Call for Articles
Special Issue of Conflict Resolution Quarterly (CRQ)
in honor of Christina Sickles-Merchant
Guest Co-Editors: Catherine Gerard, Syracuse University
and Rosemary O'Leary, University of Kansas
The field of Conflict Resolution lost a giant with the passing of Christina Sickles-Merchant in 2013. This special issue of CRQ seeks to honor the contributions of Christina, examining how her work influenced our thinking, while furthering thought and knowledge in the sub-areas of the field to which Christina contributed so deeply.
Former president of the Association of Conflict Resolution (then SPIDR), labor mediator, advisor to the Clinton administration, and Professor of Practice at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, Christina was co-author of Designing Conflict Management Systems with Cathy Constantino (Jossey-Bass, 1996).
While at Maxwell, Christina maintained her interest and activity in multiple areas. She served as a mediator for statewide labor management disputes; she continued to train and facilitate labor management quality improvement groups in hospitals and government; she created a facilitation course for community facilitators; she worked with union leaders and academics on ADR systems and reinstituting labor-management partnerships as a means of cutting down on grievances and handling organizational and workplace issues. Further, some of the systems she set up decades ago for labor-management interest-based problem solving are thriving today. Christina was a dedicated teacher and believed deeply in sharing her wisdom and inculcating skills that would make her students and their organizations more successful.
We seek both scholarly and practitioner-oriented articles on the following topics:
Dispute systems design (e.g. the costs of unsolved workplace problems; current state of the art in systems design)
Mediation of workplace disputes
Labor-management partnerships
The role of unions in the workplace, especially their place in conflict resolution practices, process, and theory
Labor management partnerships at the federal level: historical perspectives
Latest in facilitating interest-based problem-solving in large group settings
Capacity building for facilitators
Essays reflecting on the contributions of Christina Sickles-Merchant are welcome.
All articles, essays, and reflections will be subject to a double-blind peer review process.
One page abstracts of ideas for scholarly and practitioner-oriented articles, as well as reflection pieces, should be emailed by November 1, 2014 to: datoole@syr.edu . Please include your name, title, affiliation, address, phone number, and email address.
Prospective authors will be notified by December 1 and provided with a timeline for submission for the full submission.
Submissions will be due by April 1, 2015 to begin the peer review process.
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