Dr Yuting Yao

Academic Profile

Yuting Yao joined the Urban Institute in 2025 as a Research Associate, working with Dr Linda Westman on the ERC-funded project PLURALIZE. This five-year project examines just transitions in urban China through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates philosophical principles, historical analysis, contemporary policy, and the study of foreign investment flows. It aims to broaden the geographical focus of just transitions research and contribute to its development in the context of ongoing geopolitical transformations..

Prior to this, Yuting worked in the Department of Sociological Studies, where she collaborated with Dr Warren Pearce on the project Just Futures? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultural Climate Models. This project examines how influential texts, images and actors on social media (re)imagine the impacts and implications of climate change; and offers significant methodological innovation to researchers in the environmental humanities and social sciences by developing an approach to cultural models of climate futures.

Yuting completed her PhD in History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. Her primary research settles on integrated social science studies of climate change. She holds an MA in Science Communication from the University of Science and Technology of China.

Research Summary

1. Environmental Justice and Just Transitions

Amidst the deepening climate crisis, the concept of ‘just transitions’ reflects the aspiration to move away from fossil fuels while protecting the most vulnerable groups from disproportionate impacts. Building on this premise, the PLURALIZE project, in which Yuting is currently involved, seeks to identify principles of just transitions grounded in China’s specific cultural context and to examine how these principles are translated into practice. The project offers one of the first systematic efforts to investigate just transitions within and beyond China, responding to critiques that the application of environmental justice frameworks to politics in China has often imposed an Anglophone frame of reference, which may not fully capture (or possibly even obscure) dynamics on the ground. Through this approach, it aims to generate a more context-sensitive and globally relevant understanding of just transitions.                                                                                                                   

2. Cultural Climate Models

Yuting has been engaged in a collaborative effort with Dr Warren Pearce and Dr Carolin Schwegler (University of Cologne) on an interdisciplinary Cultural Climate Models. This project, funded by the AHRC and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, investigates how cultural forms contribute to modelling climate change. Recognising the significance of cultural modelling alongside scientific modelling in comprehending climate futures across diverse social, geographical, and temporal contexts, the project focuses on social media platforms, such as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter/X. The investigation delves into how images and texts synergistically articulate ethics and values, moving between ostensibly neutral (climate) facts and normative (social) values. The objective is to enhance understanding of the interactions and mobilities between models of climate futures (‘is’) to models for climate futures (‘ought’).

3. Climate change communication 

Yuting’s research on climate change communication is particularly committed to advancing dialogues on the representational repertoire of climate change between the Global North and China. In her PhD thesis, Talking about a Greenish Red: The State-mediated Climate Change Communication in China, she draws on perspectives and methodologies from STS and communication studies to examine how a plurality of climate ‘voices’ shapes China’s approach to addressing the climate crisis and its development dilemma. Her research explores a seemingly simple conundrum created by a contrast between, on the one hand, a total public and political unanimity on the question of the reality of global warming, and, on the other, the economy’s continuing reliance on fossil fuels as a ‘backstop for energy security’. It contributes novel insights and ethnographic data to illuminate how the Chinese state, businesses, the public sector, and the scientific community process information about the socio-economic risks and opportunities associated with a warming climate; and has led to an advanced comprehension of the Chinese approach(es) in harmonising (or not) short-term economic interests, political agendas, governmental planning and public communication in the context of climate change.

Research Areas

• Climate change communication
• Environmental humanities
• Science communication
• Science and technology studies (STS)

Publications

Yao, Yuting, and Warren Pearce. "The visual vernacular of climate change on Instagram: how modal convergence between image and text is changing the representation of climate solutions." International Journal of Communication 19.2025 (2025): 2221-2246.

Wang, Guoyan, Jane Gregory, Xi Cheng, and Yuting Yao. "Cover stories: An emerging aesthetic of prestige science." Public Understanding of Science 26, no. 8 (2017): 925-936.