Dr. Katherine Pavlidis Johnson

Katherine is an internationally and nationally accredited mediator and has been a barrister of the NSW Bar since 1993. She was a counselling, organisational and community psychologist in private practice from 1984 to 2017 and has been a trainer/assessor of mediators since 2000. Her extensive practice across Psychology, Law and Education has enabled her to find common ground between these fields and to develop an interdisciplinary approach to Dispute Resolution.

Katherine has combined insights from the field of Loss and grief in Psychology with the practical resolution of disputes in Law. Her PhD in Law from Macquarie University, majoring in Dispute Resolution, explored this interdisciplinary approach and developed the concept of Re-Constructionist Mediation. Her work seeks to 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 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.

Her commitment to the development of Dispute Resolution extends beyond her own practice. Katherine is the Founder of PAVE the Way to PEACE, an interest group of educators meeting in NSW Parliament House since 1996. She is also Co-Founder of the Dispute Resolution and Psychology Interest Group of the Australian Psychological Society (APS) and Co-Founder of the Dispute Resolution Industry Forum, now called Council of Alternate Dispute Resolvers (CADR).

Katherine has held significant leadership roles within the Dispute Resolution and related professional communities. She was President of the Australian Dispute Resolution Association (ADRA) in 2006 and 2007, from 2013 to 2017, and from 2019 to 2021, making her the longest-serving President of ADRA in 36 years. She was also Vice President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law (ANZAPPL) from 2010 to 2017.

Through Unilegal Consulting Pty. Ltd., Katherine continues to practise as a mediator and as a Guardian Ad Litem for the Department of Communities and Justice in NSW. She 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.