Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Referential Strategies in Northern Irish Restorative Justice Mediation

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Candler Hallman, supervised by Dr. John B. Haviland, will undertake research on the cultural and linguistic contextualization of restorative justice during mediation in Northern Ireland. As mediation is achieved through talk-in-interaction, it is hypothesized that linguistic person reference is an essential cultural and linguistic resource with which mediator-activists and participants contextualize restorative justice theory in Northern Ireland. More generally, the subtle ways in which mediation participants speak about one another, visible only through careful linguistic analysis, affect the outcome of mediation. Restorative justice is a model of criminal justice that seeks to engage the victim, the wrongdoer, and the affected community in repairing the harm caused by a crime. Restorative justice has evolved into a global social movement focused on building long-lasting peace in communities torn apart by violence. It was introduced into Northern Ireland in 1996. Using linguistic anthropological theory, the researcher will investigate the micro-processes of interaction in these mediations to understand how talking about individuals and groups displays social relationships between current interlocutors as well as the person or persons referred to. For example, he hypothesizes that the characterization of the participants, as well as the community to which restoration must occur is a collaborative achievement formulated from the theory of resotrative justice, local conventions of language use, and mediation by subtle interactive cues signaled between participants. Hallman will employ multiple ethnographic and linguistic research methods. He will use participant observation in the local communities in which the mediation sessions are held to record, contextualize, and anlyze ordinary conversation of a sample of mediators and offenders. He will tape mediation sessions involving a range of conflicts and persons to be analyzed using conversational analysis techniques. He will conduct indepth interviews of participants and mediators. These data will be used to test four overarching hypotheses about linguistic practices, grammatical constructions, the use of language during the mediation process, and mediation outcomes.The research is important because it will contribute to theory about how global social movements are contextualized through language practices at particular sites. The research will help to understand the successes and failures of post-conflict mediation. The project also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.