Yujie (Julie) Chen

Programs: CCIT; Graduate Appointment at Faculty of Information
Specialization: Digital Media, digital labour studies, platform studies, political economy of ICTS

Dr. Chen published Super-Sticky WeChat and Chinese Society. The book offers a succinct and critical study of the relationship between Chinese mobile cultures, political economy of the internet companies, and the rise of WeChat as a “super-sticky” app that integrates previously discrete daily practices. She also published the first study on the Chinese ride-hailing platforms and participant drivers’ work conditions and resistance in “New Media & Society.” She has presented works on Chinese on-demand workers and political economy of the internet industry in China at conferences like AoIR, ICA, and 4S and is currently finishing a book manuscript that explains how and why labor is marginalized, as embodied experience and an analytical concept, in the conceptions of (big) datafication and what we should do about this problematic tendency. 

Research:
Dr. Julie Yujie Chen published Super-Sticky WeChat and Chinese Society The book offers a succinct and critical study of the relationship between Chinese mobile cultures, political economy of the internet companies, and the rise of WeChat as a “super-sticky” app that integrates previously discrete daily practices. She also published several articles on the Chinese ride-hailing platforms and participant drivers’ work conditions and resistance. The latest article, with Jack Qiu, is “Digital utility: Datafication, regulation, labor, and DiDi’s platformization of urban transport in China,” which problematizes the concept of “digital utility,” a claim often made by the platform company to serve the public, and the platform’s deployment of datafication at both political and technological strategy. She is working on an article that explores food-delivery workers’ lived time and the emerging normative temporal order in the platform-mediated on-demand service. She has presented works on Chinese on-demand workers and political economy of the internet industry in China at conferences like AoIR, ICA, and 4S and is currently finishing a book manuscript that explains how and why labor is marginalized, as embodied experience and an analytical concept, in the conceptions of (big) datafication and what we should do about this problematic tendency.