Dr. Chen Zhang, Assistant Professor in Urban Planning and Public Policy, is an urban sociologist with speciality in the interplay of urbanization, rural-to-urban migrants’ political identity and action, and state-citizen relations. Her published works assess rural-to-urban migrants’ political attitudes (Zhang, 2023; Zhang & Quick, 2024); provide a novel analysis on migrants’ lifestyle and consumption behavior, and how these in turn contribute to anthropogenic climate change (Zhang et al. 2019); and explore whether and how migrants’ preferences for environmentally preferable travel modes have been developed (Zhang et al. 2018, 2016). Her most recent book project, 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 was a Lecturer at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and taught at Yale-NUS. She holds a Ph. D degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; a master’s degree in urban and Regional Planning from the University of California, Irvine; and a bachelor’s degree in Geography from Sun Yat-sen University.
