A student receives a Kheel Center Research Award

Workers’ issues have always been close to home for Yu Ann Chen’22, the most recent recipient of the Kheel Center’s Undergraduate Research Award for Outstanding Scholarship Using Materials in the Kheel or Other Archives at Cornell.

“I originally applied to the ILR school because my father worked in a noodle factory,” Chen said during a virtual award ceremony on Oct. 3. level.”

A first-generation college student whose parents immigrated from China, Chen was recognized for her thesis, “Shop Talk, Mobilization, and Protest: Everyday Sites of Resistance and Kinship of Chinese Garment Workers in Manhattan’s Chinatown.”

Stephen Kalko, Kheel Center Research Archivist, presented the award and held a Q&A after the ceremony.

“The Kheel Center team was impressed by Yu An’s application of primary source research, combined with interviews and a thorough understanding of the gaps in the current literature on the Chinatown strikes,” Kalko said, referring to the 1982 Manhattan walks when nearly 20,000 Chinese female garment workers marched for better wages and benefits.

The research project was an opportunity to bridge the personal and the sociopolitical for Chen, who now works as a fellow at Asian American for Equality, a nonprofit organization in New York.

“Doing my senior year thesis on understanding garment workers and conducting oral history interviews with my family who used to be garment workers and are now homemakers, it was amazing to relate history to what is happening now .”

“I also hope to shed light on the current agency of immigrant communities against exploitation,” she said, “like the garment workers protesting the end of the 24-hour workday and the Chinatown community’s resistance to a mega-prison in their community.”

Chen also described his research as “highlighting the humanity of workers through their everyday acts of kinship.”

The Kheel Center Research Award comes with a prize of $500 and is sponsored by the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives of the Catherwood Library, located in the ILR School and part of the Cornell University Library.

Applications for the award are accepted on a regular basis. More information is available on the Catherwood Library website.

Jose Beduya is a writer, editor, and social media coordinator for the Cornell University Library.