Lucy (Quanxin) Yang
Position title: Ph.D. Candidate: Political Theory | Comparative Politics | STS (minor)
Email: qyang283@wisc.edu
Address:
University Club 333
Research Interests
Cybernetics, self-organization, autopoiesis, critical theory, democratic theory
Biography
Lucy Quanxin Yang (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is mainly interested in how science and technology shape the assumptions of political theory as metaphors and as epistemic frameworks. Her dissertation examines the emancipatory appeal of decentralization in the digital age through intellectual history and the cultural history of computing. Specifically, it traces how computers and the Internet have been imagined as living organisms and as self-organizing systems since the mid-20th century, and explores the cultural and political implications of such imaginaries.
Prior to studying at UW-Madison, she received an M.A. in philosophy from Renmin University of China (2022) and a B.A. in economics from Shanghai International Studies University (2019).