Yuchen Chen
陈雨尘

I am an ethnographer of technology and contemporary (global) China. Situated at the intersections of science and technology studies, digital studies, and China studies, my work looks into two main themes: China’s data-driven governance and China's global outreach via digital platforms. My work has appeared in communication and media studies venues such as New Media & Society and Information, Communication & Society, as well as social computing venues such as ACM CHI and CSCW.
I am currently an assistant professor of Communication Studies at Baruch, CUNY and a faculty affiliate at China at CUNY Initiative. I hold a Ph.D. in Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, where I received the Barbour Scholarship.

Say hi: yuchen.chen@baruch.cuny.edu

For more details: curriculum vitae

Writings

Chen, Y. and Lu, A. (2025). “Immigrant Tech Workers for, in, and as Crisis: The American Pursuit of Global Computing Leadership." In The Sixth Decennial Aarhus Conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR 2025), Aarhus, Denmark, Aug 18-22, 2025. PDF

Chen, Y. , Lindtner, S., and Sun, Y. (2025). “The Moral Economy of AI."  In The Sixth Decennial Aarhus Conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR 2025), Aarhus, Denmark, Aug 18-22, 2025. PDF

Sun, Y.,  Ankenbauer, A., Guo, Z., Chen, Y., Ma, X., and He. L. (2025). “Rethinking Technological Solutions for Community-Based Older Adult Care: Insights from ‘Older Partners’ in China.” In CSCW’24: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. URL

Chen, Y., Sun, Y., and Lindtner, S. (2023). “Maintainers of Stability: The Labor of China’s Data-Driven Governance and Dynamic Zero-COVID.” In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI’23. URL

Chen, Y., Lu, A., and Wu, A,X. (2023). “‘China’ as a ‘Black Box’? Rethinking Methods through a Sociotechnical Perspective.” Information, Communication, and Society. URL

Liang, F. and Chen, Y. (2022). “The making of ‘good’ citizens: China’s Social Credit Systems and infrastructures of social quantification.” Policy and Internet. URL

Lin, C. and Chen, Y. (2022). “The Myth of Data-Driven Authoritarianism.” In Reframing AI Governance: Perspectives from Asia. URL

Kuo, R., Chen, Y., Lin, C., and Avle, S. (2022). “Triangulating Race, Capital, and Technology.” In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’22 Extended Abstracts). URL

Kim, Y., Chen, Y., and Liang, F. (2021). “Engineering Care in Pandemic Techno-governance: The Politics of Care in China and South Korea’s COVID-19 Tracking Apps.” New Media and Society. URL

Liang, F., Chen, Y., and Zhao, F. (2021). “The platformization of propaganda: How Xuexi Qiangguo expands persuasion and assesses citizens in China.” International Journal of Communication. URL