Woman of the Year Award by the Wisconsin Law Journal and the Association for Women Lawyers. She was elected to the American Law Institute in 2022 and the Council for Foreign Relations in 2023. Professor Schneider is the host of the podcast How My Friends Negotiate. She is a founding editor of Indisputably, the blog for ADR law faculty, and started the Dispute Resolution Works-in-Progress annual conferences in 2007. In 2016, she gave her first TEDx talk titled Women Don’t Negotiate and Other Similar Nonsense. Professor Schneider received her A.B. cum laude from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School. She also received a Diploma from the Academy of European Law in Florence, Italy.

Jennifer Llewellyn, Professor & McNeil Chair in Restorative Justice & Director of the Restorative Research, Innovation and Education Lab, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University

Jennifer Llewellyn is Professor of Law, McNeil Chair in Restorative Justice and Director of the Restorative Research, Innovation and Education Lab at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, her teaching and research focus on relational theory, restorative justice, justice transformation, truth commissions, peacebuilding, international and domestic human rights law, public law, and Canadian constitutional law. She has advised governments and NGO’s, supported governments, projects and programs including the Nova Scotia Restorative Justice Program, the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, the South African and Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the governments of Columbia, Jamaica, New Zealand and the United Nations. She was appointed as an expert on the UN mechanism to review the UN Basic Principles for the Use of Restorative Justice in Criminal Matters. Additionally, Professor Llewellyn facilitated the design process for the first restorative public inquiry and served as a commissioner for the Inquiry into the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children. She is currently directing the multi-year social impact research project Creating Integrated Restorative Communities for Locally Engaged Solutions (CIRCLES-NS). Professor Llewellyn was the 2018 recipient of the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council National Impact Award, the highest award for research achievement and impact in Canada, and in 2019, she received the Dalhousie University President’s Research Excellence Award for Research Impact.

Grande Lum, Director and Senior Lecturer of Law, Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution, Stanford Law School

Grande Lum is Director of the Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution at Stanford Law School which houses the Gould Negotiation and Mediation Program and the Gould Alternative Dispute Research Initiative. A San Francisco native, his scholarship and work focus on civil rights community-based mediation, consensus building, dispute facilitation, polarization prevention, negotiation, mediation, and public policy. Prior to joining Stanford Law School, he was senior partner at the Rebuild Congress Initiative, a program of the Harvard Negotiation Project and Issue One. Previously, he served as a professor as well as provost and vice president of academic affairs at Menlo College in Atherton, California. Prior to joining Menlo, he was the founding director of the Divided Community Project at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Lum was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the US Senate unanimously as director of the Community Relations Service (CRS), an agency within the Department of Justice. Before joining CRS, Lum was a clinical professor at the UC Law San Francisco, where he directed the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution. He is the co-author of America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights as well as the author of the books The Negotiation Fieldbook and Tear Down the Wall: Be Your Own Mediator in Conflict.

Andrew B. Mamo, Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati, Donald P. Klekamp College of Law

Andrew Mamo is a professor of law at the University of Cincinnati Donald P. Klekamp College of Law. His research concerns the history and theory of dispute resolution and negotiation, with an emphasis on the history of dispute resolution practices, the role of technology in dispute resolution, and the professionalization of dispute resolution. His current projects include a study of the institutionalization of dispute resolution services in the late twentieth century. Mamo received his SB in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and his JD from Harvard Law School. After graduating from law school, Mamo clerked for Judge Hisashi Owada and Judge Julia Sebutinde of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He then worked on cross-border capital markets and project finance transactions at a major international law firm in Singapore. Mamo joined Harvard Law School as Lecturer in Law and a Clinical Instructor at the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, teaching negotiation and supervising teams of clinical students representing clients on a range of dispute systems design projects. Prior to joining the College of Law, he was an Assistant Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University College of Law.

Michael K. Middleton, Senior Associate Dean – Liberal Arts & Sciences; Director – Center for Civic Discourse & Debate; Professor – Communication, University of Utah

Michael K. Middleton is senior associate dean in the Colleges of Liberal Arts & Sciences and director of the Center for Civic Discourse & Debate. His research examines rhetoric, argumentation, and public discourse through the lenses of cultural studies and pedagogy, with particular emphasis on political advocacy, social movements, and civic discourse. With more than two decades of experience in competitive debate and public speaking, Middleton has coached and mentored students to the highest levels of national competition. He has served as a consultant for the International Debate Education Association and held leadership positions in the Western States Communication Association, the National Parliamentary Debate Association, the National Communication Association’s Committee for International Discussion and Debate, and the International Forensics Association.

