The Association of Community-Engaged Scholars (ACES), a student-led organization, supports the community-engaged research and teaching efforts of UW–Madison graduate students from any department. ACES strives to be a central meeting point and resource hub for graduate students professionally active in their communities, no matter their prior experience with community-engaged work.
Among other things, we provide professional development opportunities, online resources, project feedback, and networking events. A growing network, AGES is organized and driven by its graduate student members.
Every university resides in a community. Whether a small town or large city, universities are surrounded by homes, businesses, schools, community centers, theaters–people’s lives. Collaborating with citizens in these spaces to help improve them has historically been one of the primary purposes of higher education in the United States, yet is one we often overlook today.
Community-engaged Scholarship (CES) helps bridge this gap by fostering sustainable partnerships between university faculty, staff, and students with local citizens and organizations to address real community concerns. CES can be primarily a research (Community-based Research or CBR) or educational (Community-based Learning or CBL) tool, but is always a way to bring university resources and local, lived expertise together to create powerfully practical responses to real needs.
Social gatherings: ACES hosts regular social meetups on and off campus for the AGES community. Often featuring ice cream at the Terrace, these meetups are a great way to connect with graduate students across campus, learn about opportunities and events, and build community with other engaged scholars.
Podcast club: ACES hosted a podcast club to learn about and discuss community-engaged themes and organizations beyond UW campus. Podcasts discussed include: The Black Panthers and Public Health (by Sawbones), detailing how the Black Panthers advocated for medical research and created public health programs that sought to make life better for all black and oppressed people; and The Power of Experience with Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (Human Powered), a Wisconsin humanities podcast exploring the impacts of the 2018 flood on rural communities.
Disciplinary Mapping Workshop, Spring 2022: This workshop brought together graduate students from across campus to work through boundaries, resources, and opportunities for community-engaged scholarship across campus.
Join our Google Group to receive notifications and learn more about ACES!
Association of Community Engaged Scholars (ACES) Meeting
March 29 and April 26 – 4:00 – 5:00pm in Red Gym
Join other graduate students at our monthly meeting to talk and think about community engagement as it shows up in our teaching, learning, and research!
The Morgridge Center is committed to providing universal access to all of our events. Please contact any of the Graduate Liaisons or Cory Sprinkel (sprinkel@wisc.edu) to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
Assistant Director of Community-Engaged Scholarship Haley Madden: hmadden@wisc.edu
Graduate Academic Liaison Catherine DeMets: demets@wisc.edu
Graduate Academic Liaison Vignesh Ramachandran: vramachandr9@wisc.edu
Graduate Academic Liaison Jules Reynolds: jreynolds7@wisc.edu
Meet Our Grad Liaisons
Catherine DeMets
PhD Student, Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture
My research explores how we create just and sustainable landscapes and environmental stewardship of place through community and regional food system transformation. I work with UW-Madison Extension’s Community Food Systems Program and am building community partnerships around Wisconsin to better understand whether and how planning, local and state policy, and community organizations are individually and collectively advancing food system transformation.
Jalessa Bryant
PhD Student, Multicultural Education area of the Curriculum and Instruction Department
My research focuses on teaching and learning in community-based educational spaces. I am interested in the ways Black media, photography, tv, film, and music serve as methods of storytelling. I am also interested in opportunities to learn about the ways Black people refuse harm and oppression in learning environments. I believe working side by side with communities is required for critical scholarly work and transformative qualitative research.
Vignesh Ramachandran
MS/PhD Student, Department of Geography
My research considers the South Asian and Indo-Caribbean social movements in the wake of the domestic war on terror. I work with community organizations in New York City to conduct research on working class community organizing and abolitionist movements against policing. I’m also interested in anti-racist pedagogy and DEI inititiatives on university campuses.
Jules Reynolds
PhD Candidate, Department of Geography and Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
My research focuses on resilience and transformation within the farm-to-table and local food movement in south-central Wisconsin. I work with community partners Brix Cider and Black Krim Creative on our community-based project The Brix Project to critically explore social and material impacts of local food organizing. This research is integrated into a community-based learning course titled “Exploring Food System Resilience in Wisconsin Communities.”