Katherine Pavlidis Johnson PhD (Law, Macquarie University)
Katherine is an internationally and nationally accredited mediator, serving on various mediation panels including the International Mediation Institute (IMI), Papua New Guinea Supreme Court (PNG), the Supreme Court of NSW, the Workers Compensation Commission of NSW and the Family Law Settlement Service Panel (FLSS) of the Federal Circuit Court of Australia. She is a barrister of the NSW Bar since 1993, a retired counselling, organisational and community psychologist in private practice from 1984 to 2017; and a trainer/assessor of mediators since 2000.
Katherine’s extensive practice in Psychology, Law and Education has led her to find common ground between the fields culminating in a PhD in Law from Macquarie University in 2015. She has combined the insights from the field of Loss and grief in Psychology to the practical resolution of disputes in Law. In her thesis, she has developed an interdisciplinary approach, which could transform Dispute Resolution into an agent for social change. Her use of mediation as a process of social constructionism in action attempts to empower parties to constructively respond to their own crises/losses as agents for their own social change.
Katherine is the Founder of PAVE the Way to PEACE, an interest group of educators meeting in NSW Parliament House since 1996 (pavethewaytopeace.com.au); Co-Founder, of the Dispute Resolution and Psychology Interest Group of the Australian Psychological Society (APS); Co-Founder of the Dispute Resolution Industry Forum now called Council of Alternate Dispute Resolvers (CADR)); President of the Australian Dispute Resolution Association (ADRA) in 2006 and 2007 and from 2013 to 2017, and then 2019 to 2021 (the longest-serving President of ADRA in 36 years) ; and Vice President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law (ANZAPPL) from 2010 to 2017.
Katherine has been called a ‘prac-ademic’ because of her attempts not only to constructively implement in her practice what theory teaches us academically, but also to learn from practice what can be generalised as a grounded researcher to become academic knowledge.
Katherine has been a practising registered psychologist and barrister and a nationally accredited mediator for over twenty five years. She has combined her skills to form Unilegal Consulting Pty. Ltd through which she still practises as a mediator and as a Guardian Ad Litem for the Department of Communities and Justice in NSW. Katherine also teaches mediation courses and trains mediators internationally and nationally.
In October 2024, Katherine was presented with a prestigious award from the Thessaloniki Chamber of Commerce and the Hellenic ADR Hub in Greece, for services to World Mediation as an Interdisciplinary Mediation Pioneer for her PhD in Law majoring in Dispute Resolution called Re-Constructionist Mediation.
She also received the Mahatma Gandhi Award for Leadership for her considerable services to the Australian Dispute Resolution Association (ADRA) over the last 28 years; and received the Inaugural award for Speakers to the Mind Health Forum from the McMillan Room, Oxford University, England for services to improve World Mind Health.