A flurry of questions ran through Erika Rosales’ head during the college application process: Which schools might accept me? How can I afford it? Am I eligible for any scholarships? How should I answer the question of citizenship status?
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, time for the Wisconsin Book Festival, 28 events this week alone, both in-person and online, and Stu Levitan welcomes one of the featured presenters, and one of the brightest stars in the firmament that is the University of Wisconsin faculty, Professor Jordan Ellenberg, to discuss his NYTimes best-seller, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else.
Noted: Currently, De Pierola splits her time between her own business, a part-time job as a Spanish teacher at Thomas Jefferson Middle School, and her own studies. Trained as a lawyer in Peru, she’ll graduate with a masters degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School in December and then take the bar exam — the necessary steps if she wants to practice law in Wisconsin. Simultaneously, she’s earning a teaching credential through online courses from St. Mary’s University of Minnesota.
Quoted: Erin Barbato, the director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, said that the immigration status of evacuees isn’t tied to remaining at the base, but once they leave, a clock starts on their resettlement benefits, which are only available for eight months after leaving the base.
“Many people are confusing the resettlement process with the immigration process. So, when people are applying for humanitarian parole or for their Special Immigrant Visa or even for asylum, that does not need to be completed on the base,” she said. “The issue is people have now been waiting for a long time at these bases and they don’t want to remain there any longer, but many of them need a resettlement plan in order to get their life started in the United States.”
Dr. Jeung co-founded the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center after reading news stories about attacks against Asian American elders and seeing an alarming escalation in xenophobia, bigotry and violence in the United States resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Jeung will be the day-one keynote speaker at the University of Wisconsin-Madison 2021 Diversity Forum Nov. 2-3.
For today’s show, Ali celebrates the 15th annual Passing the Mic Intergenerational Hip Hop Festival with First Wave creative director James Gavins and student poets Azura Tyabji and Zack Lesmeister, who read samples of their poetry on air and share what it’s like being an “artivist” in Madison.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Athletic Director Chris McIntosh and UW Head Football Coach Paul Chryst recently showed their support for the East Side Youth Football Program, helping them replace the football equipment that they lost in a tragic fire. On Sept. 14, they gave the young people a special surprise showing up at practice at Madison East High school to present equipment and speak to the young people.
Extension will require people ages two and older to wear mask in public enclosed spaces.
Eli Tsarovsky graduated from the University of Wisconsin last May after majoring in biochemistry. In August, he was voted president of the Campus Area Neighborhood Association and he also works as the community health AmeriCorps coordinator.
Distance from family and cultural traditions is a common stressor for Latina mothers in the Madison area, said Dr. Patricia Téllez-Girón, a UW Health family medicine provider who treats many Latinas at Wingra Family Medical Center in Madison.
The nonprofit recently partnered with UW-Madison’s Waisman Center on a $330,000 grant aimed at removing some of the barriers Latino families face when seeking care. As part of the three-year grant, Padres E Hijos En Acción has hosted three informational workshops designed to hear the needs of Latino families. The project hopes to create teams of about 20 families that can advocate for themselves and create change in the health care system.
Freakfest 2021 will most likely be canceled this year due to concerns about the potential spread of COVID-19. Freakfest is a festival that typically takes place for Halloween in Madison.
The panel featured Camara Stovall, an elementary school teacher in the Madison Metropolitan School District; Angie Hicks, MMSD’s chief of secondary schools, and Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education.
Challenging prejudice, something UW Madison Division of Extension Program Manager Sarah Schlosser faces frequently, as a white Muslim woman who wears a hijab. “I think a misconception is that if someone’s in hijab if they’re covering that there’s no way they could be a feminist, there’s no way they can believe in women’s rights and I actually feel like if we believe that women have a right to wear whatever they want, that should be include being as uncovered or as covered as they choose,” Schlosser said.
Describing himself as a “young and impressionable” student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lau was just shy of his 20th birthday at the time. The scene would move him to take action, altering the course of his career — and his entire life. He abandoned his initial plans to study business, instead taking courses in a field he’d never before considered: law and policing. After receiving his degree and completing the criminal justice certificate program in 2004, Lau got a job in the UW-Madison Police Department, where he’s worked for the past 17 years as an officer.
Through her research, the University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor has learned how development, policymaking and finance worked together over the 19th and 20th centuries to “create a lot of the urban environment and the urban inequality that we still see today around us.”
Saeed said volunteers are already gearing up to help refugees start a new life. He is also recruiting volunteers from the Muslim Students Association at UW-Madison.
Littles in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and their families got to see the UW campus, meet new UW Athletic Director Chris McIntosh, watch UW football and volleyball practices and get a backpack full of school supplies on Aug. 21 at the Big Brothers Big Sisters Back to School event held in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Littles in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program and their families got to see the UW campus, meet new UW Athletic Director Chris McIntosh, watch UW football and volleyball practices and get a backpack full of school supplies on Aug. 21 at the Big Brothers Big Sisters Back to School event held in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison economics professor Timothy Smeeding said the rise in wages for low-income workers means it’s a good time to reassess their jobs and find a better one.
