Saint Mary’s Scholar Yuan Li Tracks How Rhetoric Shapes AI Adoption

At Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga, Yuan Li—a faculty member for nearly 12 years in the Leadership, Ethics, and Law Department of the School of Economics and Business Administration (SEBA)—is examining how language and classical rhetoric drive large-scale institutional transformation, from 20th-century financial markets to 2026 artificial intelligence adoption, according to a Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026 profile by Steven Boyd Saum for Saint Mary’s College NewsCenter.

From Rhetoric in Economic Transformation to Silicon Valley AI Fieldwork

Raised in Beijing and educated at Tsinghua University before earning her PhD at the USC Marshall School of Business and serving as an assistant professor in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, Li joined Saint Mary’s in 2015. Her 2024 book published by De Gruyter, China’s Capitalist Transformation: The Rhetoric that Mattered, analyzed how ironies, metaphors, and rhetorical analogies bridged socialist ideology and market practices—a process she terms "reverse decoupling." That shift accompanied the 1990 launch of China’s stock market, which grew into the world’s 2nd-largest equity market behind the United States by 2014 and now includes 250 million Chinese investors.

Over the past 8 years, Li has applied ethnographic and rhetorical methods to the artificial intelligence sector, attending industry conferences, pitch competitions, and hackathons—including serving as a judge at the September 2026 MantisGrid AI Hackathon & Summit. Rather than treating AI purely as an engineering discipline, her research tracks how founders, executives, and policymakers frame the technology's risks and capabilities.

Executive Doctorate Collaborations on Policing, Silicon Valley, and Congress

Li also teaches and advises mid- and senior-level executives in Saint Mary’s 36-month Executive Doctorate of Business Administration (EDBA) program, which was established 8 years ago:

• Law Enforcement Real Time Crime Centers: EDBA doctoral candidate Greg Zschaschel conducted 2 years (26 months of ethnographic observation across 3 years in the doctoral program) inside a Southern California police agency's Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) to evaluate how officers, analysts, and technology vendors negotiate AI tools. Zschaschel and Li co-presented their findings at the May 2026 IACP Tech conference hosted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and Zschaschel is scheduled to defend his dissertation in October 2026.
• Silicon Valley Ecosystem and Congressional Hearings: Working with EDBA graduate Dr. Will Massy, who earned his doctorate 2 years ago, Li has studied organizational behavior across the Silicon Valley AI ecosystem. Alongside EDBA graduate Dr. Nate Mortkovitch, she is analyzing federal congressional hearings on artificial intelligence—noting that federal AI hearings expanded from only a few in 2018 to dozens of hearings and thousands of proposed state-level AI bills annually—and connects the inquiry to Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas and Saint Mary’s Lasallian liberal arts tradition.