David Anderson Hooker

David Anderson Hooker is the Founder and Principle Narrator for CounterStories Consulting, llc. CounterStories engages as a conversation and visioning partner with international, national and local civil society organizations and religious groups to craft narratives of their preferred futures and align organizational structures and internal practices in furtherance of their constructed narratives. For almost 40 years Hooker has utilized his training and expertise in Conflict Transformation by serving as mediator, community builder, scholar, and advocate. Hooker’s primary focus is in the role of individual and collective narratives for the transformation of multi-party disputes and post conflict community reconciliation, especially those conflicts where race, class, religion, and other socially constructed variables significantly impact the disputed context. He also has both practice and academic interests in the interruption of the multi-generational transmission of trauma. He has served as mediator for more than 700 court-connected mediations, several dozen public policy conflicts, environmental justice disputes, and congregational conflicts. Hooker is a former Assistant Attorney General for the State of Georgia where he represented the Departments of Juvenile Justice, Mental Health Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse, and Medical Assistance (Medicaid). He later had a private legal practice focusing on civil rights (including prisoner rights and special education) He has worked in Bosnia, Croatia, Cuba, Myanmar (Burma), Nigeria, The Bahamas, South Sudan, Somaliland, and Zimbabwe,. Hooker is Formerly a Professor of Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2016-2021) and previously held  the posts of Senior Fellow for Community Engagement Strategies at the J. W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development at the University of Georgia (2010-2015) and Associate Professor of Conflict Studies at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia (2004- 2012). He is founding member of the Board of Directors for theChicago Torture Justice Center where he is helping to develop both theory and practice of “politicized healing” as a new articulation of justice. . He is a graduate of Morehouse College (BS); Washington University in St. Louis (AM); University of Massachusetts in Amherst (MPH & MPA); The Emory University School of Law (JD); The Candler School of Theology at Emory University (M. Div); and University of Tilburg in Tilburg, Netherlands (Ph.D.). Hooker is also an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ (UCC).