Workers’ issues were always close to home for Yu An Chen ’22, the latest recipient of the Kheel Center’s Undergraduate Research Award for outstanding scholarship using materials at Kheel or other archives at Cornell.
“I originally applied to the ILR School because my father worked at a noodle factory,” Chen said during a virtual awarding ceremony on Oct. 3. “I was really passionate about understanding workers’ rights and labor justice and what it means from a grassroots level.”
A first-generation college student whose parents had emigrated from China, Chen was recognized for her senior’s thesis, “Shop Talk, Mobilization, and Protest: Chinese Garment Workers’ Everyday Sites of Resistance and Kinship in Manhattan Chinatown.”
