Yuchen Chen
陈雨尘

I am an assistant professor in  Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. I received a Ph.D. in Communication and Media from the University of Michigan. Before NYU, I was an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, CUNY. 

I am a critical media and technology scholar and ethnographer whose research lies at the intersection of digital studies, urban studies, the anthropology of the global, and contemporary China. My research examines two main themes: China’s data-driven governance and China's global outreach via digital platforms. 

You can find my work 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. 
My current book project is tentatively entitled Brokering New York City: Global China, Real Estate, and the Politics of  (Im)Mobilities. Drawing on over two years of multi-sited ethnographic research with real estate and immigration-through-investment (EB-5  visa) brokerages, the book offers a novel account of real estate development and financing in gentrifying New York City through the lens of Chinese immigrants and the transnational mobilities their investments create.

My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation,  PSC-CUNY Research Award Program, the AAARI Faculty Research Support Program at CUNY, the Barbour Scholarship,  Rackham Graduate School, and the International Institute at the University of Michigan.

Say hi: yuchen.chen@nyu.edu
For more details: curriculum vitae

Writings

Lu, A. J., Chen, Y., and Lin, C. K. (2026). Everyday Design with Surrounds: Rehearsing Alternatives Amid Urban Sociotechnical Changes. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13). PDF

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