Laura Y. Liu

Laura Y. Liu is Associate Professor of Global Studies and Geography at The New School where she is an interdisciplinary scholar of space, identity, politics, and power. She trained as an architect and geographer. Her research examines the relationship between political organizing and socio-spatial knowledge, especially around uneven working and living conditions. In particular, her work focuses on community and labor organizing; migration and urban development; and the interplay of politics with art and design. She is interested in creative, experimental, and multi-modal approaches to research and organizing, and the collective production of knowledge and analysis. Liu has researched the US-Mexico border and other border spaces, and has collectively written a photo essay on border images in Anthropology Now (2017). She has written against the novelty of precarity in Women’s Studies Quarterly(2017). With the poet Jennifer Firestone, Liu co-produced the art/chapbook LITtle by LITtle (2014). 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 Pamphlet 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 other articles have appeared in Urban Geography; Gender, Place, and Culture; and Social and Cultural Geography.