Quelle place pour les émotions des parties dans le discours en médiation des conflits?

The research project “Quelle place pour les émotions des parties dans le discours en médiation des conflits” is co-financed by the research found Jakob Wüest through Empiris foundation. It started in October 2022 and it will continue until October 2023. The project’s aim is to gain a better understanding of the different ways in which professional mediators communicate about conflicting parties’ emotions during mediation sessions, analyzing the reasons and the implications (for conflict resolution) of mediators’ discursive choices in this regard. The project includes a data collection phase, in which a corpus of role-played mediation sessions’ transcriptions will be expanded through the video-recording of new sessions in collaboration with professional mediators working in Ticino. Secondly, the data will be analyzed employing a theoretical tool developed in linguistics for the analysis of emotions in discourse (Micheli 2014). Thirdly, focus groups with professional mediators will be organized both in Ticino and in the French-speaking part of Switzerland – with the aim of grasping their perceptions about the role of emotions in mediation. The project’s results will be presented at conferences in the fields of linguistics and mediation and a scientific publication is also envisaged. Moreover, a brief report will be made available to mediators that participated in the project and to their colleagues.