Liz McKenna is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research and teaching focuses on social movements and left- and right-wing civic engagement in the United States and Brazil. McKenna is the coauthor of two books on democratic organizing. Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2021) examines how organizational leaders build constituency bases that successfully exercise political power. Her first book, Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America (Oxford University Press, 2014), analyzed how parties and campaigns interact with — and sometimes act as — social movements. Her dissertation on recent political terrain shifts in Brazil received the American Sociological Association’s Best Dissertation Award and is the basis of her current book project. McKenna was a postdoctoral scholar at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a graduate fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Prior to academia, she worked as a community organizer in Ohio and Rio de Janeiro. McKenna earned a BA in social studies from Harvard College and a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Her project, “Grassroots Organizing to Strengthen Multiracial Democracy,” will build a practice-based research network of civil society groups that seek to strengthen democratic organizing across lines of difference. A parallel research study will produce a metrics framework to better assess civic and movement organizations’ base-building strategies, collective capacities, and progress toward depolarization.
May 2024
