Misti Yang was Mellon Assistant Professor of the Public Communication of Science and Technology at Vanderbilt University. Her current book manuscript, an intellectual biography of Joseph Weizenbaum, articulates how the practices of rhetoric can inform ethics in engineering, specifically the development of artificial intelligence. In addition to the public communication of science, technology, and engineering, she wrote and taught about ethics, public speaking, argumentation, and rhetorical criticism.

Her interest in the rhetoric of engineering started while working for Silicon Valley startups, including Yelp. She also worked as a freelance writer specializing in technology stories, travel pieces, and general interest stories. She had experience in content creation, social media, event planning, and PR.

 
 

Academic Publications

Journal Articles

Carter, Jonathan S. and Yang, Misti. “Neo-Luddism and the Technical Commons.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Forthcoming.

Yang, Misti. “Phantastic, Impressive Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 54, no. 4 (2021): 374-396. 

Salzano, Matthew, and Yang, Misti. “Going Off Scripts: Emotional Labor and Technoliberal Rhetoric.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, (2021): 1–14.

Yang, Misti. “Defending Cyberspace: Reexamining Security Metaphors in the Internet Era.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs. Forthcoming. 

Yang, Misti. “Painful Conversations: Therapeutic Chatbots and Public Capacities.” Communication and the Public. (August 2020): https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047320950636. (Open Access)

Pfister, Damien Smith and Misti Yang. “Five Theses on Technoliberalism and the Networked Public Sphere.” Communication and the Public. 3, no. 3 (2018): 247–262. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047318794963. 

Public Scholarship

Yang, Misti. “💎 👐 Are Forever: GameStop and The 🚀  Pathologics of Mobs.”Digital Doxa. March 29, 2021.

Yang, Misti. “#Engineering: A Data Story.” Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, August 27, 2018.

Book Reviews

Yang, Misti. Review of Rhetorical Machines: Writing, Code, and Computational Ethics, edited by John Jones and Lavinia Hirsu. Digital Doxa. November 25, 2019.

Yang, Misti. Review of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, by Antonio García Martínez. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 39, no. 2 (April–June 2017): 9. https://doi.org/10.1353/ahc.2017.0009.