Thursday afternoon, a group of alumni, faculty and students from UW-Madison’s art and art history departments will read an open letter outside the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
They’ll be there to protest the mistreatment of artists during this year’s Wisconsin Triennial exhibition, which was the first Triennial in the museum’s history to focus exclusively on the experiences of Black women, femmes, and gender non-conforming artists.
Quoted: Alexia Kulwiec, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers, said she would like to see the federal government return to providing tax incentives for employers who provide paid sick leave for people with Long COVID.
Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, employers providing paid leave for up to two weeks to employees for COVID-19 could receive reimbursements in the form of tax credits, but the program ended in March 2021.
“It’s very disheartening to see that the policies that came out during COVID have essentially been reversed and undone, so they’re not there to protect employees today,” Kulwiec said.
Thursday afternoon outside the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, a group of alumni, faculty and students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s art and art history departments will gather in support of Black women artists.
Why Race Matters, a digital series elevating issues of importance affecting Wisconsin’s Black communities, returns to PBS Wisconsin with four all-new episodes.
In the premiere episode of the new season, available now, Fitzgerald speaks with University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Emerita Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings to discuss the history of Critical Race Theory, what it is and how it’s used in educational settings.
ore than 250 people watched as Ho-Chunk Nation President Marlon WhiteEagle raised the Ho-Chunk Nation flag over the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on Thursday.
The flag, located at UW-Madison’s Bascom Hall, will fly for more than six weeks this fall, starting with one week in September. It will also be flown on Indigenous Peoples Day in October and for the full month of November, which is National Native American Heritage Month.
What Amy Kind observed during her residency as a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston often frustrated and angered her.
She could admit a poor person to the hospital again and again, each time potentially costing tens of thousands of dollars.
“Yet changing someone’s ability to have safe housing — even getting an air conditioner for someone with breathing problems — was not something I could do,” said Kind, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
The plate of grits, with smoked trout, smoked ramps, and pine-needle syrup, was dainty and delicious. Seated across from me was a man named Daniel Cornelius, a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. Cornelius worked for the Intertribal Agriculture Council, which promotes Native farming. He expressed admiration for Sherman and Baca, and for their effort to reclaim Native cuisine: “The culinary approach has such a role to play, to get people excited about these foods, to show they can taste good.” Still, he said, “there’s this idea, like, ‘Oh, people have healthier food and a bunch of vegetables, they’re gonna be healthier and really happy,’ but that’s bullshit. The issues go a lot deeper. There’s a lot of intergenerational trauma.”
“Increasingly dryer and hotter weather conditions pose a threat to successful cultivation, and ultimately, the yield of agro-derived biomass feedstocks,” says Victor Ujor, assistant professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “With a near-global drop in rainfall, plant growth and yield will fall dramatically, if this trend continues.”
Quoted: Jack Williams, a climate scientist and chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Geography, explained that prairie plants, with their deep roots and soil horizons, can store carbon and mitigate climate.
“There’s a lot of below-ground carbon sequestration in grasslands,” Williams said. “So a healthy grassland can also be a good climate mitigation strategy.”
Ellen Damschen, a UW-Madison professor in the department of biology, echoed that view, stressing that it’s important because small, local seed populations are at greater risk of getting wiped out.
“If seeds move, they’re moving their genes. You want to allow population sizes to get bigger, and you want to allow movement between sites,” she said.
The board is expected to continue its discussion of hourly wage increases next week. Jennifer Gaddis, a UW-Madison associate professor and expert on school food programs, suggested increasing pay is one place parents and staff disappointed with the food options so far should focus their energy.
“There’s not a whole lot that you’re going to see improve in terms of a reduction in prepackaged foods or greater freshness or variety unless MMSD can attract and retain the labor to prepare those kinds of meals,” Gaddis said. “There are things that the district could be doing if they had a fully staffed workforce, and I think that if they were able to invest and build out higher-quality jobs, that would really translate pretty directly into improved meals for kids.”
A Columbia University study estimated that child poverty jumped 40% when the expanded child tax credit expired last December. “What the numbers today really tell us is that poverty isn’t inevitable,” said Sarah Halpern-Meekin, who researches poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It is in part a product of our policy choices.”
