Gabriella Blum

Gabriella's dissertation is entitled, Between War and Peace: Managing International and Intrastate Armed Conflicts. Her ultimate goal is to offer a theoretical framework for the design and implementation of conflict management regimes within armed conflicts, using tools from international relations scholarship, as well as theories of negotiation, conflict studies and game theory.

Pacey Foster

Negotiation and social network scholars share an underlying interest in how social relationships affect exchange processes. Despite this fact, insights from embeddedness and negotiation research remain largely disconnected. Pacey's dissertation, The Impact of Social Factors on Negotiations in Embedded Markets, will link negotiation and network theories by exploring how different kinds of social relationships impact partner selection and negotiations in a local cultural industry. The research will contribute to negotiation theory by focusing on how attributes of dyadic relations and network structures combine to affect partner selection decisions and negotiations in an actual market. It will advance network scholarship by considering the contingent value of ties among buyers and between buyers and sellers on exchange behaviors. It will contribute to cultural industry research by examining how gatekeepers use their social networks to manage decision-making in markets characterized by risk and uncertainty.

Before beginning his Ph.D. in Organization Studies, Pacey spent ten years working in mediation and conflict resolution programs including the Harvard Mediation Program, the American Arbitration Association, JAMS/Endispute and the Program on Negotiation. His work included management and administration, training, research and mediation in contexts ranging from community disputes to a national class action settlement. While his primary research interests are in negotiation, social networks and cultural industries, Pacey has also been a long time practitioner of action research and is interested in applying these techniques to the resolution of real world conflicts.

Kessely Hong

Kessely is working with Professor Keith Allred on a project involving a jurisdictional conflict between the Nez Perce Indian Tribe in Idaho and local non-Indian governments. Her research identifies an important distinction between constituents and officials (not only in terms of their own opinions but also in how they are perceived by the other side). For her dissertation Kessely proposes to extend this line of research to other contexts in order to gain a richer understanding of what factors influence the actual and perceived differences in opinion between constituents and officials, and what factors influence the degree of offensiveness vs. defensiveness of conflict participants.

Aida Othman

Aida's present research is an inquiry into Islamic approaches to peace and dispute resolution and their influence in contemporary conflict management discourse. The tentative title of Aida's dissertation is Resolving Disputes in Islam: Perspectives on Classical Theory and Contemporary Practice.