About Our Founder,
Dr. Danielle Lemi
Fractional research leader for pro-democracy, progressive organizations
Identity is an Analytical Lens
Dr. Lemi’s Filipina and Latina identity deepens her ability to understand how power operates within institutions and how identity shapes research projects, methods, and decisions.
Her background — growing up with parents in labor unions, working as a professional woman of color in academia, and seeing how unstructured research environments affect workers' wellbeing and relationships — guides the purpose and mission of Kapwa Sol Insights.
HOW IT WORKS
Expertise & Experience
PhD in Political Science
2 books published by Oxford University Press on race, gender, identity, and political candidate evaluation
Owned and led national quantitative + qualitative research initiatives designed to inform messaging and voter outreach programs
YOUR HOSTS & GUIDES
Our Purpose
The progressive movement benefits from complex research initiatives. These projects are often difficult to execute and lack the strategic systems and guardrails to make them sustainable and effective.
We create those systems.
Kapwa Sol Insights exists to address failures before they occur and anchor strategic authority at the intersection of strategy, identity, and execution.
Kapwa Sol
Our name represents a powerful blend of our founder’s Pinay and Chicana heritage.
Kapwa: a Filipino cultural value that reflects our connection and mutual responsibility to one another.
Sol: Spanish for “sun” and an emblem of the life we give to one another
Kapwa Sol is an expression of our futures that are inextricably linked. Our work with progressive and pro-democracy organizations helps our partners empower their communities and use their research to achieve a better, more equitable quality of life for all.
Doing Identity Labor
How Mixed-Race Politicians Disrupt Descriptive Representation
In Doing Identity Labor: How Mixed-Race Politicians Disrupt Descriptive Representation, Danielle Casarez Lemi provides one of the first book-length treatments of how multiracial politicians, across office, geography, and background, navigate identity in public life. Lemi develops an interdisciplinary theory of identity labor that explains how multiracial politicians perform their racial identities, especially according to their appearance.
The book assembles a rare combination of text analysis, discourse analysis, survey analysis, experimental analysis, nationwide interviews, and case studies of multiracial politicians, including a study of Vice President Kamala Harris. Lemi's groundbreaking multidimensional analysis shows that using racial identity for political gain is neither clear-cut nor ambiguous.
Sister Style
The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites
(with Nadia E. Brown)
One of the first book-length volumes to examine how the politics of appearance shape Black women's political ambitions, opportunities, and access to political office
An intersectional approach that centers Black women as political candidates, voters, and activists
Examines in-group dynamics and the politicization of Black women's bodies to understand who gets to belong in politics
Winner of the 2022 American Political Science Association's Ralph Bunche Award