Loretta Pyles, Ph.D., MSW

Advisor

Loretta Pyles is a scholar, educator, change-maker, and contemplative artist committed to transformative and healing justice. She has worked primarily with public and non-profit organizations helping them to embody a culture of integrative care through trauma-informed and anti-oppression lenses. Loretta received her B.A. in Philosophy and Sociology from Baker University, an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Kansas, and a Ph.D. in Social Work from the University of Kansas. Formerly on the faculty at Tulane University School of Social Work in New Orleans, Loretta is a Professor in the School of Social Welfare at the State University of New York at Albany. Her research has focused on disasters, gender-based violence, poverty, racism, and integrative practice. The National Science Foundation has funded her research on human capabilities, community participation, and disaster recovery. Her social change and healing justice work has taken her across the country and globe working with communities in Haiti, Mongolia, and Indonesia. 

Loretta’s sensibility about transformative justice was formed during her time working in a women’s collective at a community-based domestic violence program in Lawrence, Kansas. She continues to be inspired by the insights of feminist, anti-racist, and environmental social movements. She came to body-mind-spirit practices in 1999, after becoming burned out from her own social services and social change work. She is a trauma-informed yoga teacher and a mindfulness student and teacher.

Loretta embraces transformative pedagogies and teaches graduate courses on community organizing, social policy, international development, and integrative social work. In her book, Progressive Community Organizing: Transformative Practice in a Globalizing World (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2021), she introduces an innovative transformative organizing framework, which centers healing justice and anti-oppression work as central to social change. Her book (co-edited with Gwendolyn Adam), Holistic Engagement: Transformative Social Work Education in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2016), offers educators a framework and methods for using the whole self to teach to the whole self.  She also published Healing Justice: Holistic Self-Care for Change Makers (Oxford University Press, 2018). And (with Juliana Svistova), she published Production of Disaster and Recovery in Haiti: Disaster Industrial Complex (Routledge, 2018). In addition to these books, she has published more than 50 articles and book chapters.

Loretta is an active unionist in United University Professions, the union for higher education professionals in New York state. She is a board member of the Labor-Religion Coalition of New York, the coordinating organization for the New York Poor People’s Campaign. She lives with her husband, Ted, in the Capital Region of New York.