About me
Victor Tan Chen is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies economic inequality, labor markets, social policy, and alternative organizational forms. He has published five books: The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (with Katherine S. Newman), which was named a Library Journal best business book of the year; Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy, for which he received the John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award; Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy (with Katherine Chen), which received the Joyce Rothschild Book Prize; the Handbook on Unemployment and Society (with Ofer Sharone and Sabina Pultz); and the coauthored open educational resource The Craft of Sociological Research: Principles and Methods of Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Social Science Data. Chen’s work has been featured in the Atlantic, New York Times, BBC News, Fortune, and NPR. He has given talks at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s LEED Programme, Cornell, MIT, and Stanford. He is the elected statewide treasurer of the Virginia PTA and edits In The Fray, a magazine devoted to personal stories on global issues.
