The Digital Infrastructure of New York City’s “New Chinatown”

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Friday, April 10, 2026 | 6pm to 7:30pm

25 West 43rd Street, Suite 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan

In-Person: RSVP | Zoom: RSVP

Prof. Yuchen Chen will present on their project examining Chinese immigrants and real estate entrepreneurs in West Queens, exploring their placemaking practices in the emerging “new Chinatown.” Prof. Chen focuses on how Chinese ethnic media platforms mediate these processes and introduces the concept of “infrastructure” to understand diasporic identity and placemaking. By shifting the focus to the materiality of digital platforms, the study reveals how they facilitate the circulation of people and cultures within the Chinese diaspora.

Project funded by the 2025 CUNY Faculty Research Support Program

Author Bio

Yuchen Chen is an assistant professor of Communication Studies at Baruch College, CUNY. She is an ethnographer of the digital cultures of contemporary China and their social and political implications. Her work looks into two main threads: China’s data-driven population management and the increasingly digitally mediated Chinese immigration and investment in the U.S. Her work is situated at the intersections of feminist science and technology studies, digital studies, and (global) China studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Media from the University of Michigan, where she received the Barbour Scholarship. Her work has appeared in communication and media studies venues such as New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, as well as social computing venues such as ACM CHI and CSCW.