My approach toward teaching and research is shaped by my experiences attending and later on teaching in NYC public schools.  My encounter with classrooms as both sites of marginalization and hope inform my goal of opening up generative spaces for challenging normative ideas, and imagining practices of freedom we have yet to experience.  My work is also informed by my disciplinary background in anthropology, and the sociocultural foundations of education.  These emphasize a productive tension between theory and practice.  This means not only applying theory to explain social and cultural processes, but using long-term observations of everyday life to push and refine theory. My teaching strives to equip students with experiences that will lead them to make connections between theory and practice through placement in fieldsites.  I constantly encourage them not to jam the complexities of social life into a theoretical framework, but to use those moments of friction and misalignment to critique and challenge theory.  In turn, my students are constantly sharpening my own theoretical understandings through their astute field observations, and through sharing their own life stories.  

My research aims to deconstruct popular liberal ideas.  People often have positive associations with the term diversity.  Many view its widespread acceptance as a sign of social progress. My research, however, examines the underbelly of liberal values like diversity by tracking how it is commoditized vis-a-vis a changing global political economy.  I explore how celebratory discourses about increased diversity in schools often obscure the fact that it pushes out low-income Black and Latinx students.  This speaks to the limits of well-meaning liberalism.  It explores the management of difference in a neoliberal era, which promotes a duplicitous inclusion that is ultimately exclusionary.

Another strand of my research examines the formation of alliances and solidarity among different racial groups.  Forming solidarity among groups is commonly thought of as a positive means of advancing social progress.  But when these alliances are based on notions of shared suffering, this creates a false equivalence between different racialized experiences, which undermines the work of racial justice.  I theorize the concept of thick solidarity as an attempt to forge alliances in ways that do not gloss over difference, but pushes into the specificity, irreducibility, and incommensurability of racialized experiences.  A current project examines the work of Asian-American youth activist groups that are allies of the Black Lives Matter Movement.  Their strategic alliance-building illustrates how to build solidarity in ways that are consequential and politically responsible.

My work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Educational Research Association, and Penn’s Urban Studies Program.  My research articulates with the anthropology of education, activism, ethics, migration, and urban studies. 

Education:

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Ed.M., Teachers College, Columbia University

B.A., New York University

Publications:

Liu, R. (2020). "POWER: PA State Funding is a Textbook Example of Structural Racism." The Notebook and NPR WHYY. Op-ed. June 22.

Liu, R., S. Fischmann, A. Hong, and K. Melville. (2020). "Spatializing Community-Based Learning: How a Critical Geography Framework Can Foster Understandings of Structural Inequality and Egalitarian Relationships." Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education 12 (1): 1-13. (written with students and community partner)

Liu, R. (2019). "Cultivating Cosmopolitans: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in an Age of Instrumentalism." Anthropology & Education Quarterly. 51 (1): 1-22.  

Liu, R., (2019). "Why We Can't Afford to Leave Race Out of School Funding Conversations." Colorlines. Op-ed. May 17.

Liu, R., & Shange, S. (2018). "Toward Thick Solidarity: Theorizing Empathy in Social Justice Movements." Radical History Review, 131

Liu, R. (2018). "Asian, Black, and Latino solidarity should come first." Hechinger Report. Op-ed. September 5.

Liu, R. (2018). “Dismantling the Barrier between Asians and African-Americans.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. Op-ed. June 8.

Liu, R. (2012). "Reclaiming Urban Space." Legacies. (12)1.

Liu, R. & Lui, D. (2012). "Growing Up is Activism." 20-minute, Non-fiction Digital Film.

Liu, R., Lewis, E., & Snellinger, A. (2011). "Editorial Introduction to Virtual Issues on Youth." Cultural Anthropology Online. 

Courses Taught:

ED 014: Pedagogy and Power: Introduction to Education

ED 014F: Pedagogy and Power: Introduction to Education, First Year Seminar

ED 046/SOAN 040: Race, Nation, Empire, and Education

ED 065: Qualitative Research Methods

ED 068/SOAN 020: Urban Education

ED 167: Education, Race, and the Law