Slow Care

The “Exploring Empathy Through De-carceration Programming” Collaboratory explored how public-facing programming influences individuals’ empathy and understanding of issues related to de-carceration and re-entry into society after incarceration. The group’s focus extended beyond how passive participants and consumers (i.e., those who attend events) are impacted to also identify how involvement in developing and delivering the programming influences empathy and understanding among those producing it. The collaboratory identified interns who developed and implemented Humanities-informed story collection methods to interrogate this issue. This work has potential to provide valuable insight into broader educational and social effects associated with experiential learning in justice-related issues.  

Members:

• Shannon Ross (Co-PI, The Community)
• Rebecca Konkel (Co-PI, UWM Criminal Justice)
• Ben Trager (UWM Center for Student Experience and Talent)
• Carl Fields (The Community)
• Jen Vega (The Community)
• Aaron Schutz (Educational Policy and Community Studies)
• Susi Gómez-Kennedy (UWM Center for Student Experience and Talent)
• Kimberly Hassell (UWM Criminal Justice)

Building alliances and solidarity across difference takes time and presence in a range of spaces in the community. The Muslim Milwaukee Project began as a community-university collaboration through multiple close engagements, conversations, and interviews with Muslim leaders and community members. Our whole project from its inception speaks to the importance of slow care in knowledge production: It took a couple of years of working with Muslim leaders to develop two demographic surveys. Our long-term engagement and attentive listening to community members, leaders, activists, and artists, and our showing up at major events in local Muslim communities, has built solidarity over time.

Our book, Muslims in Milwaukee: Placemaking, Belonging and Activism, was published in spring 2026, by the Syracuse University Press within the Critical Arab American Studies book series. In May 2026, we hosted a community-oriented book talk-back in an effort to continue in the vein of mutual collaboration, respect, and solidarity, and ensure a space where Muslims in Milwaukee can engage in and speak back to our book–our representation of a diverse religious minority with increasing social and political visibility and clout. The talk-back brought us into conversation with prominent members of Milwaukee’s Muslim community—Waheed Ahmed, Othman Atta, Amal Azzam, Janan Najeeb, and Brother Will Perry—and moderator Fahed Masalkhi, PhD.

Members:

• Caroline Seymour-Jorn (PI, Comparative Literature and Global Studies)
• Anna Mansson McGinty (Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies)
• Kristin Sziarto (Geography and Urban Studies)

The Critical Asian Humanities Reading Group offers scholars from a wide swath of disciplines and departments a forum in which to focus on recent scholarship concerning Asia. 

The Digital Cultures Collaboratory supports research into digital and analog games and other forms of online culture, by graduate students, staff, faculty, and alumni.

In the 2025-26 academic year, Digital Cultures hosted its fourth annual online symposium, organized around the theme of “Time & Digital Relations,” in keeping with C21’s Slow Care theme.

The increasing presence and accelerating pace of the digital in our everyday lives creates an open and ever-evolving challenge for scholars of all disciplines to critically respond to in their work. Be it social media, gaming, streaming, remote working, or the normative uptake of AI, all things “digital” now inform the ways in which people receive information, form and maintain social relationships, and come to imagine the world beyond their immediate engagement with it.

At the same time, the boundaries between ontological categories – design and use, rules and architecture, presence and pattern – grow less distinct amid these shifting forces, and social actors experience them always in and through unfolding time. They implement new rhythms in their relations with others, at times synchronizing with increased pace, at others aiming to (re)establish slowness. This compels us to revisit core questions about what it means to relate with and through technologies that have become intrinsic to the very texture and tempo of experience.

Reproductive Justice aims to create a space where researchers at UWM and reproductive justice community advocates in Milwaukee can work together to address systemic injustices.

In the 2025-26 academic year, Reproductive Justice organized Book Talk: A Conversation About Black Feminist Resistance in Trying Times with authors Nessette Falu, Ph.D., a Black queer feminist and cultural anthropologist with sub-disciplinary specializations in medical anthropology, Black queer studies, Black feminist studies, and reproductive justice studies, and Dr. Stacie McCormick, a Mississippi-raised Black feminist scholar and writer. The event was co-hosted with La Revo Books at Kuumba Juice & Coffee.

The Trauma, Truth, and Treatment (T3M) Working Group provided an interdisciplinary forum to examine how narratives of trauma and violence intersect with the medicalization of mental health, with a focus on fostering slower, more nuanced, and survivor-centered approaches to care.

Sharity L. Bassett is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Executive Manager of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education (EQI) at UWM. Sharity earned her PhD in global gender studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and has been involved in collaborative research with Haudenosaunee communities since 2011. Her book, Haudenosaunee Women Lacrosse Players: Making Meaning through Rematriation, came out October 1, 2024, through Michigan State University Press. For EQI, she created and directs the Indigenous Kinship & Responsibility Scholarship – which focuses on undergraduate research opportunities across multiple academic disciplines – as well as the Indigenous Felt Knowledge Festival and Artist in Residency program.

During this fellowship, Sharity developed multivocal and collaborative autofiction, a project she began in summer 2025 with EQI/MMSD interns and a workshop series at Ring Lake Ranch in Wyoming. With this project, she sought to engage a methodological innovation that brings together three components: (1) a method of co-laboring across difference that integrates intergenerational stories, (2) fiction as a tool of building empathy across difference, and (3) autofiction as developing stronger articulations of why and how we work across difference. This work focused on creating connected futures by engaging with difficult stories, fostering empathy, and facilitating productive conversations.

