UW-Platteville Students, Faculty, and Alumni at the 50-year anniversary of the WGSC Conference

Several students, faculty, and alumni from the College of Liberal Arts and Education at UW-Platteville received student research awards, attended, or presented at the 2026 WGSC Spring Conference, "Rooted in Justice: Fifty Years of Feminist Scholarship and Community Engagement," held in Madison on April 9-10. The conference was co-convened by the Universities of Wisconsin Women's & Gender Studies Consortium and the Office of the Gender and Women's Studies Librarian.

Since 2017, many UW-Platteville students majoring and minoring in Women's and Gender Studies (WGS) or taking upper-division WGS courses have won the WGSC student research award. This year was no different. JJ Irons, a senior majoring in Applied Engineering and Technology Management with a minor in WGS as well as Plastics Processing, was one of the sixteen awardees representing eleven Universities of Wisconsin campuses and was recognized during the conference luncheon on April 10. Irons' project, "Women, Gender, and Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville" emerged from his research interest in women and other underrepresented genders in university engineering programs and came to fruition after Irons conducted in-depth interviews and analysis. Irons has been admitted into a graduate program in engineering management at the University of New Brunswick in Canada and will embark on a new journey in September 2026.

Ava Garrard, a graduating English major, presented alongside a professor and another undergraduate student. Her paper, "Women, the Wiindigo, and Real-Life Monsters in Indigenous Horror," examined how two authors used the horror genre to foreground violence against Native American women. "Her essay does an excellent job showing how a popular genre like horror performs important cultural work," said Assistant Professor Hannah Korell, who co-supervised the project and also attended the conference. "This project helps to bring mainstream awareness to a critical women's issue, and Ava's literary analysis offers new and exciting insight into two novels that have made their way into the zeitgeist. I am very proud of Ava's research and her passion for social justice." Garrard will attend Lehigh University in Pennsylvania for a master's degree in English after she graduates from UW-Platteville in May 2026.

Jason Roth, a UW-Platteville alumnus with a B.A. in WGS, also attended the conference. He is now working in the School of Education at UW-Madison and pursuing a master's degree in social work. He was one of the award winners at the 2020 WGSC Annual Conference.

At the conference, WGS program coordinator Dr. Dong Isbister joined forces with two former WGS program directors, Drs. Melissa Gormley and Teresa Burns, to give a presentation titled "A Half-Century Journey of Woman's and Gender Studies in a Rural Teaching Institution." Conference proposal reviewers noted that the presentation highlighted a significant gap in the field of Women's and Gender Studies, the teaching of gender and sexuality on a rural and majority-male campus.

As the panelists pointed out, UW-Platteville's Women's and Gender Studies program started in 1971 and was the first Universities of Wisconsin comprehensive campus to have such a program. For many years, this campus was also the only one with a required gender studies general education requirement. The program grew through the 1990s and underwent substantial changes afterwards (2016-2025). Today, it continues to serve students, communities, and the field by focusing on high impact practices, collaboration, and intersectional and interdisciplinary research and curriculum development.

More information can be found at https://consortium.gws.wisc.edu/2026-wgsc-conference/wgsc-student-award-winners-2026/ and https://www.uwplatt.edu/news/roth-receives-uw-system-award-project-exploring-authentic-membership-marginalized-identity.