Lingyu Li is an Assistant Professor in Special Education at Lehman College. Her scholarly interest broadly focuses on inclusive education for bi/multilinguals with disabilities, as well as bilingual special education teachers’ identity and agency. Her scholarly interest is deeply rooted in her identity as a multilingual Asian individual and her commitment to inclusion and social justice. Lingyu draws from critical frameworks like intersectionality, disability critical race theory, and culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy. She primarily utilizes qualitative methodologies such as narrative inquiry, ethnography, and life history study in her research. One strand of her research aims to explore how structural challenges shape special education teachers’ everyday teaching practices and how they use their agency to navigate and reconstruct the boundaries of inclusive education for bilinguals with disabilities. Lingyu's current research studies educational policies used in a Chinese-English DL charter school to examine how DL policy address the needs of bilinguals with disabilities and how are bilinguals with disabilities represented in DL program guides and promotional materials. 

Lingyu earned Doctor of Education in Special Education and Master of Science in Special Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She sees the potential in collaboration with interdisciplinary scholars, local stakeholders such as teachers, community members, students, and families from diverse background to disrupt the system of ableism, racism, monolingualism, cultural hegemony and other systemic oppressions, and re/construct the education system with social justice and equity as its core.