Synopsis

Modern life demands constant negotiation, and academic life is no exception. Securing funding, collaborating across disciplines, managing hierarchies, and advocating for one’s research in competitive institutional environments are central to the work itself. Yet most academics are never formally trained to negotiate or engage in productive dialogue. The result is often frustration: budgets left on the table, collaborations that stall, and strained relationships due to unspoken power gaps. 

The good news is that negotiating more effectively, building more productive working relationships, and navigating the social dynamics of academic life — without sacrificing intellectual integrity — may be more learnable than we think. In this workshop, participants will develop practical skills in negotiation and dialogue that they can apply immediately: to budget conversations and resource allocation, to collaborative research partnerships, to difficult exchanges with supervisors or peers, and to the everyday communicative challenges of academic careers. 

The workshop provides tools to strengthen communication, manage conflict constructively, and build and sustain working relationships. We aim to improve participants’ capacity to conduct negotiations and dialogues that are both effective and principled. The content is grounded in a model developed at Harvard University, moving beyond one-time dealmaking toward the kind of durable mutual understanding that academic life depends on.