Dear
Donor:
In
2008, I established the Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize at the CUNY Graduate
Center to support socially-engaged graduate student research – the kind of
research that is currently under siege in the United States.
Past
award winners have written dissertations on topics such as the militarized
repression of indigenous people in Canada, US-Mexico borderland practices,
military occupation and resistance in Kashmir, geopolitics of queer Asian Americanness, social movement work among
radical educators, and peacebuilding through participatory archives. These projects have
illuminated not only the inner workings and long-term effects of state
violence, but also the possibilities of resisting it.
As
the prize enters its 17th cycle, I am asking for your support to
meet a fundraising goal of $5000, which I will match.
This
prize is personally very meaningful to me because its genesis was my mother’s death in
March of 2008.
She was a person of great intellect whose biggest dream was to be a scholar,
but her educational opportunities were foreclosed by colonization, war, gendered
violence, and authoritarian rule.
Understanding
the conditions of her life history had been my motivation for pursuing a PhD in
Sociology and a Certificate in Women’s Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, and
in doing so, my mother realized one of her dreams – to have a daughter with a
PhD. But her biggest dream of becoming an educated person herself was never
fulfilled.
I
was devastated by her sudden death, but in my grief, an idea came to me. A
scholarship in my mother’s name could honor her memory and give her a presence
at an institution of higher learning.
So
I started the Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize through the Center for the
Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center, and for me, it has
acted as my mother’s symbolic enrollment at my alma mater, her dream of higher
education come true. While
the prize began as a personal project, it has become something much larger, and
it feels especially critical right now.
We
are at a historical moment in which we are confronting a tidal wave of
repression in the US. Researchers and universities are being defunded and
surveilled, rational thinkers are being purged from the workforce, free speech
and information are being suppressed, and the communities that make up the City
University of New York – immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+, and the working
class – are being denied opportunities, their existence literally erased from
public discourse.
My hope
is that the Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize can be a small part of the answer to
how we respond – by continuing to fund promising young researchers who are not
afraid to talk back to the abuses of power. Their work matters now more than
ever. Please join me in supporting them.
With
gratitude,
Grace M. Cho
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