The Department of Community & Environmental Sociology presents the 2025 Slesinger Lecture:
Rural and Small Town America: Myths and Misunderstandings
delivered by
Professor Tim Slack
Professor of Sociology
Louisiana State University
Thursday, March 13th at 2:30
354 Ag Hall
The Slesinger Lecture honors Professor Doris Slesinger’s legacy of research in health and social justice.
What follows are details about the Slesinger Lecture, comprising a brief biography of Professor Slesinger; a concise description of the Lecture’s development and purpose; and a listing of previous lectures, featuring embedded streaming videos of each.
For further information about the Slesinger Lecture, please email us.
To support future Slesinger Lectures, please contribute online.
Professor Doris P. Slesinger (1928-2006)
Professor Doris Peyser Slesinger (1928-2006) earned her undergraduate degree in 1949 from Vassar College, her master’s degree in 1960 in sociology and demography from the University of Michigan, and her PhD in sociology (with an emphasis on demography and health) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973. She joined the faculty of UW-Madison’s Department of Rural Sociology in 1974, and was promoted to full professor ten years later. In 1987, the Department chose Professor Slesinger to serve as its chair — a position no other woman had filled for a Rural Sociology department in the United States. She retired in 1998, and remained engaged in university affairs, including serving as a member of the Governor’s Advisory Council on Migrant Labor and in the UW-Madison Faculty/Staff Ombuds Program.
Throughout her life, Professor Slesinger was a passionate advocate for migrant workers’ rights and women’s health issues. Her research and outreach activities concerned the health and well-being of minorities, including African Americans and Native Americans, women, migrant farm workers, and the rural poor. In 2006, Professor Leann Tigges, then Chair of the Rural Sociology Department, remarked of Professor Slesinger:
Doris was in the generation of women professors who were always breaking new ground. Academic women in the generations that followed have had a somewhat easier time because of the pioneers like Doris who forged the way, fought the early battles, and established the precedents. Doris actively and continuously tried to make our way easier by her service as an advisor and mentor to women graduate students and junior faculty. I’ve witnessed the love and loyalty felt by these women for Doris, and in the past months their pain at losing her has been palpable…. She was soft-spoken, but never unspoken. She was passionately concerned about fairness and justice, and she never forgot that people have many dimensions to their lives…. Doris brought intelligence, honesty and humor to all her activities and relationships. We will miss her, but we are so glad she was here for us.
The Slesinger Lecture
In 2007, the Department of Rural Sociology established the Doris P. Slesinger Fund, using the $10,000 bequest that Professor Slesinger left to the Department. The departments of Community & Environmental Sociology (the renamed Department of Rural Sociology), in collaboration with the Department of Family Medicine, subsequently decided to use the Fund to support the Slesinger Lecture. This annual event honors Professor Slesinger’s life and life’s work, and stimulates campus-wide discussion of the principles of community engagement that are enshrined in the Wisconsin Idea.
Previous Slesinger Lectures
2016: Dr. Celeste Watkins-Hayes, “Remaking A Life, Reversing An Epidemic: HIV/AIDS & The Politics Of Transformation”
2015: Dr. Seth Holmes, “Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Indigenous Mexican Farmworkers in the United States”
2014: Dr. H. Jack Geiger, “Health Justice & Social Justice: Can We Lurch Toward Equity?”
2012: Professor Linda Silka, “Evaluating Community-Engaged Research”
2011: Professor Steve Wing, “Public Health Research & Environmental Justice”
2016: “Remaking A Life, Reversing An Epidemic: HIV/AIDS & The Politics Of Transformation”
Celeste Watkins-Hayes
Associate Professor (Sociology & African American Studies)
Northwestern University
2015: “Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Indigenous Mexican Farmworkers in the United States”
Seth Holmes
Associate Professor (Medical Anthropology & Public Health)
University of California-Berkeley
2014: “Health Justice & Social Justice: Can We Lurch Toward Equity?”
H. Jack Geiger
Arthur C. Logan Professor Emeritus of Community Medicine
City University of New York, School of Medicine
Co-founder and Past President, Physicians for Human Rights
Co-founder and Past President, Physicians for Social Responsibility
2012: “Evaluating Community-Engaged Research”
Linda Silka
Professor
School of Economics
Director, Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center
University of Maine
2011: “Community-Based Public Health Research and Environmental Justice”
Steve Wing
Associate Professor
Department of Epidemiology
Gillings School of Global Public Health
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Thanks to current and previous co-sponsors and supporters of the Slesinger Lecture:
Collaborative Center for Health Equity
Department of Anthropology
Department of Family Medicine
Department of Sociology
Global Health Institute
Havens Center for the Study of Social Justice
Human Rights Program
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
University Lectures Committee