Today, a new exhibit is being opened to the public at the Chazen Museum of Art on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The culmination of multiple years of research and planning, the UW-Madison Public History Project exhibit looks to ask questions about the real history of UW-Madison itself. The Public History Project looks to give voice to a lesser-known history of UW-Madison through students, staff, and associates of the university who have been affected by marginalization across identities.
Twelve years after its creation, Wisconsin’s Equity & Inclusion Laboratory (Wei LAB) at the University of Wisconsin—Madison has a new director: Dr. Brian A. Burt.
Burt, a 2019 Diverse Emerging Scholar and associate professor of higher education at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (UW—Madison), was previously assistant director and research scientist at the Wei LAB. He takes the reins from founder Dr. Jerlando F. L. Jackson, who is now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education.
Noted: Danielle Nabak is the healthy communities coordinator for the University of Wisconsin Extension Milwaukee County’s FoodWIse program. Like some other experts, she prefers the term food apartheid to food deserts because of histories including redlining, economic disinvestment and freeway expansions that isolated marginalized communities.
“I think that really gets at more of the active disinvestment and the active oppression that occurred to create the conditions that we’re really talking about when we talk about a food desert,” Nabak said.
Quoted: Roe, which prohibited states from banning abortion before viability, allowed doctors to offer patients options of how they wanted to be treated. “Now that patient autonomy has gone away,” said Dr. Abigail Cutler, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“I’m compelled by my conscience to provide abortion care, and I have the training and the skills to do so compassionately and well,” she said. “And so to have my hands tied and not be able to help a person in front of me is devastating.”
Quoted: You should be concerned about your data privacy in general, especially when seeking an abortion, said Dorothea Salo, a professor who specializes in information security and privacy at the Information School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Be especially wary of most commercial search engines, she said.
“We know they collect and retain search data, including search queries; we know they associate that data with individual searchers; we know they share, aggregate and sell it all over creation; we know that law enforcement agencies access it,” said Salo, who uses DuckDuckGo but notes that other search engines provide similar benefits.
Quoted: David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said head-to-head races also provide more incentive for candidates to directly attack their opponents.
In an at-large race, candidates might hope voters will choose them alongside a variety of other candidates, so attacking other candidates could hurt their own odds.
“If you’re competing across all the candidates, it’s not as likely you’re going to be singling out one person for an attack; rather you’re more likely to be making a positive appeal to your voters about why you should vote for me,” Canon said.
University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Allison Prasch, an expert on foreign policy and political communication, joins Live at Four to break down how the British Empire changed during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign.
“We essentially have to respect her for her very long service, but as the monarch, she cannot be disentangled from colonization of South Asia,” Mou Banerjee, a professor of South Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told NPR.
That said, there’s a robust body of research connecting educational attainment to voter turnout: “A person’s level of formal educational attainment is a very strong predictor of whether they vote in elections, especially nonpresidential elections,” said Barry Burden, a professor and the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Barry Burden, a professor and the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, believes that in the United States, the registration step “is probably more of a deterrent to voter participation than we realize,” he said. “It’s a little challenging for most voters, but if a person doesn’t have the literacy skills or language skills to navigate that bureaucratic process, it could be a deterrent to even getting registered or getting a ballot in the first place.”
UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said party officials might not be aware of the research showing that voting changes have little effect on turnout.
At the same time, “even if the effects are small, elections are sometimes decided by thin margins, especially in Wisconsin,” he said, and “an election practice that affects turnout of one side’s voters by just 1 percentage point could easily change the outcome.”
Noted: The panel discussion, held over Zoom, was organized by COWS, the University of Wisconsin center that measures the economy from the perspective of workers. It followed the release last week of COWS’ latest State of Working Wisconsin report. The report’s key finding was that, for many reasons, Wisconsin workers have reached a turning point where they have discovered their potential power to improve the conditions of their jobs.
“It isn’t a time of retreat from work, it is a time of engagement and workers taking this moment to recognize the power they have,” said labor economist Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS and co-author of the report, as she set the stage for the discussion.
