Dr. Zhang Chen is Assistant Professor in Urban Planning and Public Policy at Duke-Kunshan University. Her research and teaching speciality is in the interplay of urbanization, rural-to-urban migrants’ political identity and action, and state-citizen relations. Her published peer-reviewed articles assess rural-to-urban migrants’ political attitudes; provide a novel analysis on migrants’ lifestyle and consumption behavior, and how these in turn contribute to anthropogenic climate change; and explore whether and how migrants’ preferences for environmentally preferable travel modes have been developed.

Her book, entitled, “The Power and Danger of being In-Between: A Spatial-Ethnography of Chinese Rural-to-urban migrants’ informal entrepreneurialism”, is an ethnographic exploration of the emergence and development of a community of Chinese rural-to-urban migrants, who mobilize themselves to challenge the dominant discourse of rural-urban binary, identify themselves as rural-urban “inbetweeners,” and defend a fluid, hybrid rural-urban in-between social position.

Before joining DKU, Chen taught at Yale-NUS. She accomplished a doctorate degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2019; a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of California, Irvine in 2012; and a bachelor’s degree in geography from Sun Yat-sen University in 2010.