“For those reasons, the job market is in favor of workers right now and turnover is good,” Smeeding said. “When people voluntarily leave jobs, economists think that’s good, because that meant they found something better.”
Quoted: “It’s sort of like a race, where you’re only seeing people at the starting line and people at the finishing line but you’re not seeing how they go around the track,” David Egan-Robertson, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said of the data released every 10 years.
Noted: Stephen Young is a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor who studies basic income programs in the United States and worldwide. Young said universal basic income is not a “magic bullet solution” but an idea that has gained traction in the past decade to “address structural unemployment and poverty.”
Letter to the editor from Patrick Kass, director, transportation services, UW-Madison: Recently, we’ve had over 4,000 employees enroll in flexible parking options that allow them access to campus parking facilities without a commitment to purchasing a dedicated space for a full year. Combined with a robust bus rapid transit (BRT) system, these policies can build a network of transportation options that will allow our employees to access campus in convenient, cost-effective and more environmentally friendly ways.
Quoted: “If you look at the language of some of these bills, they’re really pretty broad,” says Diana Hess, dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s school of education. “There’s a lot of things that are in the language that would make it really hard to teach civic education.”
For today’s show, Tuesday host Carousel Bayrd talks about uncovering UW–Madison’s campus history with Kacie Lucchini Butcher, director of the Public History Project. They discuss some of the project’s research, including fraternity ties to the Ku Klux Klan, housing discrimination, blackface and minstrelsy on campus, and the UWPD.
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health will be the first site to host a new national fellowship that aims to make the doctor’s office more supportive of LGBTQ patients.
Noted: The fridge was co-founded by Taste Of Home Associate Culinary Producer Sarah Tramonte and University of Wisconsin-Madison Division Of Extension nutrition educator Hataya Johnson.
Quoted: “We used public data that is so often used against people to help correct situations or improve situations that might be barriers to employment, housing, education, childcare and health,” explained Marsha Mansfield, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Economic Justice Institute and director of LIFT Dane.
The UW School of Medicine and Public Health and the Medical College of Wisconsin are launching a $3 million effort to address health disparities in Wisconsin, which have been underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic.
From an ocean of green to a sea of red. It really is Christmas in July at the Deer District.
Maybe Frank Kaminsky will be present for both?
Though the Milwaukee Bucks playoff run will be over one way or another by July 29, the Deer District will still be a hot spot for local sports celebration, though this time it’s for a brand outside the city.
During the 2020-21 academic year, 14 Wisconsin third through fifth grade teachers took part in the Shipwrecks! Game Design Fellowship with PBS Wisconsin Education and Field Day Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout the winter, these educators met with teachers, game designers, researchers and maritime archaeologists to co-design a video game that investigates shipwrecks in the Great Lakes using the practices of maritime archaeologists.
It’s still difficult for Rosa Rivera y Rivera to talk about the village she grew up in. Decimated by the Salvadoran Civil War that left more than 75,000 civilians dead, she hasn’t been back to the land since 1980.
Mary Thurber, clinical instructor in zoological medicine at UW-Madison and Vilas’ primary veterinarian, said zookeepers continue to take precautions around animals potentially at risk of contracting COVID-19, including wearing facemasks.
Quoted: Doug McLeod, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said conflict can indeed be threatening, especially to smaller cities, and that the national attention that Wausau is receiving would “disappear into everything else” in a city like New York or Chicago.
“(Conflicts) can be more divisive, they can raise tensions in smaller communities,” said McLeod, who studies social conflicts and the mass media. “Those communities might look for scapegoats to place blame, (and) it’s often the person coming in from outside — like a journalist from New York.”
Adding to the confusion, the university earlier this month put out new guidance that would now allow for the Mini Marathon to take place in person. But Graves said it’s too late at this point to rework the entire event for an in-person format.
Noted: Comments from Kurt Paulsen, Kris Olds and Paige Glotzer.
Chris Walker is a renowned dancer and the founding Artistic Director of the groundbreaking First Wave hip-hop program at UW-Madison, and was recently appointed director of the Division of Arts. He joins us to talk about the power of art, and what is happening with art and diversity at UW-Madison.
In an interview from the new office, she said being downtown will help the Progress Center form partnerships with local businesses and would put the Center closer to many current clients, including those who work for or attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
After months of county-wide caps on gatherings, capacity limits and face covering requirements, COVID-19 restrictions in Wisconsin’s second-biggest county have come to an end.
Noted: The Wisconsin Latinx history collective is an organization created in partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) and the UW–Madison Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Program and will spend the next five years documenting the history of Latinx people in the state of Wisconsin.
