Keywords: Carrie Menkel-Meadow and Dispute Resolution

It is such an honour to contribute to this special issue celebrating our amazing friend Carrie Menkel-Meadow. She has so many wonderful qualities, has written so many influential things, and has initiated and contributed to such important debates over many years in the field of dispute resolution that it is impossible to do her and her work justice in this essay. I therefore decided to organize my contribution around keywords that come to my mind when I think about Carrie and I will connect these to her work in separate entries as the body of my essay. I also weave into the text how she has influenced my work and continues to do so. The keywords are professional, feminist, mentor, generosity, and contemporary. This approach allows me to focus on how I understand her work to embody so many of her personal qualities. My methodological anchor here is Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), in which he argues that language in not neutral and that many commonly used terms carry contested and often conflicting meanings depending on who uses them and in what context. Williams highlights the close relationship between language and social life. This is a helpful way to think about Carrie and her work on dispute resolution.