Mary Jorgensen, a nurse at UW Health involved in the three-year campaign to reinstate union representation at the health care system, agreed. “We’ve had deteriorating working conditions since we lost our contract in 2014,” Jorgensen said. “The pandemic just exacerbated all the problems that we did have.”
Quoted: Maxine McKinney de Royston, an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that tests were constructed as part of a system that has failed students of color. She also said tests aren’t completely predictive of future success.
“We use these tests to say, ‘Oh, now we’re in crisis,’ as opposed to saying, ‘Well, are we actually evaluating or assessing that which is important to us? Are we actually evaluating learning?” McKinney de Royston said.
This question is in “an evolutionary moment right now,” Asifa Quraishi-Landes, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies Islamic constitutional theory, said. Recent publications have made an effort to explore the many kinds of relationships and marriages that Muslims experience, whether or not they are recognized according to traditional Islamic law. “Tying the Knot,” “a feminist / womanist guide to Muslim marriage in America,” published in the spring of 2022 by a group of female Muslim scholars, including Quraishi-Landes, takes on topics ranging from mut‘a marriages—the temporary partnerships practiced by some Shia Muslims—to interfaith marriages, L.G.B.T.Q. marriages, and polygynous marriages, in which men have multiple wives, although the latter are rare among the estimated three and a half million
Are there drawbacks to this ambition? Last year, Ben Pettis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison argued that “overreliance on KYM as an authority on memes and their history can contribute to the homogenization of Web histories,” potentially obscuring or downplaying a given meme’s connections to harmful ideologies, for instance.
Carney told me that in some animals, purring could be a sort of vocal tic, like nervous laughter; cats might also be trying to send out pleas for help or warning messages to anyone who might dare approach. Or maybe bad-times purrs are self-soothing, says Jill Caviness, a veterinarian and cat expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and parent to a feline named Electron. They could even be a cat’s attempt to dupe its pain-racked body into a less stressed state.
Noted: A University of Wisconsin economics professor estimated an annual loss of more than 6,000 jobs and roughly $5 billion in lost economic output due to reduced production or closure of refineries in the Upper Midwest. Experts for the tribe dispute those findings.
Quoted: “The months of August, September and October are a period in which there’s a really rapid transition in the avifauna of Wisconsin,” said Stanley Temple, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus who specializes in birds and wildlife conservation. “Some birds that spent the summer with us are leaving for the winter. Some birds that bred further north during the summer are passing through on their way to wintering grounds further south.”
Quoted: The effectiveness of methods like goats, mowing and herbicides to control invasive species like buckthorn and bush honeysuckle is something that University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are studying. It’s part of a multi-year project that’s underway at two plots in Sun Prairie and Prairie du Sac.
Researchers are examining how each of those management techniques work when used alone or together, according to Mark Renz, professor and extension specialist in UW-Madison’s agronomy department. He noted a study by researchers at Purdue University in Indiana previously found goat grazing could reduce invasive species over the span of five years.
“So it works, it just takes time,” Renz said. “And the challenge as a land manager like the Brule Forest is trying to figure out is it worth it to do that approach with goats or is an integrated approach better or what works best for their situation?”
Quoted: “It’s a puzzling, probably multi-faceted problem, and getting a handle on it is tough, but it’s not just chimney swifts that are declining,” said Anna Pidgeon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor in forest and wildlife ecology.
“Birds that depend on insects solely for their food for the whole annual cycle are declining as a group. Swifts are not maybe a flagship, but an important one,” Pidgeon said. “They’re pretty conspicuous, and they’re conspicuous in their decline as well.”
As a teenager in the 1990s, Erika Rosales moved from a small town in Mexico to Madison. Then, as she grew older, her immigration status risked creating barriers for her education and work.
Rosales now leads The Center for DREAMers at UW-Madison, which provides resources to immigrants living without documentation across the state.
“I’m happy that I’m at a point where I can support others that have a similar story,” she said.
In October, Rosales collaborated with Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the UW-Madison Law School, to create the DREAMers center. It’s funded by a two-year grant offered from the university.
“We will never turn someone away if they are undocumented,” Barbato said. “If someone contacts a school and says, ‘I want to apply for this program’ — whether it’s law school or medical school — those administrators can contact us for the information before giving someone incorrect information or the runaround.”
