Dr Priscilla Liu

Dr. Priscilla Liu is an educational anthropologist and qualitative methodologist. She is deeply committed to conducting educational and social sciences research to advance equitable education and life for historically marginalized children and families and bringing about positive and actionable changes in educational policy and practice.

As an educational anthropologist, Dr. Liu examines issues on language policy and planning, language socialization, and the ethnographic study of education, with a geographical focus on the US and China. She is particularly interested in family language policy and heritage language maintenance.

As a methodologist, Dr. Liu incorporates a variety of qualitative methods including ethnography, autoethnography, narrative inquiry, phenomenology, and case study into educational research. The primary goal of her work is to scaffold for qualitative inquiry, providing a strategic and structured framework for designing and conducting educational research. Dr. Liu examines the ontological and epistemological foundations for qualitative inquiry, developing rigorous and rigid procedures for qualitative research. She also applies arts-based research methods to her work using poetry as a creative way of representing data.

Dr. Liu holds a PhD degree in Education with an emphasis on Social Research Methodology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to moving to the U.S., she earned a Bachelor’s degree in English and a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics at Northeast Normal University in China.