Dr. Guo Chen

Faculty Urban-Economic Geography

• Associate Professor

• Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences
• Global Urban Studies

• Geography Building
• 673 Auditorium Road, Room 211
• East Lansing, MI 48824
• 517-432-4747
• guochen@msu.edu

LINKS

Guo Chen Personal Website: https://people.geo.msu.edu/guochen

Guo [pronunciation link]

AREA OF STUDY

BIOGRAPHY

Guo Chen, Ph.D. (she/her), is an Associate Professor in Geography and Global Urban Studies in the College of Social Science, an affiliate with the Environmental Science and Policy Program, the Asian Studies Center, and the Gender in a Global Context Center (GenCen), and a core faculty member of the Asian Pacific American Studies Program at Michigan State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the Pennsylvania State University, and a M.S. degree and a B.S. degree in Geography and Regional Planning from Nanjing University. Guo is a recipient of a number of prestigious awards in research, teaching, leadership, and service, including a prestigious Wilson Center Fellowship (2017–2018), an AAG specialty group outstanding service award (2020), and several university-wide awards and distinctions. She is a recipient of the College of Social Science–Integrative Studies in Social Science Teaching Excellence Award (2010) and a university Lilly Fellow for faculty leadership and teaching excellence/innovation (2022–2023). Her recent awards include an MSU GenCen Inspiration Award-Professional Achievement Award in 2023 (a prestigious recognition of an individual each year whose unique impactful passion, inclusive action, and influence make outstanding contributions to gender equity and social justice, positively influencing the culture of Michigan State University) and an Outstanding Women of Color Award–Trailblazer Award from WOCC in 2024.  Guo is the inaugural Editor of Human Geography/Nature and Society as a Co-Editor-in-Chief for The Professional Geographer, a journal of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). She has served as a college-elected Faculty Senator representing the College of Social Science (2023–) on Faculty Senate/University Council and a university all-faculty-elected At-Large Member on the Steering Committee (2024–) at MSU.

Editor of two books and four special issues, Guo is a human geographer with broad interests in urban, economic, critical, and environmental areas. She is also a teacher scholar and public intellectual who has authored and co-authored 60 publications with a focus on inequality, urban poverty, social and environmental justice, housing rights, housing for the poor, slums, migrants, urbanization and land use, and urban and regional governance, including peer-reviewed articles and edited issues appearing in PLoS ONE, Scientific Reports, The Professional Geographer, Environment and Planning A, Sustainability, Urban Geography, Urban Studies, Cities, Habitat International, Environmental Management, and many other journals. She is co-editor of the book Locating Right to the City in the Global South (Routledge 2013). Guo is the lead editor of the “genre-setting,” comprehensive edited book How to Foster DEI and Justice in Geography: Theory, Praxis, and Shaping our Future (E Elgar 2024). She is the initiator and editor of two Focus Issues for The Professional Geographer titled “Hidden Geographies II: Cities” (forthcoming 2025) and  “Hidden Geographies: Migration, Intersectionality, and Social Justice in a Global Contemporaneous Space” (issue 1 of 2023); the latter features research articles on race, gender, ethnicity, class, nationality, citizenship, and social and environmental justice, by ten diverse scholars around the world. She is also co-editor of Special Issue “Interrogating unequal rights to the Chinese city” for Environment and Planning A  in 2012 (based on her initiated sessions at the AAG meeting as an early-career scholar). In addition, she is editor of a recent Special Issue “Global social and environmental justice: Intersections and dialogues” for Sustainability. Her publications also include book chapters and creative products. Her scholarship and collaborative research have been funded by the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation (DDRI), the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Mellon Foundation-funded Urban China Research Network, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and various MSU awards (IRGP–New Faculty Grant, CASID, HARP, DFI, Honors College, and Asian Studies–Dr. Delia Koo Awards).

Dr. Chen served as elected secretary, vice-chair, and chair of the China Geography Specialty Group (CGSG) of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), 2012-2015 and received an Outstanding Service Award in 2020 from the Specialty Group. She also received the distinction to be selected as a candidate for election for National Councilor of the AAG in 2023. Recently, she has been involved in AAG’s Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) subcommittee work and its inaugural working group on Research Partnerships for Targeted Mentoring Networks. She has served on the editorial boards of The Professional Geographer and Journal of Urban Affairs and has served as an ad hoc reviewer for close to 50 academic journals and many programs. Her academic leadership also includes over 130 organized sessions, invited talks, and conference presentations.  Her public scholarship includes interviews, op-eds, and webinars. 

