Laura Liu : Power

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Contributor Bio

Laura Liu

Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School.

In 2011-2012, she is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, City University of New York Graduate Center. Her research focuses on community organizing and urban social justice; the socio-spatial dynamics of immigrant communities; race, gender, and labor politics; and the relationship between methodology and epistemology in activism. Her ongoing research project examines urban social transformation, specifically the relationship between community organizing, migration, and labor, and the production of knowledge in urban political activism.

She has written on the connection between geography and industry in the art exhibit Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave (2011); the impact of new technologies on urban space in Situated Technologies Pamphlets 7: From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (2010, with Trebor Scholz); and the impact of September 11 on Chinatown (Indefensible Space, 2007, Ed. Michael Sorkin). Her articles have appeared in Urban Geography; Gender, Place, and Culture; and Social and Cultural Geography. Liu is writing a book called Sweatshop City, which looks at the continuing relevance of the sweatshop both metaphorically and materially in Chinatown and other immigrant communities, but also more broadly in New York City and other post-Fordist, globalized contexts.

In addition to publishing, Professor Liu regularly presents her work at conferences and in invited lectures. In 2009 and 2008, she was invited to participate in the Workshop on Ethnographies of Activism at the London School of Economics. She has held fellowships from the Society of Women Geographers, and the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University. Prior to coming to The New School, she held a joint appointment at Dartmouth College in the departments of Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies. She holds a doctorate and a masters degree in Geography as well as a certificate in Women’s Studies, all from Rutgers University. Her bachelor’s degree in Architecture is from the University of California at Berkeley.