Jiaqi Zhang
- Email: lwjz@leeds.ac.uk
- Thesis title: Compassion and law: questions about who, to whom, and how.
- Supervisor: Professor Jen Hendry
Profile
After getting my LLM degree from the University of Warwick, I went back to China and started an NGO to eliminate poverty in rural areas. I spent two years in two of the poorest villages in Sichuan province and Inner Mongolia. Our mission was to persuade local villagers to join the integrated villagers' cooperative organisation.
After that, I worked as a lawyer and worked part-time in the NGO because of financial shortage. After establishing the organisations and handing them over to the local people and governments, we fulfilled the mission and ended the NGO.
Research interests
I am interested in jurisprudence, more specifically, the relationship between emotions and law.
In the course of my work, both in the NGO and as a lawyer, I found emotions have played an essential role in decision making at an individual level. And in the most eye-catching political events in the past few years, we could see the influence of emotions too. For example, many scholars have pointed out that Trump's team used fear and disgust to promote xenophobia and won the 2016 election. In addition, when I studied theories about sexual minorities, I realised that almost all theories and reasons against sexual minority rights were rationally disproved by many scholars of distinction a long time ago. However, there are still anti-LGBTQ+ laws and regulations in the world. Then, some scholars have pointed out that the real power driving the anti-homosexual policies and attitudes is the power of disgust. There are people simply feeling disgusted about specific activities, so they want to ban them. In other words, emotion is the key to such public issues.
That is why I am interested in emotions in public affairs. All emotions are profoundly different from each other. They should be studied individually. And at the PGR stage, compassion is my topic.
Qualifications
- LLB (Law), Southwest University of Political Science and Law
- LLM (Advanced Legal Studies), the University of Warwick
- Certificate of the Legal Profession Qualifications, PRC
- Lawyer's License, PRC