Forty years ago, in 1985, the Wisconsin Idea Seminar emerged out of the commitment to introduce new faculty and staff to the people and places of Wisconsin. The inaugural route charted a path through the state, crisscrossing rivers, forests, rolling hills and prairies. The seed that was planted forty years ago has grown into an annual journey, an opportunity to honor the Wisconsin Idea and an invitation to faculty and staff to extend and deepen their roots in the upper Midwest.
The Wisconsin Idea Seminar is now a tradition and over the decades more than 1,300 Seminar alumni have intentionally paused their daily lives to make the five-day journey through the state to focus on the social and cultural contexts that shape the lives of Wisconsinites, including current and future students of the university. Seminar alumni have seen first hand the ways that our work at the university can be animated by respect, reciprocity and responsibility to people, land and water.
In May, the 2025 Wisconsin Idea Seminar set off on the FOREST + RIVER journey to follow a circular path around Wisconsin, focusing on forest ecosystems, sustainability, entrepreneurship, health, creative placemaking and migration. They considered how rivers, forests and people are interconnected and depend on each other.
Woven through these themes were threads of memory, ancestors, time, balance, home, foraging, growth and hope. We met Menominee language educators who spoke of their community’s collective memory that spans 600 generations. We met Hmong farmers who are marking 50 years of settlement in Wisconsin, and who connect the past, present and future by cultivating plots of garlic, scarlet eggplant and culturally significant herbs in rural Wausau. With the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute we met family members who are caring for loved ones who are living with dementia, and we experienced first hand how music mobilizes memory and restores the spirit. We met high school students who saw an absence in the historical narrative and sought a collaboration with the Wisconsin Latinx History Collective and the Wisconsin Historical Society to collect oral histories from their neighbors. We met grandmothers, like Bonnie McKiernan and Zakiya Courtney, who are repositories and conduits of knowledge and love—who bridge eras and geographies, and who are actively working to sustain and care for their communities.
We met UW alumni at each stop, Badgers who are committed to the wellbeing of their communities and who continue to strengthen relations between the university and their local communities to advance research, entrepreneurship and collaborations that are guided by community priorities.
Our Seminar travelers were a curious and thoughtful bunch and included a forensic toxicologist, a dancer, a chemist whose career was inspired by a periodic table place mat, a licensed pilot and many others. An attribute that all forty participants shared was curiosity. As one of our participants, Berit Ness, chief engagement officer at the Chazen Museum of Art, wrote during our journey, “[showing] curiosity about others and the world can be an act of reciprocity.”
Highlights of the 2025 Forest + River Journey
- Introduction to Ho-Chunk cultural land and waterscapes
- A visit to a dairy farm
- Conversations with UW-Stevens Point faculty about integrating community-engaged research into undergraduate curriculum and how they prepare the next generation of natural resource stewards
- Listening to the rushing spring waters of the Wolf River
- Learning about forest management on the Menominee Reservation
- Engaging water educators, artists, and makers
Join us!
We encourage eligible members of the UW-Madison community to apply now. Application deadline for the 2025 Wisconsin Idea Seminar is February 15, 2025.
In the words of Seminar alumni
Every year returned Wisconsin Idea Seminar participants tell us they wholeheartedly recommend the experience to colleagues. And each year the most repeated phrase in their recommendations to others is “Just do it.”
Learn how UW-Madison faculty and staff have been shaped by the Wisconsin Idea Seminar.
Gratitude
“Forest + River journey was a reintroduction to Wisconsin through Indigenous histories and ways of knowing as they unfolded in various opportunities to learn from the philosophies underlying Indigenous relations to history, language, land, and water. I will carry this reintroduction to Wisconsin with me as an invitation to continue learning from Indigenous wisdom as I build a life in Wisconsin and intentionally consider how I might meaningfully contribute to various communities through my work.” (WIS’25)
Rachel Williams
Assistant Professor, Educational Policy Studies, School of Education
“I will reflect fondly on Bonnie McKiernan’s subtle breaking of our collective fatigue at the start of our tea-making workshop. Each participant was asked to share their name and their ancestral background. This grounding activity poetically brought many histories, politics, and truths to the fore, presenting an opportunity for generative and introspective dialogue.“ (WIS’25)
Esther Kang
Assistant Professor, Design Studies, School of Human Ecology
