Georgia Southern University Professor and Fulbright Scholar Lori Amy, Ph.D. Selected to Present Research in Iceland

July 27, 2011

Georgia Southern University associate professor, Lori Amy, Ph.D., has received a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies Committee on European studies to present her paper, “NGOs and Civil Society in Albania: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, Where We’re Going.”  The presentation is part of the sixth annual European Consortium for Political Research General Conference to be held next month at the University of Iceland.

Amy, who served as a Fulbright Scholar, teaches in the Department of Writing and Linguistics in Georgia Southern’s College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences.

As the last of the Soviet-bloc countries to open its borders, Albania is struggling through a history of violent repression under communism, followed by the many social, economic, and cultural problems accompanying transition. The increasing insecurity of the individual and family in states of emergency, such as Albania’s 1997 economic collapse and the 1999 Kosovo War, reveal deep conflicts between international actors and the civil population about the role of the state in the post-cold war era.
Assisted by the international agencies structuring development aid, the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) sector has been responsible for defining and addressing the many social problems arising from the large-scale dis-investment in the public sphere under the dictates of privatization.

Amy’s analysis will map the nature and scope of the work that NGOs, through the umbrella of International Aid and Donor Organizations, have been doing since the transition to develop the structures of civil society. This mapping allows us to explore the relationship among state, municipality, private enterprise, and the nonprofit sector and to ask how structural realignments in each of these sectors can be evolved to work together to advance health, welfare, and economic development.
This analysis is part of Amy’s ongoing research about traumatic memory under communism and in transition.  Her next book, Re-Membering in Transition: Structures of Denial, Trajectories of Violence, and the Struggle for Meaning in Post-Communist Albania, will analyze the unarticulated, unanalyzed, and unresolved memory contests manifesting in the culture and politics of transition.

Prior to her Fulbright tenure in Albania, Amy was Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program (WGST) at Georgia Southern, where she brought her research on cultural violence and human rights activism to curriculum development and University-community outreach initiatives. Her current research extends the analysis of cultural violence elaborated in her first book,The Wars We Inherit: Military Life, Gender Violence, and Memory (Temple University Press 2010).  Called a “groundbreaking work in the literatures on trauma and survival,” Wars is a memory project that analyzes the structures that evolve violence, explores processes for working through violence, and, ultimately, imagines futures beyond the violences scripting us.

Amy earned her Ph.D. in English with a certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Florida, a Master of Arts degree in English and American Literature from the University of California at San Diego and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.