My thanks to Professor Forti for her extremely thoughtful review, and to Jeff Isaac for establishing this Critical Dialogue. Forti’s many interesting points deserve a full response; unfortunately, I can reply here to only two key points.

First, Forti suggests interviews can capture the messiness of life that too often eludes us in experiments. I agree. Naturalistic research projects also are often messy, but I advocate making the best of any extraordinary data set you are lucky enough to find. This book grew (unintended) out of a class project, in which I wanted students—fortunate enough to live in a country that has not fought a war on its soil since 1865–to learn first-hand what it would be like to experience such trauma. I casually, and without realizing the Pandora’s Box I was opening, assigned students a final project in which they were to interview someone who had lived through a war or genocide. I never dreamed my students would conduct such amazing interviews. When I realized the treasure trove of material they produced, I asked the class if anyone wanted to work on it with me, hoping to involve them in the pleasures of academic of research. To my delight, several students responded; one student was not even in the class, just an Armenian who had heard we were talking about this historic genocide and wanted to hear about it first-hand.

As we began working on the book, we quickly realized we had not specified what we meant by humanity when we conducted interviews. This lack of conceptual clarity is clearly a weakness if we think of this as a well-thought-out-pre-designed research project. However, we decided to use it as an opportunity to try to understand what the speakers might have meant by “keeping their humanity.” So Forti is correct: the key concept was not clearly specified, and we are exploring this in future work, which focuses on people who live with on-going political trauma, in this case the never-ending conflict in the Middle East. In this research we will be asking more explicitly what it means to the speakers to keep or reclaim their humanity.

Second, Forti asks about identity and the extent to which it is “the play of the making and unmaking of an identity… between identification and dis-identification, that “saves” us from closure within our own selves?” Like the term humanity, identity is also a complex concept that justifies fuller conversation. But, essentially, I would argue that identity is multi-faceted and that it is the situation that evokes and draws forth one particular aspect of identity versus another. It is the multi-dimensional aspect of identity that gives complex human beings the opportunity to choose how we remember events. It is what allows someone like Sara to revisit her memories, choosing sometimes to remember an event with bitterness and at other times to recall it in a way that allows for forgiveness, or at least a closure that opens the possibility of finding peace with our own future as we move beyond the trauma of war.