Quoted: “A lot of the companies in the United States that practice in the renewables area have shifted a lot of their efforts to large-scale solar design,” said James Tinjum, who researches environmental sustainability and renewable energy at the University of Madison-Wisconsin. “The economics has, in the last decade, made it possible.”
Quoted: According to University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of political science Barry Burden, Republican voters in the state can be quite receptive to candidates who share Trump’s politics, but they do not always vote for such candidates when they don’t explicitly reference him.
“In races where the former president did not make an explicit endorsement such as the contest for attorney general, the ‘trumpier’ did not prevail,” Burden said.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center, detailed shifting racial demography and white suburban backlash to the Trump era as central elements to the increasingly leftward tilt of what was once a bastion of Wisconsin conservatism.
“I think the population has changed over time, and that’s has made them (the Milwaukee suburbs) more politically competitive,” Burden said ” There’s also some evidence that white suburban voters became disenchanted with Donald Trump as a Republican candidate. Voters who normally would automatically vote for the Republican candidate for president were not comfortable with Trump.”
When Martha Alibali, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, first used lecture-capture technology last spring, she worried that her efforts might suppress in-person attendance. Many students still participated in the live class, and they shared thoughts about the policy in conversation and end-of-semester course evaluations.
And since 2012, Barry, a 66-year-old who in 2019 received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship — the so-called genius grant — has been at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has held various positions and now does cross-disciplinary teaching on creativity. So when it comes to self-expression, to making art, it’s fair to say that she’s an expert. But in many ways, not nearly as much of an expert as your average little kid, which is something Barry has been thinking about a lot lately.
Despite the benefits of school meals, some low-income families may not apply for their children to receive free or reduced-priced meals due to the perception that doing so amounts to taking a government handout, said Jennifer Gaddis, author of “The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools” and an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology. Ending universal free school meals may increase this notion, she said.
“The zero-Covid policy is like adding frost to snow, worsening a trend of declining births,” said Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who believes that China’s population has been shrinking for several years already.
Noelle LoConte, MD, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the lead author of the ASCO statement on alcohol and cancer risk, stressed that there is no doubt that alcohol is a carcinogen, causing about 5% of cancers globally, and also that its use has increased during the pandemic.
Rozalyn Anderson, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, said while speaking to the BBC that intermittent fasting is better suited for us from an evolutionary standpoint. Giving our bodies a substantial break from the heavy lifting of digestion allows room for cellular repair and the release of energy from our bodies. Healthline reports that intermittent fasting can also aid in weight loss, reduce inflammation and insulin resistance, lower blood pressure, and improve brain function.
Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he found no evidence of a candidate filing by the Biden campaign on the FEC website.
At the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Laura Jacques, an assistant professor, advises medical students who plan to apply to an OB/GYN residency. She says she believes Wisconsin’s recently reinstated abortion ban — which makes providing an abortion a felony offense — will have a chilling effect on the program’s ability to attract candidates.
“There’s no question that residents are going to not come to states that won’t give them the training that they value and think they need,” Jacques said.
The Center on Wisconsin Strategy has been publishing its State of Working Wisconsin report since 1996. The 2022 report, released ahead of Labor Day, derives its data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau and other federal sources.
“If I was going to pick a single year to think of the best possible picture for workers in this century, I would pick this year,” said Laura Dresser, a professor in the UW-Madison Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work and a co-author of the report. “I see more consistent evidence of a shift.” Dresser is also an associate director for the COWS.
Another leading expert on forgiveness, Robert Enright, Ph.D, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a pioneer in the scientific study of forgiveness, defines the practice by three factors. The first factor is moral virtue. “Moral virtues deal with goodness toward others,” he says, adding that this is not contingent upon one specific religious belief, though it is part of many religions, including Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.
Currently, the practice is perfectly legal. It’s also coming under increased scrutiny. “This is a hot button issue,” says Suzanne Eckes, education law professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We’ll probably see a lot of litigation.”
Quoted: Beth Martin is a Professor of Pharmacy Practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As Walgreens continues to struggle with recruiting pharmacists, Martin explained there has been a national decline in students interested in attending pharmacy schools. She said the pandemic has also put a strain on the system, however, that time was also used to push the field forward.
