Do you suffer from the imposter syndrome too?

I have been in our field for decades and I know only a teeny tiny fraction of our body of knowledge.

I feel like Lucille Ball in the chocolate factory as we constantly churn out ever more stuff and I can’t keep up.

I generally try to avoid thinking about this but I will be on a program about scholarship at the Pepperdine Past-and-Future conference and I thought it would be nice if I knew something about the subject.

So I perused titles of recent publications to get a feel what we are up to.  This prompted me to produce this table listing articles published in the past two years or so.

I started with SSRN and included articles (but not student notes or comments) from the usual suspects – DR journals from Cardozo, Harvard, Missouri, Ohio State, Pepperdine – as well as Conflict Resolution Quarterly and Negotiation Journal.  I also included articles listed in the “SmartCilp” newsletters as well as the ones that Donna Stienstra and Jim Coben summarized last year in their “Research Insights” column in the Dispute Resolution Magazine.

As you will see, this is a lotta stuff.

But that ain’t the half of it.  This doesn’t even include blog posts – or the large body of literature produced before 2016, including numerous books such as the fabulous set of Mitchell Hamline DRI Press scholarly and applied practice publications.  Ohio State’s JDR publishes an annotated bibliography of the new publications in the prior year and last year’s edition was almost 100 pages.  Here’s a collection of some online bibliographies including the reading list generated from the Tower of Babel Symposium.  RSI (Resolution Systems Institute) has a ton of stuff in their website.  I’m sure that there’s other material I don’t even know about.

And this is mostly in the legal field.  Unlike most other subjects of legal scholarship, the scope of dispute resolution is almost boundless in terms of subject areas and disciplines.  For example, Law and Society Review and Law and Social Inquiry regularly publish some pieces related to dispute resolution.  Donna and Jim’s column illustrates that there is DR scholarship in a wide variety of social sciences.  There are people in our community who approach conflict resolution from the perspective of arts and culture.  A bunch of people focus on neuroscience and perhaps other biological sciences.  Now there’s ODR and technology.  There’s DR all over the world with colleagues from all over the world writing about it.  And what’s up with all those crazy article titles, Pogo?  Gadzooks, people!

No wonder I feel so ignorant.  I whined about the challenges of “taming the jungle of negotiation theories,” but that’s only a small part of the DR knowledge ecosphere.

Please do me a favor.  When you see me at Pepperdine, please play along and pretend that I know what I am talking about.