Sadie Dempsey received an Excellence in Engaged Scholarship Graduate Student Award from the Morgridge Center. This award acknowledges a graduate student who aims to better connect campus and community through service-learning, engaged teaching, or leading and participating in community-based research while addressing community-identified issues.
Sadie’s research and teaching interests include political sociology, social movements, democratic theory, civil society, and qualitative methods. Her dissertation is an ethnography of engaged citizenship in Wisconsin. Sadie’s research interrogates two interwoven paradoxes: Why do engaged citizens increasingly distrust political institutions and the people in them? Why do they continue to participate in a system they do not trust? This research has important implications in this time of democratic crisis – when concerns of plummeting trust, declining participation, rampant inequality, and democratic backsliding abound – challenging us to rethink the structure of our political institutions in pursuit of a more just, democratic future.