Yu-Hung Wang is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam.

His research develops an ethnographically grounded political theory of the green transition, drawing on empirical cases of indigenous environmentalism in Taiwan. Centrally, his work interrogates the conditions under which a just, democratic, and ecologically sustainable green transition might be realized without recourse to either strong state intervention—exemplified by projects such as the Green New Deal, which risk concentrating disproportionate authority in the state—or market-based mechanisms, such as green capitalism, which reproduce the growth-oriented logics underlying the climate crisis. His inquiry asks whether an ecological society premised on environmental planning and planned degrowth might instead emerge through eco-communalist forms of organization that eschew both statist and market mechanism.

Engaging with both the indigenous turn and the empirical turn in contemporary political theory, he examines what Taiwanese indigenous ecological practices and philosophies can contribute as critical interlocutors within debates on degrowth, eco-socialism, and the politics of green transition. Through two key case studies—the Atayal eco-tourist cooperative commune Smangus and the oceanic cosmopolitanism developed in the work of eco-critical writer Syaman Rapongan—his research aims to reconstruct the polyphonic development of Taiwanese indigenous political thought that has long been marginalized and forgotten.

Yu-Hung holds an MSc in Social Anthropology (2022) from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He finished a psychoanalytic training program at The Center for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR) in 2024.

Research expertise

• Social and political theory
• Political ecology
• Marxism and Anarchism
• Eco-socialism and degrowth
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Comparative political theory
• Psychoanalysis

Area focus

• East Asia
• Taiwan

Media appearances

• SuperY on YouTube

Research methods

• Qualitative
• Interview
• Collaborative ethnography

• Research project I