Yukun Yang (he/they) is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Design and Media at the College of Arts, Media, and Design. He is a communication scholar with general interests in online communication, critical (digital) race and cultural studies, and computational social science. Specifically, he studies the collective and communicative practices on social media and how these practices uphold or challenge dominant narratives, power hierarchies, and hegemonic ideologies, with a particular focus on race and ethnicity. His work has appeared in top communication/media studies journals such as New Media & Society and Information, Communication & Society, as well as in computational social science/social computing proceedings such as ICWSM and CSCW.
Yukun is currently an affiliate for the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Center for Transformative Media at Northeastern University. He is also the recipient of the Centering Race Consortium (CRC) Teaching Race Graduate Fellowship, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) at Brown University.
Previously, he was a Data Scientist at the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. He obtained his master’s degree in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Research/Publications Highlights
Yang, Y., Dong, H., Welles, B. F. (2026). Refugee, Tourist, or Colonizer: Scrutinizing the Dramaturgical Performance of “TikTok Refugee” on RedNote. Information, Communication & Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2609777
Yang, Y., & Welles, B. F. (2026). Subversive Humor and Platformed Asianness: How Asians Use Neologisms to Define Themselves and Others Online. The Communication Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2026.2616143
Yang, Y. (2025). r/23andMe and my pictures: Platform Racial Spectacles as Collective Racial Identity Formation. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251344291
Yang, Y., Lange, R., Zhang, Y., & Walther, J. B. (2025). How Social Responses to Online Hate Messages Affect Hatefulness. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251396951
Yang, Y., Tagore, P., & Welles, B. F. (2025). “I’m so sick and tired of this”: Understanding the Roles and Scenarios in Self-Disclosure of Everyday Experiences of Racism on Social Media. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), 9(7), 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3757412
Yang, Y.*, Cho, A*., Nguyen, Q., & Nsoesie, E. O. (2023). Association of Neighborhood Racial and Ethnic Composition and Historical Redlining With Built Environment Indicators Derived from Street View Images in the US. JAMA Network Open, 6(1), e2251201. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.51201
Yang, Y. (2020). “Musicalization of the Culture”: Is Music Becoming Louder, More Repetitive, Monotonous, and Simpler? In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 14(1), 750-761. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v14i1.7340
Yang, Y. (2019). When Power Goes Wild Online: How Did a Voluntary Moderator’s Abuse of Power Affect an Online Community? In Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), 56: 504-508. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.55
Yang, Y., & Huang, Y. (2019). Dumping the Closet Skeletons Online: Exploring the Guilty Information Disclosure Behavior on Social Media. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 13(01), 663-666. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v13i01.3267
Departments
Interdisciplinary, Communication Studies
Education
- MS, Information Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- BA, Library Science, Northwest University, China
Research Focus
- Online Communication
- Race and Technology
- Critical Digital Studies
- Critical Cultural Studies
- Computational Social Science