Dr Yi-Ting Chang

Dr Yi-Ting Chang is a Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space. She is a political geographer of outer space, researching the geopolitics of space environments and resources. She completed her PhD at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford in 2026 as a Clarendon Scholar. In her PhD thesis titled "From Geopolitics to Astropolitics: Space Engineering, Export Controls, and State-Building in Taiwan," she conducted fieldwork at the Taiwan Space Agency to explore how export controls and technological borders shape the daily lives of space engineers and Taiwan's space missions. Her broad research interests lie in critical geopolitics and science and technology studies (STS). She has been working on vertical geopolitics, focusing especially on power, the body, materiality, and infrastructure in the three-dimensional world. Her current project examines the environmental and political geographies of space debris and explores the possibilities for space sustainability amid geopolitical tensions. Her work has been published in Geoforum, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Territory, Politics, Governance, Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, and City and Planning (Taiwan Institute of Urban Planning). Her research has also been recognized through several awards, including the Royal Society for Asian Affairs (RSAA) Travel Award, the Taiwan STS Master’s Dissertation Excellence Award, and the National Taiwan University Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award. She served as a Research Fellow at the Oxford China Policy Lab and as an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. She is currently a member of the Supervisory Board of Taiwan Space Generation (TSG) and was previously a residential researcher in the Department of Space Policy and Law at the Taiwan Space Agency.