“A lot of our community pharmacists innovated,” Martin said. “They made new connections. They saw new problems to solve, so I think if we all continue to use that frame of reference, that perspective, we can get through this.”
“We’re in a vulnerable spot in the pandemic where we had higher levels of cases just a few weeks and a few months back,” said Dr. Ajay Sethi, “and it’s come down a little bit — but not low enough to feel safe.”
The Latino community is the fastest-growing segment of the population in Wisconsin, but the number of physicians from that community has been declining nationwide over the past 30 years. Fewer than five percent of physicians in the US identify as Hispanic or Latino.
“We know in medicine that if you see a physician that looks like you, that understands culturally where you’re coming from, the health outcomes are better,” UW Health family physician Dr. Patricia Tellez-Girón told Madison365. “But we need to start growing our own because we don’t see that the society at large is really aiming for that.”
Walking down the hallway on the first day of school can be nerve racking for students.
“It’s a large transition between the freedom of flexibility of summer to more of the routine and rhythm of school,” said Dr. Shilagh Mirgain, a Distinguished Psychologist at UW Health.
Dr. Mirgain said anxiety can start to creep up and impact a child’s sleep, mood and focus. However, parents can step in before school starts this week by paying attention to routine.
As of 2022, an estimated 6.5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, an illness that robs people of their memories, independence and personality, causing suffering to both patients and their families. That number may double by 2060. The U.S. has made considerable investments in Alzheimer’s research, having allocated US$3.5 billion in federal funding this year. -Allyson Bennett, Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison
There are a lot of factors that affect how long milk is good for after the sell-by date. The biggest is whether the milk has been through pasteurization, which John A. Lucey, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research in Madison, defines as “the process of heating every particle of milk or milk product in properly designed and operated equipment to any of the specified pasteurization time/temperature combinations designed to destroy all human pathogens” in a 2015 paper published in the journal Nutrition Today.
Quoted: “We have an opportunity, actually, to sort of prevent this from becoming a long-term issue,” Dr. Dan Shirley, medical director for infection prevention at UW Health, said.
A recent study looked at the relationship between meth and opioid use with non-fatal drug overdoses in rural areas across 10 states, including Wisconsin. We speak with an author of the paper on who uses multiple drugs and how they can best receive treatment, Dr. Randall Brown.
Quoted: UW-Madison education professor Nick Hillman leads a research lab that’s dedicated to understanding how student loan debt impacts borrowers after they leave college.
“1 in 5 are clear of debt in 5 years, 1 in 5 struggling and in default within 5 years, so that means you have 3 in 5 who are kind of in this muddy middle,” he said.
Hillman’s research shows nearly 50 percent of Wisconsinites between the ages of 18 and 34 have student loans, but that steadily decreases among older age groups.
Quoted: In such cases, people have a hard time gauging what the majority believes because often the minority tends to be very visible and loud, said Dominique Brossard, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies public perception on controversial science, who was not involved in the study.
“We actually use cues around us to make sense of what’s going on,” said Brossard, so if someone lives in a neighborhood that is fairly conservative, they will tend to think more people are conservative than they are.
Quoted: As someone who’s a registered dietitian who also works in the dairy field, it’s ironic that Andrea Miller deals with lactose intolerance herself. She’s a registered dietitian and outreach program manager for the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“For most people, cultured products as a whole will digest and absorb well because of what they contain (natural enzymes) and the fact that lactose has been eaten up in the process of culturing,” she says.
Yet the political environment is slightly different in Wisconsin, another 2022 and 2024 battleground state to which Biden is expected to travel next week, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden.
While most Americans are now living free of face masks, one group — the roughly 7 million who are immunocompromised — are still mid-pandemic, the Guardian reported Tuesday. Dr. Jeannina Smith, medical director of the infectious disease program at University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics, describes the trauma suffered by organ transplant patients who lose their transplant when the test positive for COVID in a hospital setting. One such patient, “was sobbing because she said, ‘It’s so hard for me to see that people care so little about my life that wearing a mask is too much for them.’”
