Mediation at the road of intersection: The case of Family Division, Kampala High Court.

vi ii Abstract The sociological understanding of mediation has received less attention in Uganda despite the rolling out of mandatory mediation to all civil cases. This research seeks to understand how parties around the negotiation table in mediation employ gender in its intersection with class and status to pursue their interests. It employs intersectionality, the tool of analysis that helps to understand how social interactions overlap and cause unique experiences. Qualitative research methods using observations of mediation sessions and unstructured, informal interviews of participants was carried out at the Family Division of the High Court of Uganda at Kampala over a period of one month. Through analysis of mediation sessions attended and the interviews, the findings revealed that parties employ the social norms of gender, class and status during their negotiations to give themselves a positive position and the opponent party a negative one by framing themselves as; the good version of the symbols depicted while framing the other party as the bad version of the symbol, the disadvantaged and deserve protection and the opponent party framed as advantaged and not deserving protection, the right ones and other party as wrong one. The findings further reveal mediators employ legal norms in form of rules, together with social norms from their social background upon which they rely to interpret and process the mediation. The study therefore concludes with recommendation for a wider research on the topic in order to generalize the findings. It also recommends a research on the impact of the effect of social norms on the mediation outcome.