At a ceremony Nov. 6, Cornell University Library honored ILR School student Strummer Dunn ’29 with the Kheel Center Undergraduate Research Award, an annual prize of $500 for outstanding scholarship using research materials at the Kheel Center for Labor-Documentation and Archives or other archival repositories at the library.

Dunn (who uses “they/them” pronouns) received the recognition for “COTTON BREATHES BUT WE CAN’T: Rhetorical Consubstantiation of the Worker’s Body in the Appalachian Textile Belt,” their final research paper for the course Rhetoric of the Labor Movement.

“My family is from the Appalachian South, so I wanted to do something within that region, and I found through the Kheel Center’s website this magazine from 1970s called Mountain Life & Work with a September 1978 edition on Southern Textile Workers,” Dunn said.

“It was like such an incredible primary source document, filled with different interviews with textile workers,” they said. “It had poems, songs, and a bunch of reporting on the organizing that was happening in textile mills at the time.”

Using the magazine as a case study, Dunn analyzed how Southern Appalachian workers used persuasive language to create a sense of community and to mobilize their members toward common goals.

Specifically, Dunn used a method called “cluster analysis” pioneered by literary theorist Kenneth Burke to reveal patterns of words and phrases commonly used by the workers to represent their system of values.

Dunn discovered, for example, that the term “worker” was associated with words and concepts related to the fight for labor rights. “The WORKER clusters specifically with terms like ‘rights’, ‘justice’, ‘union’, ‘organize’, and ‘fair’,” Dunn wrote in their paper.

The awarding ceremony was held at the Kheel Center, and it was attended by Jim DelRosso ’99, M.P.A.’03, director of Catherwood Library; Haven Hawley, Associate University Librarian; Steven Calco, head of the Kheel Center; and ILR professor Samuel Nelson.

Calco has been helping students in Nelson’s Rhetoric of the Labor Movement class every semester since 2018, when he first joined Cornell as a research archivist at the Kheel Center.

“Labor speeches, statements, songs, and union ephemera are ripe with rhetoric, so this partnership between the Kheel Center and Sam Nelson’s rhetoric class has been fruitful for many years with students using our digital and physical primary sources in the archives for their final papers,” Calco said.

“Strummer Dunn’s rhetorical analysis brings the cultural significance of textile workers to the forefront through songs and poems that workers created to highlight the issues they were fighting for in the workplace,” Calco said. “Through these narratives, we understand the rank and file perspective of union workers and their contributions to working class literature, which are often overlooked in the arts.” 

The Kheel Center Undergraduate Research Award started in 2016, in honor of former research archivist Patrizia Sione, who led the Kheel Center’s public services for over 20 years, helping the Cornell and research community with access to Cornell University Library’s expansive labor and management collections. Sione had also been partnering with Nelson’s class Rhetoric of the Labor Movement class before her retirement.

More information about the Kheel Center Undergraduate Research Award can be found on the Catherwood Library website.