Samantha Moore-Berg, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Utah

Dr. Samantha Moore-Berg is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah. Previously, she was the Emile Bruneau Postdoctoral Researcher and Director of the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Moore-Berg studies the causes and consequences of intergroup conflict and develops interventions to promote peace. She often does this research by collaborating with practitioners to apply her findings to real-world settings. Her work has been published in prestigious journals, including Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has been featured in notable media outlets, such as The NYTimes and NPR.

Nicolás Parra-Herrera, Associate Professor and Wagner/Holbrook Chair in Negotiation, S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah

Nicolás is the Wagner/Holbrook Presidential Chair in Negotiation and Associate Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah. He earned his S.J.D. (doctoral degree) from Harvard Law School (HLS). He also holds a cum laude M.A. and a magna cum laude B.A. in Philosophy, as well as a magna cum laude LL.B., all from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. He teaches negotiation, mediation, leadership, advanced topics in dispute resolution, and legal ethics. His research focuses on the intellectual history and foundations, philosophy, and ethics of negotiation and other forms of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). He is the recipient of the New Voices Award, AALS ADR Section, and the Roger Fisher and Frank Sander Prize at Harvard Law School. Prior to joining the law school, Professor Parra-Herrera was a Byse Fellow at Harvard Law School, a Civil Discourse Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, a Program on Negotiation Graduate Fellow, and a fellow at the Center for the Legal Profession at HLS. He has served as a visiting professor at the Law School at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, where he taught negotiation, mediation, leadership, legal theory, and digital justice. At Harvard Kennedy School, he was a Teaching Fellow in courses on Moral Leadership, Moral Practice, and Adaptive Leadership, where he received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Student Teaching (2024). Earlier in his career, Professor Parra-Herrera clerked at the Colombian Constitutional Court and practiced law for five years at prestigious law firms in Colombia. Besides his research and teaching, Professor Parra-Herrera co-produced the first podcast on law, film, and humanities in the Spanish-speaking world.

Monisha Pasupathi, Dean, Honors College, Professor of Psychology, University of Utah

Dean Pasupathi grew up mainly in Ohio, where she did her psychology and English literature undergraduate studies at Case Western Reserve University. She then pursued a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford University and, from there, a post-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. In 1999, she arrived in Utah as a faculty member in the Psychology department, fell in love with the mountains, and stayed put! Her scholarly expertise is in adolescent and young adult identity development. She is especially interested in how telling stories shapes our memories, emotions, and selves across the lifespan – and how those stories are influenced by the listeners in our lives. She joined the Honors College in 2018 as an associate dean and became the Dean in 2023; the Honors College is deeply committed to dialogue across differences.

Emma Petty Addams, Co-executive director for Mormon Women for Ethical Government

Emma Petty Addams serves as co-executive director for Mormon Women for Ethical Government. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in piano performance at Stanford University, she spent time in Boston and Silicon Valley working in contracts negotiation, corporate transactions and capitalization, and investor relations. In addition, she has built and run large piano studios in California, New Jersey, and Omaha, Nebraska. While seemingly unrelated, these previous career opportunities were excellent preparation for the fast-paced yet methodical and collaborative nature of the work at MWEG. Every time an MWEG member writes an op-ed, speaks out against injustice, or expresses her opinion peacefully on social media, Emma is grateful for the chance to help women contribute their part to the complex multi-voice symphony that is our democracy. Emma currently resides with her husband and three sons in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Danya Rumore, Associate Professor of Practice and Director of the Environmental Dispute Resolution Program, School of Social Sciences, Utah State University

Danya Rumore, PhD., is the Director of the Environmental Dispute Resolution Program, an Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Social Sciences, and a faculty affiliate of the Heravi Peace Institute at Utah State University. She has taught thousands of professionals the skills of collaboration, negotiation, conflict resolution, facilitation, and effective communication. She also has extensive experience working with a wide range of entities across the West to facilitate collaborative problem-solving around land use, natural resources, water, and community decision-making. Danya was the 2025 recipient of the Utah Council on Conflict Resolution’s Peacekeeper Award and the 2018 recipient of the Rob Williams Award for Emerging Environment and Public Policy Leaders.

