In the current judicial field there is a new trend that advocates for a model of restorative justice and alternative means of conflict resolution that poses new communicative-interactive situations between the parties involved. These communicative exchanges within the judicial sphere seek, ultimately written request, to humanize judicial processes by giving the victimizer the opportunity to take full responsibility for the harm caused, and the victim the opportunity to be morally restituted after the act that is the object of the process or open case. Thus, victim and offender have a conversation controlled by the mediator, where the parties bring their positions closer in pursuit of a agreement, or where they feel that their arguments, opinions and attitudes are taken into account. In this way, the (re)establishment of links between the interlocutors, or between the parties and society, is favored. This is the context of thesis 'Socio-affective interactions during conflict and extrajudicial, intrajudicial and intrapenal mediation: Multimodal analysis of the linguistic and gestural mechanisms that (re)consolidate social bonds'.

The thesis , framed in the work of the InMedio, MultiNeg and MultiDeMe projects, seeks to analyze real evidence of mediations that occurred within this context. For this purpose, the corpus of recordings of mediations will be made available and, along the same lines, using the resources of the Multimodal Pragmatics Lab of the University of Navarra, a corpus of contrasting non-judicial mediations will also be generated, with the aim of obtaining a broader view of the linguistic and gestural mechanisms used in the promotion of mediation, goal .

Thus, in this thesis , from a theoretical and applied perspective, we seek to analyze these data with a particular focus on, among others: the linguistic manifestation of (dis)agreement; the influence of attenuation and intensification in mediation activities; the cognitive processes underlying this subject of interactions; the impact of what is stated by the other interlocutor; the presence of the speech referred; the presence of gesturalpriming and alignment; and the potential influences of different social variables, in order to understand in depth the phenomenon of mediation.

Due to the rise of restorative justice practices in the judicial field, a systematic and detailed analysis of the interactive mechanisms (linguistic and gestural) used by human beings to (re)establish and consolidate interpersonal bonds in interactive processes in which mediation plays an essential role is necessary. Likewise, the analysis of such exchanges in specific communicative contexts will shed light on the emotional and socio-communicative expression of human beings from an integral multimodal perspective.

Director of thesis
 

Inés Olza
iolzamor@unav.es