March 11, 2026 In her first semester as a graduate student at the Howard H. Baker Jr. School of Public Policy and Public Affairs, Madison Lackey found herself sitting across from community leaders in the Cumberland Gap region, listening to conversations about economic transition, tourism strategy, and the lingering effects of industrial decline. The discussion centered on budgets and development plans, but beneath it ran deeper questions about opportunity, mobility, and trust.
For Lackey, the moment felt clarifying.
As an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, she had double majored in political science and philosophy, immersing herself in theories of justice and governance. Part of the first generation in her family to pursue higher education, she learned to navigate academia through persistence by seeking out mentors, asking questions, and steadily building confidence. She developed a strong theoretical lens. But in Central Appalachia, theory met lived reality.
Through Dr. Tim Ezzell’s “Sustainable Communities” course, Lackey was tasked with helping develop a multi-community tourism strategy for the region which encompasses the tripoint where Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee meet. What began as an assignment soon evolved into a deeper lesson about what policy work looks like beyond the classroom.
“Successful community engagement requires a number of important skills and traits. First, the student has to be curious, so they can understand the community and its issues. The student needs to have great empathy, so they can relate to community residents and their challenges,” said Dr. Ezzell. “They need to be creative, as many distressed communities need more than a conventional solution to their problems. Lastly, they need to be good listeners. People who can sit patiently, hear what’s being said, and understand what’s really being said. This last skill is often the hardest one to teach. Madison possesses all of these qualities, in abundance.”
In meetings, community members spoke with pride about their home, but described limited pathways for social and economic mobility. Hearing their stories sparked Lackey’s interest in qualitative research and data analysis and strengthened her commitment to community-engaged work.
By the time she presented the team’s findings in Washington, D.C., the experience had reshaped how she thought about policy research. The numbers mattered, but the stories behind them matter just as much. Listening to residents describe their choices, their constraints, and their hopes revealed dimensions of policy that data alone could not capture.
The lesson followed her far beyond East Tennessee.
After her first semester at the Baker School, Lackey traveled to Três Lagoas, Brazil, to serve as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul. Over nine months, she began noticing familiar patterns in an unfamiliar place.
Transportation challenges shaped access to jobs. Her students spoke openly about the difficult tradeoffs between earning income now and investing in long-term education. Conversations about opportunity and mobility echoed themes she had heard months earlier in Appalachia.
Different hemispheres. Different languages. Similar landscapes. Yet many of the same questions.
“Witnessing the pervasive nature of structural challenges evident across Central Appalachia and my host community in Brazil fostered my commitment to leveraging policy research to investigate the drivers and redress of structural social inequality,” she explains.
Those observations sharpened her interest in understanding how people interpret government action and public institutions, especially during moments of uncertainty.
When she returned to the Baker School, those questions began to guide her research.
Working alongside her advisor, public policy professor Jack Mewhirter, she began examining how citizens respond to government action during crises. Much of the existing research assumes that rapid government response builds trust by signaling competence and control. But as she analyzed the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, she noticed something that complicated that assumption.
For some people, the very speed intended to inspire confidence instead raised doubts.
If a process seemed unusually fast, some individuals questioned whether proper care had been taken. The policy itself might be sound, yet the pace of implementation could clash with expectations about how responsible governance should operate. Lackey considered this the speed paradox.
To understand this tension, Lackey turned to cognitive dissonance theory, examining how people reconcile new information with existing beliefs. Her research suggested that public trust often depends less on objective timelines and more on whether policy implementation aligns with expectations shaped by media narratives, social networks, and political identity.
When those expectations and outcomes diverge, even effective policies can lose legitimacy.
Sharing these findings at the Conference on Policy Process Research (COPPR) in Switzerland pushed Lackey well beyond her comfort zone. The conference brings together scholars from across Europe and North America who study how policies are designed and implemented.
Standing before an audience of senior researchers, she fielded questions about everything from the role of federalism in crisis response to how American traditions of individual rights shape public compliance with government policy.
What began as a nerve-wracking presentation soon became an energizing conversation.
Mewhirter, who attended the conference, saw the moment as evidence of Lackey’s emerging scholarly voice.
“It is rare for a graduate student, at either the master’s or PhD level, to contribute to scholarship in the way that Madison does,” Mewhirter said. “Her work is community-grounded, empirically rigorous, and meaningfully contributes to and advances broader academic debates. Working with her is far more akin to collaborating with a colleague than mentoring a student.”
Their collaboration continued. Lackey is the first author of a forthcoming research methods chapter in the Handbook on Inclusive Government, where she examines what it means to conduct truly community-engaged research.
From learning research in Dr. Ezzell’s class to witnessing communities in Brazil, Lackey was ready to put theory into practice. She joined a 10-person interdisciplinary team studying youth retention in rural Morgan County, Tennessee, a project facilitated by the University of Tennessee’s Appalachian Justice Research Center. Guided by two professors from the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences, she helped conduct interviews with community members, code qualitative data, and contribute to a 60-page report for local stakeholders. In this full-circle moment, Lackey moved seamlessly from analyzing research methodology in the classroom to seeing its real-world impact.
Now in the process of applying to PhD programs in political science, Lackey continues to refine the questions that have shaped her work: how economic change influences regional inequality, institutional trust, and political behavior.
Careful data analysis matters. But so do patience, humility, and a willingness to listen.
For Lackey, the work still begins the same way it did that first semester at the Baker School.
By listening.