Chair, Urban Studies, The New School

Laura Y. Liu is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School. Her research focuses on community organizing; urban social justice; immigrant communities; race, gender, and labor politics; and the relationship between methodology and epistemology in activism. She has written on the connection between geography and industry in the art exhibit Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave (2011); the influence of digital 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, Sweatshop City, which looks at the continuing relevance of the sweatshop in Chinatown, New York City, and other post-Fordist, globalized contexts.

Liu has been a faculty fellow in the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School (2015-2016). In 2011-2012, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, City University of New York Graduate Center. 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, Rutgers University. Prior to The New School, she held a joint appointment at Dartmouth College in Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies. She holds a doctorate and masters degree in Geography from Rutgers University, and a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley.