Stephen Yang is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He studies the temporal politics of technological innovation, particularly the senses of speed and futurity around computational media and artificial intelligence. 

Specifically, Yang’s research examines the technopolitical devices that premediate futures in the present — from trend forecasts and design demos to regulatory sandboxes and real-time automation. He traces the paradoxes and frictions that emerge when acceleration and seamlessness are figured as the telos of technological futures. His dissertation explores how prototyping operates as an infrastructural logic, staging imagined futures of AI into plausible trajectories and aligning institutions to conjure, work toward, and secure such futures-to-come. In doing so, he foregrounds the ethico-political tensions between speeding up and slowing down, between speculation and anticipation, and between possibility and inevitability — while also showing ways to imagine and build futures otherwise. 

Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), media studies, and critical HCI, Yang employs genealogical, interpretive, ethnographic, and design-futuring approaches to interrogate how technological futures are imagined, materialized, and governed. His work has been published in the International Journal of Communication and Convergence, as well as in conference proceedings for the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). His research is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP), as well as by the Levan Institute for the Humanities and the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life (STPL) at USC. 

Beyond conceptual advances, Yang’s scholarship also offers critically oriented principles for technology design and policy. He has held research appointments outside academia, including Microsoft Research, Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), and Partnership on AI. He also participated in the Consortium of Media Policy Studies (COMPASS) in Washington, D.C., where he contributed to U.S. federal policymaking. Prior to USC, Yang worked in journalism and advertising at organizations including VML and Taipei Times. He earned his B.S. in Communication and Information Science from Cornell University.

Read more about Yang here: www.stephen-yang.com