Loretta Pyles

Professor
School of Social Welfare
Department: Social Welfare

Expertise:
Economic justice; gender-based violence; disaster and social inequality; community organizing

Campus phone: 442-5152
Campus email: [email protected]

Biography:

Pyles' scholarship centers on the ways that individuals, organizations and communities resist and respond to poverty, violence and disasters in a policy context of neoliberal economic globalization and social welfare retrenchment. She draws from critical, social constructionist and feminist traditions to inform her research and utilizes a range of research methods including conceptual, qualitative, participatory action research, and quantitative.

Pyles is the author of Progressive Community Organizing: A Critical Approach for a Globalizing World (Routledge, 2009) and more than 30 articles and book chapters. In Progressive Community Organizing, 2nd Edition (2013), she introduces the pioneering transformative organizing framework, which affirms critical and compassionate inquiry into self and society. She is also a certified yoga instructor and is interested in ways that spiritual practices can facilitate change.