At MSU, her countless elected and appointed leadership roles include serving as a College-Elected Faculty Senator representing the College of Social Science on the Faculty Senate, being a university all faculty-elected At-Large Member on the Steering Committee, serving as an Elected Faculty Representative on the Asian Studies Advisory Council (2019–21), being a President-Appointed faculty member (2021–24) and Elected Chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Disability Issues (2021–22), being a Graduate Students-Elected Faculty Mentor of the Supporting Women in Geography group, being a founding member of the Diversity Committee (2020–21) and Appointed Chair of the first standing DEI committee in her department (2021–22), continuously serving on various committees for the Asian Pacific American Studies programs and APIDA/A community, and serving on the Urban Environment Committee of ESPP (2017–18). She has also served on many department search, faculty and staff awards, graduate admission/funding, Economic Geography major, and other committees.

Mentoring and teaching for engaged learning is integral to her scholarship. As a teacher scholar, she has promoted a creative pedagogy with a critical engagement of visuals, documentaries, and simulations in nearly all her over ten different undergraduate and graduate courses taught/designed in more than a decade, including an exit/capstone course for MSU Asian Studies Minor and a recent Honors Research Seminar on global slums. Her undergraduate, graduate, and seminar courses cover a broad range of topics from economic geography, urban geography, globalization, poverty and inequality, migration and slums, and people and environment, to theories and methods in geography, geography of Asia-Pacific, and China and globalization, in small, large, and Honors sections, and as capstone courses. She has mentored close to 40 graduate students and international visiting scholars (as mentor, informal mentor, or committee member), in addition to many undergraduate students and interns.

She accepts graduate students starting Fall 2026.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Dr. Chen’s prior research has focused on the dynamics, spatial manifestations and spatiality, and the social and environmental complexities of rapid urban transformations and their impacts and implications for disadvantaged groups in China, Global South, and emerging countries through an integrative and critical lens.  In particular, her work has explored these broad themes: 1) theorizing the nexus of urbanization, poverty, inequality, and social justice in emerging urban contexts from an historical and geographical perspective; 2) understanding inequality and inequities on multiple scales such as within and across cities as well as between social groups and identifying the structural/institutional bias and structures shaping inequalities and social injustice, i.e., through studies on housing differentiation and rights and housing for the poor; 3) visualizing the hidden/changing landscape of urban poverty, deprivation, and exclusion of migrants and other vulnerable groups; and 4) evaluating and critiquing state, city-region, and community governance and policies that impact the poor and the marginalized.

Her recent work has also included combining deep field knowledge with qualitative and creative methods to investigate the hidden intersectional geographies of inequity, exclusions, and social justice for rural-urban migrants and other groups based on long-term independent and collaborative research on poverty, informal recycling, waste geographies, migrants, and hidden slums in the Global South.

Trained as an urban and economic geographer, planner, and spatial analyst, Guo has employed a mixed methodology involving social theories and integrated quantitative and qualitative approaches that include intensive field work, surveys and interviews, archival research, and analyses of a combination of census, socioeconomic statistics, survey and interview data, remote sensing, and land-use data.  She has a long-term interest in critically engaging with visual materials to gain insights into the socio-spatial, economic, and social justice and environmental justice dimensions of rapid urban changes and urban transformations. Guo likely authored the first geography graduate thesis (in Chinese language) documenting urban poverty in a post-reform Chinese city based on extensive fieldwork when she was a master’s student. 

Current and previous projects: 

Hidden geographies, social justice and the city in a global context

Migrants, informal recycling, and transnational waste geographies

Urban resilience in context

Slum geographies in mainland China, Hong Kong, and the Global South

Urbanization, inequality, and social and environmental justice in China and in a transnational or global context 

The changing landscape of urban poverty in China before and since reform

Other projects on topics ranging from globalization, city-region and neighborhood governance, emerging financial centers to urban expansion and inequality, migrants and rural-urban migration, housing rights, housing differentiation, housing for the poor, and right to the city in China and the Global South

DEIJ & Theory, Praxis, and Future of Geography / Asian and Asian American Geographies