On Saturday, Feb. 25, nine Uni students and English teacher Adele Suslick participated in a conference at the University of Illinois called “Criminal Trafficking and Slavery: The Dark Side of Global and Regional Migration.” They attended sessions in the morning on trafficking and slavery as both an American dilemma and significant transnational crimes. In the afternoon, Suslick attended a curriculum workshop for K-12 educators, while the students participated in a forum with two teen activists from the Metropolitan Learning Center, a Bloomfield, Conn., magnet school. The Connecticut students talked about the organization they've formed at their school, Student Abolitionists Stopping Slavery. They invited the Uni group to work with them in future projects. In the end, the students from both schools created a banner against human trafficking that is going to be unfurled later in March at the Global Studies Forum, a conference for Illinois secondary school teachers. Uni's participation in the trafficking conference grew out of the Global Studies Initiative, which Suslick and several of her students formed earlier this year.

photos by Emma Anselin & David Porreca