Officially created in January of last year, the collective began with the meeting between Arenas and four other academics, including historian and UW–Madison assistant professor Dr. Marla Ramírez Tahuado; UW–Madison Associate Professor with the School for Workers Dr. Armando Ibarra; cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of geography and Chican@ & Latin@ studies Dr. Almita Miranda; and assistant professor of Latinx Studies at Marquette University Sergio González.
Quoted: UW professor Christine Whelan has shared her expertise as part of Dear Pandemic, helping people understand how to talk with others about their COVID-19 fears.
“We can see people who say, absolutely I will never get the vaccine, and a couple of weeks later, they change their mind. So, interestingly enough the research has found that it is much easier to change your opinion, than it is to change your behavior,” she said.
Not long ago, officials from East Side Youth Athletics feared they wouldn’t be able to continue offering grade-school children the opportunity to learn about football.
A scaled-down version of Casting for Kids returns to Madison’s four lakes on Saturday, with the Green Lantern Restaurant in McFarland as the post-fishing headquarters. University of Wisconsin men’s hockey associate head coach Mark Osiecki hopes to raise $100,000 for the American Family Children’s Hospital and the UW Carbone Cancer Center through the outing and an online memorabilia auction.
With nearly 63% of Dane County residents receiving at least one dose of the vaccine and new cases down, “we’ve temporarily reached a point where there’s adequate immunity and not a ton of new disease being reintroduced … but it’s a moving target,” said Dr. James Conway, a UW health pediatrician and vaccine expert.
“We’re getting really close” to herd immunity, said UW-Madison infectious disease epidemiologist Malia Jones, but “there’s no way to figure out exactly what it is until after the fact.”
Noted: Rawan Hamadeh of Brookfield, who just finished her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was at the festival surveying people about their vaccination status.
“There are a lot of rumors being spread about the vaccine and how safe it is,” Hamadeh said. “Our goal is, if they aren’t vaccinated and they don’t want to be vaccinated, to try to educate them and inform them that there is nothing in the vaccine that can harm you.”
Despite no immediate change in Dane County, the guidance is the “proof in the pudding” the vaccination effort is how the country returns to normalcy, said Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer at UW Health.
Dr. Jasmine Zapata’s mother and husband weren’t sure they wanted to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but after talking with her about their concerns they got immunized in March. Zapata, a UW Health pediatrician who is Black, is having similar conversations with patients, before church groups, at school forums and with friends and other family — pretty much anyone she knows who wants help making a decision.
On Saturday, the UW-Madison Class of 2021 will celebrate commencement in-person. The graduation ceremony is only for the students; parents and guests of the graduates are not allowed in Camp Randall.Area businesses say this decision is bringing a much needed influx of customers.
UW-Madison is in the process reimagining Library Mall — the area featuring Hagenah Fountain between the Wisconsin Historical Society and Memorial Library — the last piece of the East Campus Mall project from Regent Street to Lake Mendota. “I would say that the overall goal is to make this another entryway, or front door to the campus … one that is indeed welcoming to all people and helps open the university and its amazing events to everyone,” said Gary Brown, the university’s director of campus planning and landscape architecture.
A University of Wisconsin program that provides veterinary medical care and social services to some Dane County residents reports they are seeing an increase in homeless pet owners.
The police department plans to notify the University of Wisconsin if anyone is cited for illegal activity on or around April 24 for its Office of the Dean of Students and Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards to determine if further action is warranted.
UW Health has had a few “vaccine racial equity days” at its Arboretum Clinic on South Park Street and plans to continue holding at least one a week, said Shiva Bidar-Sielaff, chief diversity officer. Groups representing communities of color invite people to come, and interpreters and printed materials in several languages are available, she said.
Alder candidate Juliana Bennett says candidate Ayomi Obuseh’s claims were about her, while Obuseh says her post was not directed at Bennett.
Interview with Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association Director of Alumni Engagement Gia Gallimore.
About 17 years ago, Alex Peterson-Weber, who was about 6 at the time, moved to Madison from Boulder, Colorado. After graduating from Memorial High School in 2015, Peterson-Weber, now 23, spent three years as an undergrad at UW-Madison before joining the university’s School of Pharmacy in 2018.
“I’ve been hurting a lot this week,” said UW-Madison student Juliet Chang. Another UW student, Manola Inthavong, said she fears what happened in Atlanta will not be the last act of violence.
The demonstration, organized largely by the UW BIPOC Coalition, attracted a diverse crowd of over 200 individuals to advocate for the safety of Madison’s AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islander) communities.
The University of Wisconsin recorded its lowest seven-day average for positive COVID tests last week, at 0.1% positivity.
UW Health’s Emergency Education Center has continued to train front line responders for all medical emergencies over the last year, including COVID-19.
