Sophie Xiaoyi Liu

Sophie Xiaoyi Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of British Columbia, specializing in the sociology of law, race/ethnicity, and migration. She examines how knowledge of and experiences with the law shape the ways marginalized groups engage with legal practices in the North American context. My dissertation examines pathways to justice for hate incident victims in Canada, with a particular focus on the experiences of Asian minorities. She argues that victims’ reluctance to pursue legal recourse reflects a strategy of legal disengagement from systems perceived to be structurally incapable of addressing their harms, rather than a problem of access to the legal system. She employs diverse methodologies to explore these issues, including survey experiments, in-depth interviews, and computational text analysis.