The Virginia "Jenny" Madden Award for Graduate Student Leadership and Service

The Virginia “Jenny” Madden Award for Graduate Student Leadership and Service is named in honor of Virginia “Jenny” Madden for her many years of service to the Graduate School, the Staff Senate, and the University of Louisville community. The award recognizes a master’s degree recipient who exhibits leadership through service to the recipient’s program, college, discipline, the University as a whole, and/or the community. Jonathan Riley Ellis is this year’s recipient of the Madden award.

Jonathan (Jon) Ellis received his BA from University of North Florida in 2019. As part of his degree, he conducted qualitative research, examining how biracial young men navigate and understand racial identity to formulate a sense of self. He used in-depth interviews to gain insight into how biracial males experience inclusion, exclusion, colorism, and identity.

Jonathan began the MA/PhD in Applied Sociology at the University of Louisville program in 2022, receiving a Diversity Scholarship from the Graduate School. After his first year of coursework, he was admitted into AKD, the National Sociology Honor Society. During Spring 2023, Jon began interviewing unhoused Black men in Louisville for a Qualitative Research Methods class; this led him to his MA thesis topic on how unhoused Black men navigate urban spaces. At the beginning of his research in early Fall 2023, Jon began volunteering with Hip Hop Cares, a local non-profit organization that has been serving the unhoused population in Louisville for over a decade.

Since Fall 2023, Jon has spent between 7-15 hours per week volunteering for Hip Hop Cares and other organizations serving the unhoused population. Jon has also been active in leadership through departmental and A&S service. Jon was a TA for two Sociology classes, winning the Sociology Department Teaching Award in 2024 for helping teach Statistics to undergraduates. Jon has also served as the liaison for the Sociology Graduate Student Committee for the past two years, attending all faculty meetings to give graduate students a voice. In Fall 2024 he has become the Sociology representative to GNAS. In addition, Jon completed the Graduate School’s Mentoring Academy and has informally mentored several of his peers.

In August 2024, Jon defended his MA thesis, “Contested Spaces: Unhoused Black Men and their Survival within the Urban Landscape,” which explores the experiences and narratives of unhoused Black men. His project included over 50 hours of participant observation and a dozen in-depth interviews with unhoused men. He found that these men regularly encounter contested spaces with businesses, the public, hospitals, and law enforcement. Unhoused Black men must navigate through displacement techniques—such as raids on campsites—that move them further away from needed resources. His research adds an important lens on how race, space, and the label of homelessness create barriers for unhoused black men and how administrative processes and policies add burdens that make upward mobility challenging for these men. He is currently revising the thesis for submission to Sociological Spectrum, a peer-reviewed journal.