 

Amy J. Schmitz, Full professor at The Ohio State Moritz College of Law and Director of JusticeTech at The Ohio State University.

Professor Amy J. Schmitz is a full professor at The Ohio State Moritz College of Law and Program on Dispute Resolution as the John Deaver Drinko-Baker & Hostetler Endowed Chair in Law and Director of JusticeTech at The Ohio State University. She also is affiliated with The Ohio State Program on Data Governance and the Divided Community Project. Before teaching at Ohio State, Professor Schmitz taught at the University of Missouri School of Law and Center for Dispute Resolution as the Elwood L. Thomas Missouri Endowed Professor of Law, starting in 2016. Previously she was a Professor at the University of Colorado School of Law for over 16 years. Prior to teaching, Professor Schmitz practiced law with large law firms in Seattle and Minneapolis and served as a law clerk for the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. Professor Schmitz teaches courses in Law and Technology/JusticeTech, Contracts, Lawyering and Problem-Solving, Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), Arbitration, International Arbitration, Social Media and Conflict, and Uniform Commercial Code. She has been heavily involved in Arbitration and LegalTech teaching and research for a long time, is a Fellow of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution, serves on the Education Committee and the AI Ambassadors Program for the AAA-ICDR, is on the Board of Directors for the International Council on Online Dispute Resolution, and the Editorial Board for the International Arbitration peer-reviewed Journal. She was the long-time Co-Chair of the ABA Technology Committee of the Dispute Resolution Section and the ODR Task Force, and now is on the Beyond the Page Task Force of the ABA Dispute Resolution Section. Professor Schmitz is also an elected member of the American Law Institute and the 2023 winner of the Association of American Law Schools Technology, Law and Legal Education Section Award as well as the ABA Section on Dispute Resolution Scholarly Achievement Award in 2025. Professor Schmitz has delivered over 185 presentations and hosts The Arbitration Conversation, a highly regarded webcast (100 episodes on YouTube) that moved to a podcast (17 episodes and more coming). She also is a researcher with the ACT Project exploring AI and dispute resolution at the Cyberjustice Laboratory in Montreal, Canada, and is heavily involved in discussions and research around technology, dispute resolution, and access to justice. She has published over 90 articles in journals and books, is a co-author of Resolving Disputes: Theory, Practice and Law (Aspen 2021), the book with Stipanowich, Arbitration: Theory, Practice and Law (Aspen 2022), a book with Martinez, Digital Dispute System Design (Aspen 2025), and a book with C. Rule, The New Handshake: Online Dispute Resolution and the Future of Consumer Protection (ABA 2017), and, The Arbitration Conversation: Insights and Wisdom from Experts in the Field (ABA 2024). She has received the Inst. for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR) Award for one of her articles as well as the CPR Book Award in 2023 and again in 2025. Amy has been an Expert Consultant on two USAID Projects, two Fulbright Specialist grants, and does research, teaching and presentations throughout the world.

Jeff Seul, Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School; Lecturer on the Practice of Peace, Harvard Divinity School, and Partner at Holland & Knight

Jeff Seul serves as Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, Lecturer on the Practice of Peace at Harvard Divinity School, co-chair of the Peace Appeal, and partner and chair of the technology and telecommunications industry group of the international law firm Holland & Knight, where he practices in the areas of corporate and securities law and mergers and acquisitions. The Peace Appeal, which was founded with a mandate from five Nobel Peace Laureates, including Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, is an international NGO that helps local stakeholders launch and sustain broad-scale peace and national dialogues processes to end or avoid war. Jeff’s scholarship is focused on negotiation and mediation of conflicts involving worldview and deeply held value differences, peace and national dialogue processes, and related topics. He has published in leading journals in the negotiation and conflict resolution fields, including the Journal of Peace Research and Negotiation Journal, and contributed to books edited by other scholars. Jeff serves as a mediator, facilitator, or advisor in a wide variety of conflict contexts, from armed conflicts to major business disputes. Among other activities, Jeff is involved in several conflict transformation initiatives in the Israeli-Palestinian context. He has advised or been an executive or board member with scores of startups for the past 35 years, primarily in the technology and renewable energy sectors. Jeff is a Zen teacher in the White Plum lineage and co-teacher at Full Moon Zen.

The views expressed in this lecture and in the event description are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of the S.J. Quinney College of Law or the University of Utah.

For questions about this event email events@law.utah.edu.

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