Meet the Faculty: Yiran Zhang

Yiran Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Employment and Labor Law

What interests you most about your specific field? What do you hope to accomplish with your research or outreach activities?

I’m interested in the ways in which law and policies shape the power dynamics affecting paid and unpaid social reproductive labor, especially the labor that is traditionally associated with “women’s work.” I hope to contribute to a better understanding of work-law-in-action from the perspectives of care workers and other marginalized workers. By doing so, I hope to generate solutions that improve care workers’ work and family conditions and structure a more functional and fairer care economy.

What do you enjoy about working with ILR students?

ILR students are very driven, always eager to understand complex concepts, take on challenging assignments, and experiment with novel ideas. They’re motivated by social justice causes and empathetic with disadvantaged workers’ struggles. Students’ energy and creativity make me look forward to class discussions and to reading their work every week.

Why do you believe it’s important to understand what you teach?

I teach labor and employment law and a writing seminar on the law of care work. In the former, I aim to introduce students to legal analytical methods as well as the institution of workplace law. Given that legalism and legal thinking has saturated contemporary policy-making and everyday management decision-making, I believe knowing how to think like a lawyer is beneficial to students with a variety of career goals. The seminar, in contrast, is particularly helpful for students who are interested in the skills of legal research and scholarly writing or the topics of nontraditional workplaces, gender, race, law and society.

What piece of advice would you like to offer students?

Find something that you love to do, become good at it, and maybe build a career out of it. The first step is as important as, if not more important than, the other two. Sometimes this process involves figuring out what does not give you joy and what is not a good fit for you. So don’t be afraid to try something out of the box or try something you end up failing. Also, don’t be too anxious – things work out much more often than we expect.