About Lori Amy

I have spent a life researching, teaching, and writing about the effects of violence in our lives and world, and learning how to find wisdom and strength in the process of healing.  As a university professor, I specialized in memory and trauma studies.  My teaching, research, and scholarship explore how the violences we experience in our individual lives are deeply rooted in the cultural and collective violences that we take for granted as normal - violences such as war, poverty, and the many forms of oppressive power that harm those who are labeled as “other” – “other” religions, races, cultures, genders.  You can read more about how I understand the continuum of violence, from the cultural field to private life, in The Wars We Inherit: Military Life, Gender Violence, and Memory.

In 2009, I accepted a Fulbright Fellowship to Albania, where I worked with Public Health officials on developing theoretical frameworks and policy recommendations for understanding violence as a public health issue.  I went to Albania in part because I wanted to write a book that could show how the war on terror was reshaping global consciousness; Albania is in the region where the war on terror was being waged, and it was as good a place as any to begin my research.  When I arrived in Albania, I found the still-bleeding wounds of the Cold War, and that the war on terror was piling up new wounds on top of Cold War traumas that have never healed.  This discovery led me to 6 years of intensive work with Albania’s former political prisoners from the cold-war totalitarian dictatorship, and then to co-founding a nongovernmental organization, OTTOnomy, dedicated to using the arts, culture, and public education to heal wounds of war and dictatorship in the Western Balkans  My most recent book, Time Travels through Albania: A Love Letter from the Future, tells this story.

Time Travels examines, through the lens of Albania, the architectures of trauma sculpting our lives and worlds.  I have written Time Travels for a general audience concerned with war, dictatorship, post-communist transition, collective and cultural violence, and the future of democracy.  In contrast, my recent co-edited book, Reconsidering Transition: Albania 1990 - 2020 and the Promise of Democracy (with Afrim Krasniqi) is written for the foreign policy, international development, and international relations fields and the disciplines (history, political science, law, and cultural studies) that inform them.  Reconsidering Transition focuses exclusively on Albania to understand how the vision of democracy that brought us through the 20th century has to be re-imagined for the specific needs and contexts of the 21st century.

After decades working at the intersection of academia and activism, the new world we are entering calls me now to move beyond the limits of both.  While these remain vitally important in our world, I have come to see how each has been born out of, shaped by, and in many ways continues to reproduce the cultural and collective violences that have shaped all of our political cultures.  Moving beyond simply understanding the traumatic legacies of mass violence, my work now focuses on methods of bearing witness that lead us to a theory and practice for healing the wounds collective violence leaves.  This work takes three primary directions: coaching, consulting, speaking, and public courses, and my new emphasis on writing for the public sphere in Hope and Healing.  For more on how I understand bearing witness, you can see my TEDx Talk, Restoring the Social Fabric: Bearing Witness.

Hope and Healing stands as witness to the radical flux of our historical moment.   Our planet is heating up.  We are already in the midst of extreme weather events and climate changes that are reshaping life on our planet.  This is in-tandem with the explosion of artificial intelligence which calls into question the fundamental definition of what it means to be human.  Up until now, humans have understood consciousness - and the memory and language that structure consciousness - to be the primary characteristic differentiating the human from the animal.  AI so far outstrips the human capacity for memory and language that these terms are no longer sufficient to define the human.  As AI grows from generative to superintelligence, humans will have to co-evolve with technology.  Evolution at this cusp moment in human history is thus an evolution in consciousness: an evolution that we consciously choose as the path for our survival into the future.  Healing is a crucial pillar in the new consciousness we are called to evolve.

To prepare to meet our new reality, I have undertaken an intensive study of collective trauma healing with Thomas Hübl and The Pocket Project and deep systems transformation through the Presencing Institute.  In the service of healing and transformation, my writing co-evolves with my work as a trauma-informed coach and consultant helping individuals and organizations embrace the transformative potential of this moment.  I approach crisis as an opportunity to evolve - an opportunity that calls to each of us, no matter where we are in the world. When we see the social, political, and economic upheavals we are experiencing as both symptoms of the traumatic legacies demanding our attention and opportunities to heal what has remained wounded in our collective psyche, then we can see our way to healing as the hope and possibility for the futures that we are, collectively, making.  My work answers the call for hope and healing for the future that is emerging through us, right now, in each of our actions.