Women's Perspectives on Population, Immigration, Environment

[Christine Manninen <manninen@glc.org>]

Posted on behalf of Debi McNutt <mtn@igc.apc.org>

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**Please post and circulate**

MIDWESTERN CONFERENCE
Dangerous Intersections:
Women's Perspectives on Population, 
Immigration, Prisons, and the Environment

"Dangerous Intersections: Women's Perspectives 
on Population, Immigration, Prisons, and the Environment"
is the title of a Midwestern regional conference to be 
held Friday, October 23 and Saturday, October 24, 
at the University of Illinois-Chicago.  The conference is 
sponsored by the Committee on Women, Population and 
the Environment, (CWPE), and is co-sponsored by other 
Midwestern organizations such as the UIC Center for 
Research on Women and Gender, Midwest Treaty Network,  
African American Women Evolving, and the Women's Health 
Education Project. The conference is a forum for discussion 
and strategizing around the relationships between population 
control, the anti-immigrant backlash, attacks on reproductive 
health, environmental racism, and the prison industrial complex.

The CWPE has been critical of the efforts of the population 
control movement to blame environmental degradation on the 
"over-population" of the poor, people of color, and the peoples 
of Third World. The Midwest Regional Conference will address 
many interrelated issues affecting women, and grassroots 
responses; including: 

* The environmental justice struggle to stop metallic sulfide 
mines in Northern Wisconsin, affecting Native communities.
* "W-2" Welfare reform that was created and put into effect in 
Wisconsin and is now being  implemented in other states.
* The condition of women in prisons.  
* The problems that immigrants are facing in the the Midwest, 
as well as an international perspective on migration issues.  
* Looking at a new cheap labor pool that is being created by 
prison workers, immigrants, and former welfare recipients.

The conference will be Friday, October 23 (7-10 pm), and 
Saturday October 24 (9 am-6:30 pm) at the UIC Lecture Center A,
705 S. Morgan St.   The keynote speaker will be Loretta Ross,
of the Center for Human Rights Education.  For more information, 
contact Debi McNutt (phone 608-246-2256; e-mail mtn@igc.apc.org ); 
or Dionne Carey (phone 312-663-0336; e-mail DLCAREY1@aol.com ), 
or write CWPE, 220 South State Street, Suite 706, Chicago, IL  
60604.  CWPE publishes the journal Political Environments,
available from CWPE, c/o Population and Development Program/SS, 
Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01022.