Yvonne Yen Liu Research Fellow

Our people — Research Fellow

Yvonne Yen Liu (she/her) co-founded Solidarity Research Center with two colleagues from the Survey and Research Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World in 2014. In addition to sharing the acronym from their old namesake, Solidarity Research Center continued the ethic of solidarity research which prioritized lived experience as a form of knowledge and used inquiry as a tool for social change. 

Yvonne Yen Liu

Contacta con Yvonne Yen Liu

Today, Solidarity Research Center is a worker self-directed nonprofit organization that builds solidarity economy ecosystems using data science, story-based strategy, and action research. The organization works at the intersection of racial justice and solidarity economies. Over the past decade, SRC has supported social movements including farmworkers, incarcerated workers, indigenous peoples, immigrant and migrant families, and developers of alternatives to racial capitalism. 

The framework that Solidarity Research Center ascribes to is resist and build: We resist the current system of racial capitalism and rule by the power elite, while we build alternatives that are directly democratic and based on principles of the solidarity economy. Two years ago, Solidarity Research Center embarked on a program to build powerful social movements: radical municipalism. The logic was that alternatives to racial capitalism cannot exist and flourish without large groups of people demanding that social rules and norms be revised, abolished, and transformed.

Solidarity Research Center hosts two projects for radical municipalism: the first is a popular education series, Municipalism Learning Series, that aims to broaden the audience for the theory and practice in North America. The second Los Angeles for All is an experiment to build a municipalist movement in the City of Angels.

In addition to her work with Solidarity Research Center, Yvonne is the Director of Research for the Maven Collaborative, an organization that centers race, gender, and joy in the pursuit of economic justice. The Maven Collaborative recognizes that our current systems and institutions are rooted in anti-blackness, racism, and sexism, and actively builds a society that addresses the needs of those most excluded by economic structures by unapologetically focusing on Black women. 

Yvonne serves on the boards of the Institute for Social Ecology, New Economy Coalition, Policy Advocates for Sustainable Economies (affiliated with the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives), and US Solidarity Economy Network. Yvonne was the 2018 Activist-in-Residence Fellow at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.

Yvonne is a practitioner of research justice with over 20 years of being a nerd for social movements. She is passionate about telling stories through words, images, or data to shift hearts, minds, and guts. Her writing has been featured in Colorlines, The New York Review of Books, and Yes Magazine. Yvonne has a BA in cultural anthropology from Columbia University and a MA degree in sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she pursued a PhD. Although a native of New York City, she and the city have parted ways. She is based in Los Angeles, California where the sun smiles down on her every day.

Areas of expertise: 

Radical municipalism, social movements, solidarity economy, dual power, direct democracy, prefigurative politics, alternatives to capitalism, militant research, worker cooperatives, solidarity unionism, class struggle unionism, intersectionality, Third World movements, racial formation

Honors/awards:

2018, Activist-in-Residence Fellow at UCLA Asian American Studies Center

2017-18, Antipode Foundation Scholar-Activist project award

Website:

https://solidarityresearch.org/

https://yvonnegraphy.com/