As Graduate Student Co-Coordinator of Andean Circle  alongside Jennifer Sierra and Faculty Host Bruce Mannheim, Emily Rae Sabo is excited to announce the 8th annual Andean Circle Conference. The theme this year is “(In)equality in the Andes: Issues of Language, Gender and Race.”

What is Andean Circle?

Andean Circle is an organization of students and faculty, mostly affiliated with the University of Michigan, whose work focuses on one or more of the Andean republics. The group is a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop funded and administrated by University of Michigan’s Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (LACS). The group meets regularly to present the results of new research about the histories, cultures, languages, and societies of the Andes, focusing primarily on graduate student work, but also including work from affiliated faculty and post-docs. We provide a space for graduate students to gain feedback on publications, dissertations, presentation papers, and job-talks. Through roundtables, guest-speaker presentations, informal meetings, and films we strive to create an intellectual community that promotes analytical discussion and interdisciplinary collaboration on pressing topics facing Andean communities.

About this year's Andean Circle conference

(In)equality in the Andes: Issues of Language, Gender & Race

Saturday April 8 | 9am-3:30pm in 410 West Hall

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.

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The event is free and open to the general public. It will include breakfast, coffee, four exciting talks from prominent Andean scholars, and a musical performance from SAMY. Online registration (click here) is encouraged but not required. 

NOTE: If you'd like to attend but won't be able to stay for the entire event, don't worry. You are welcome stop by for as little or long as you like (see the detailed schedule in the attached 2017 Conference Program to find out what's going on when). The 2017 Conference Program also includes speaker bios and abstracts for the talks that will be presented.