ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how popular culture may help to shade in some of the grey areas of mediator identity and image. It argues that popular mediation images can assist with mediator identity-building. The popular culture examples illuminate mediation differently than how we teach it and are therefore disruptive of some mediation truths. However, watching mediation deviations and deception is useful because students can feel mediation mistakes in ways they cannot when reading textbooks. Students and viewing audiences use television narratives as “one of the many cultural resources through which they will construct meaning,” so popular culture mediation, even with all its flaws, is implicated in mediation meaning-making. Mediation is not an official profession, so findings about professional identity and its formation may or may not be applicable to mediators. Mediators’ own definitions likely relate to their training, backgrounds and favoured approaches to mediation.
