Celeste Li
[email protected]

Celeste Li is an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying sociology, computer science, and art history. She is involved in AI policy research and organizing, and currently serves as Policy Lead for the Wisconsin AI Safety Initiative.

Her research focuses on how political elites use uncertainty as a governing resource in the development of national AI strategies. She is particularly interested in how uncertainty is mobilized to justify rapid resource allocation, securitization, and institutional coordination, and how these dynamics differ between the United States and China. Through analysis of public-facing elite discourse, she examines how narratives of risk, competition, and inevitability structure international diplomacy and sustain political legitimacy.

Her broader interests include decision-making under uncertainty, elite politics, interactional and comparative-historical sociology, political economy, and the governance of emerging technologies. She is interested in pursuing policy analysis and research at the intersection of AI governance, international relations, and sociological theory.

COURSEWORK

• Sociology of Developing Societies/Third World
• Sociology of Economic Institutions
• Political Sociology
• Contemporary Sociological Theory
• Classical Sociological Theory
• Methods of Sociological Inquiry
• Probability and Info Theory in Machine Learning
• Matrix Methods in Machine Learning