Katharine Beutner is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Previously, she taught at the College of Wooster and the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. Her second novel, Killingly, won the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award from the Wisconsin Writers Awards and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her first novel, Alcestis, won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and was a finalist for other awards, and her writing has appeared in Tinfish, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, TriQuarterly, The Toast, and other publications. She is a fiction editor at The Dodge, a magazine of eco-writing and translation.

In the 2025-2026 academic year, Beutner revised the follow-up novel to Killingly, her second novel, and initiated a new environmental writing project. 

Kidiocus King-Carroll is an Assistant Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies. A native of Milwaukee, he earned his PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His scholarly and public work has appeared in Rhizomes, AGITATE!, and the Gender Policy Report, among others. He is also the co-editor of the 2024 anthology Seditious Acts: Graduate Students of Color Critique the Neoliberal University. A scholar of Black Midwestern urban history and Black Queer Studies, King-Carroll is a founding member of the Black Midwest Initiative. 

In the 2025-2026 academic year, Carroll researched and developed a podcast that situates Black migration to Milwaukee as a lens for exploring slow care and its impacts.

Lynn has been a full-time faculty member of the UW-Superior Social Work Program for over 13 years, primarily teaching the social welfare policy and macro practice courses. Her expertise is in policy advocacy, community and organizational evaluation and change. She just published an open-source education textbook, Macro Skills for Community and Organizational Change. 

She has also worked as a human services consultant in Duluth for 17 years, leading program evaluation, needs assessment and grant writing projects. In this capacity, she has worked with numerous local non-profits and supported the expansion of community mental health services in Northeast Minnesota. This included a regional needs assessment for the Region 3 Adult Mental Health Initiative (2011, 2017, 2024), and the establishment of two Mental Health Local Advisory Councils (LACs) for St. Louis County (2020). 

In Superior, she is an active member of the Douglas County Behavioral Health Coordinated Community Response and assisted in the writing of a successful crisis response systems change grant. She is a lead for the Live Well initiative of the UW-Superior’s Pruitt Center for Mindfulness and Well-Being, which focused on connecting people with each other and with themselves and the outdoors. 

As a C21 Research Fellow, Goerdt developed a well-being innovation lab through UW-Superior’s Pruitt Center for Mindfulness and Well-being that supports change-making efforts on innovative ideas to address the most challenging barriers to well-being, prioritizing projects that support youth and young adults in northwest Wisconsin.

Yevgeniya Kaganovich is a Belarus born, Milwaukee, Wisconsin based artist, whose hybrid practice encompasses durational projects, wearable objects, sculpture and installation. Yevgeniya has received a Masters of Fine Arts form the State University of New York at New Paltz and a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Metal/Jewelry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Yevgeniya has been an active art practitioner since 1992, exhibiting her work nationally and internationally. Her work has received a number of awards and has been published widely. 

Yevgeniya’s interests in craft scholarship and pedagogy lead her to undertake curatorial projects, panel and symposium organizing, and other contributions to contemporary craft discourse. Yevgeniya has worked as a Designer/Goldsmith at Peggie Robinson Designs, Studio of Handcrafted Jewelry in Evanston, Illinois and has taught Metalsmithing at Chicago State University, Chicago, Illinois, and Lill Street Studios, Chicago Illinois. Currently Yevgeniya is a Professor in the Department of Art and Design, Peck School of the Arts, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she has been heading a thriving Jewelry and Metalsmithing Area with a graduate and undergraduate programs since 2002. 

As a C21 Research Fellow, Yevgeniya continued an ongoing project that integrates fungi into and around and sculpture, focusing on a review of literature relevant to the project, experimentation with wild and domesticated fungal material, and field and forest work to enable sharing the experience of the project with colleagues.

Nan Kim is Associate Professor of History and Affiliated Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches as part of the core faculty for programs in Public History, Museum Studies, and Digital Cultures. An interdisciplinary scholar of contemporary history with formal training as a cultural anthropologist, she is the faculty lead for the Science & Technology Studies Working Group at UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies, and she currently serves on the editorial board of Critical Asian Studies and the executive board of the Society for East Asian Anthropology. She is the author of the award-winning book Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide (Lexington, 2017), and her work has appeared in several publications, including Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (Cornell University Press, 2023),The Routledge Handbook on Trauma in East Asia (Routledge, 2023), The Journal of Asian Studies, and Arte Internacional (Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá). Her research interests include historical trauma, protest memory, visual and material culture, scientific dissent, political ecology, and the nuclear Anthropocene.

In the 2025-2026 academic year, Kim worked on a project about how narratives and interpretations that center the Anthropocene persist as dissenting forms of environmental memory.

Dr. Gabriela Nagy is a clinician-scientist working at the intersection of psychology and public health. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Colorado-Boulder, followed by a Master’s and PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). She then pursued her clinical internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the Duke University School of Medicine. Dr. Nagy returned to UWM in 2022 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. 

Dr. Nagy’s research focuses on improving mental health care access and outcomes, particularly for individuals facing systemic barriers to care. Her research lab investigates the social and structural factors influencing mental health, develops and tests psychosocial interventions, and works to implement effective strategies that enhance care delivery. In this way, her work straddles intervention science and implementation science. She utilizes community-based research methods, mixed-methods approaches, and human-centered design. Most recently, her work has been supported by National Institutes of Health and Advancing Healthier Wisconsin and has been published in leading academic journals. Dr. Nagy is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Health Service Psychology as well as the Journal of Latinx Psychology. 

As a C21 Research Fellow, Nagy sought to submit to publications, code recordings of intervention sessions, and leverage community-engaged methods to refine and optimize her work.