SBGS Faculty Chrissy Lau Receives Grant for We Go Down Sewing: The Auntie Sewing Squad, Radical Care and Racial Justice During COVID-19
Congratulations to SBGS Assistant Professor Chrissy Lau on being awarded a $4,000 grant from The Albert Lepage Center, Villanova University, COVID-19 Grants for History in the Public Interest. Co-PIs include Mai-Linh Hong, Assistant Professor at UC Merced and Preeti Sharma, Assistant Professor at Cal State Long Beach.
We Go Down Sewing: The Auntie Sewing Squad, Radical Care and Racial Justice During Covid-19 is an edited collection of essays, creative writing, and photographs that openly engages with three main fields of US history, including immigrant labor, race and public health, and social movements, which have shaped how members of the Auntie Sewing Squad responded to Covid-19.
The Auntie Sewing Squad emerged in March of 2020 led primarily by Asian American women and other women of color. The Auntie Sewing Squad organized women sheltering in their homes into a self-sufficient, publicly funded, mutual aid group that labored to change public opinion around mask wearing and to make masks available to vulnerable communities.
We Go Down Sewing features five main essays, 15 creative writing pieces, and 50 images. It is currently under contract with University of California Press and will be published in Fall of 2021.
For more information on The Auntie Sewing Squad from fellow Otters, visit the CSUMB Digital Commons page featuring The Auntie Sewing Squad Interviews Oral History Archive. The archive was created in fall 2020 as part of a final project for Dr. Lau's course SBS 112: Women and Social Chane in the US, From the 1890s to the Present Day.