As you may know, Noam Ebner and I have been co-editing a book on Star Wars and conflict resolution, soon to be published by DRI Press! This past summer, we have had a couple of opportunities to present some of the ideas from this project at academic and professional conferences — and then this fall, we waded into the nerdy, fun waters of the Comic Con.

Over Labor Day weekend, we presented virtually at Dragon Con. Dragon Con is based in Atlanta and is one of the largest Cons in the world. Our panel, “Conflict Experts Fight About Star Wars,” also featured Sherrill Hayes (Kennesaw State), Hillary Anger Elfenbein (Wash U), and Scott Maravilla (admin judge; American U). You can watch our session here!

A few weeks later, Sherrill and I were on an in-person panel at Rose City Comic Con in Portland, Oregon. We were joined by two of our law student research assistants for the book, Kinleigh Jones and Elizabeth Mayans.

Our panel, “Conflict Resolution Through Star Wars,” ended up with over 100 attendees. It was really gratifying to discover that so many non-ADR professionals want to learn about conflict and dealing with conflict. Liz Tippett helped us make these cool shirts. And we also made little “conflict-crons” (inspired by the Jedi holocrons from Star Wars) with conflict modes on four sides. They were a big hit.

After the session in Portland, we had a long discussion over what went well and what we’d do differently next time. In many ways, it was like a really new and different teaching challenge. We are excited about attending more of these kinds of events and look forward to sharing our book once it’s out. 🙂