Born: Unknown, China
Died: NA
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Fire Dragon Feminism: Asian Migrant Women’s Tales of Migration, Coloniality and Racial Capitalism by Quah Ee Ling (2025), republished with permission from the author.
Helena Liu migrated from Fuzhou, China, to Sydney, Australia, with her parents when she was five years old. Growing up among immigrant communities in Southwest Sydney, Helena Liu developed a good understanding of migration, racism and settlement based on her lived experiences. As an intersectional feminist academic and activist, Helena Liu set up Disorient, a website providing important learning, teaching and research resources on feminisms, intersectionality and activisms. Disorient recorded 155,000 visitors from its launch on in November 2020 till its closure in June 2023 (Liu & Taylor 2024). Its mailing list attracted 1,804 subscribers over two years of its operation (Liu & Taylor 2024). Disorient project reflects Helena Liu’s tireless feminist labour in creating a supportive community for current and former marginalized workers of the academy and sharing generously original reflection workbooks for subscribers to work on internalized oppression and blog posts on topics such as intersectionality theory, introduction to bell hooks and intersectional feminism. In response to feedback from the online community she has developed around Disorient, she conducted two online workshops during the global pandemic in 2021 on ‘Surviving the white patriarchal academy’ and ‘Publishing scholarly activist work’ (Liu & Taylor 2024). Helena Liu’s Disorient provided a feminist activist community space and resource hub for a core group of early career academic researchers, community workers, leadership coaches and former university employees who are primarily women-identifying and marginalized in various ways to seek support, guidance and mentorship. The impact of Disorient was also transnational where, for example, ‘a Dalit scholarly activist community in India [started visiting the website] from mid-2021’, and ‘their members began regularly corresponding with Helena via email, offering suggestions for the reading list published on the website, and participating in online workshops’ (Liu & Taylor 2024). Even though Disorient has closed for now, the intersectional, anti-racist feminist scholarly activist ethics upheld by Helena Liu, author of Redeeming leadership: An anti-racist feminist intervention (Liu 2021), are noteworthy.