This year’s Andean Circle conference will address the ways in which social inequality is practiced and experienced in the Andes. The silent yet pervasive mechanisms of social categorization have led to substantial discrimination in the Andes. Rosaleen Howard, our keynote speaker for the 2017 conference and Chair of Hispanic Studies and Professor in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Newcastle, will speak directly to these issues. Over the course of her career, Prof. Howard’s anthropological and sociolinguistic work has focused on language politics and cultural identities in the Andes. Her talk will discuss the nature of linguistic racism in theory and in practice as it emerges between mainstream Spanish-speaking society and speakers of indigenous languages across the Andean-Amazonian states of South America. Talks by Allison Caine, Bruce Mannheim and Devin Grammon will address issues of linguistic, racial and gender-based inequality in the Andes drawn from a combination of fieldwork methodologies, in situ ethnography, historical research, and in-depth analysis of linguistic data and global education.