In Remembrance of Misti Yang

By Damien Pfister

“Chase the rabbit,” Misti counseled early career graduate students. Follow curiosity where it leads you. Don’t get so caught up in the academic productivity game that you lose focus on forging relationships through good conversation about ideas. Be open to the impressions that such conversations leave, the traces of which will shape your capacity to live well with others.

Dr. Misti Yang passed away on March 23, 2023. In losing Misti, we have lost a capacious thinker, a generous collaborator, a prolific scholar, a convener of people, a brilliant teacher, a thrower of sweet parties, a hilarious direct messager, a builder of communities, a fervent eye-roller, a warm conversationalist, a loving partner and friend. 

We were lucky to have her in our lives for as long as we did. To return to graduate school after finding success elsewhere was a very deliberate choice about how she could maximize her positive impact on the future. After graduating from Wellesley College in 2001, Misti flexed her range in a number of jobs: investment analyst, car salesperson, food critic, freelance writer, social media director, event planner, a jetsetting DJ. Misti worked at several internet start-ups in the 2000s, which gave her an insider’s view of the weirdness and profundity that characterizes engineering discourses about new technologies. By 2016, she had earned her M.A. at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she wrote a thesis under the advisement of Sara VanderHaagen titled “The Revolution Will Be Computed: Fantasy, Apple Computer, and the Ethos of Silicon Valley.” UNLV recognized Misti’s work there with an award for the Outstanding Graduate Student in Communication Studies. Misti did her doctoral work in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, completing a dissertation titled “Code Me a Good Reason: Joseph Weizenbaum and a Rhetoric of Ethical AI.” Her timely dissertation explored the ethical uses of artificial intelligence–as usual, Misti was ahead of the curve in thinking about how new technologies would alter patterns of communication. Throughout her time at Maryland, Misti developed the relationships with others that she prized most of all: with fellow graduate students, with faculty, with scholars of digital studies, and with the science and technology studies community.

Since 2021, Dr. Misti Yang served as the Mellon Assistant Professor of the Public Communication of Science and Technology at Vanderbilt University, where she taught courses like “The Rhetoric of Technoscience,” “Public Communication of Science,” and “Ethics in Science and Technology Communication.” Teaching scientists and engineers to think more deeply about ethics and communication was what Misti had returned to graduate school to do; she felt the privilege of being able to do so acutely, and her impact from a decade of teaching undergraduates will continue to ripple.

In a too-short scholarly career, Misti published award-winning scholarship on chatbots, artificial intelligence, and automation, registering how computational technologies challenge our theories of invention and judgment. While we mourn the loss of Misti and the brilliance that was to come, her work offers a strong foundation on which ongoing conversations about rhetoric, artificial intelligence, and ethics will build. 

I advised Misti’s doctoral work in rhetoric and political culture, and was lucky to have had a front row seat to her scholarly development. Misti believed that what academics do matters deeply to the communities we are embedded in. She felt like it was an honor to be able to do the work, and she made a great impact on every community she was a part of: her intellect and wit sparkled in graduate seminar, she was happy to discuss the different affordances of Twitter and Mastodon in a lecture hall full of undergraduates, she humbly accepted an Outstanding Teaching Award in 2019, taught a large lecture class on ethics in engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (!!!), had some early publication wins that made her hungry for more, and was recognized for her efforts to improve diversity and inclusion at the University of Maryland with the Outstanding Graduate Student Assembly Member Award. 

Misti thought that rhetoric was the study of finding good reasons to live together better, a meditation on how rhetorical entities find their grooves with each other, a pathway to building communities of care in which all might flourish. And so, the grief that we feel about the loss of this marvelous person-partner-friend-scholar-teacher is, as Misti might say, an indelible part of being alive. It will be messy. It cannot be sped along. It cannot be automated or outsourced. It can only be experienced; but in the experiencing, new relationships will be forged that might encourage sustained curiosity about the wonders of the world. 

We love you, Misti. You left quite an impression. 

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Friends and family established the Misti Yang Impact Award to recognize graduate students in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. Donations can be made in Misti's memory.