It is my honor and pleasure as CIES President-Elect to invite you to attend the 61st Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International 
Education Society. We expect over 3000 researchers, students, practitioners and policymakers to attend the 2017 CIES conference which will take place March 5-9th in Atlanta, GA. Over the four to five days of the conference you should expect exposure to cutting-edge educational research, a welcoming professional community, and intense intellectual conversation.
Despite its size, complexity, depth and breadth CIES remains an extremely friendly place for enriching scholarly and professional engagement – in considerable part due to its many Special Interest Groups (SIGs) which are geographically/regionally or thematically organized.
I have invited participants in CIES 2017 to pay particular attention to the problem of inequality and have set the 2017 conference theme as Problematizing (In)Equality: The Promise of Comparative and International Education. To suggest that inequality needs to be problematized implies that much that is taken-for-granted needs to be challenged. It also suggests that we consider how inequalities are constructed as problems in the first place and what solutions and possibilities are thereby enabled and disabled.
We have an exciting conference planned, though of course CIES really only comes about because you – the members of CIES (whether long-established or newly entering the field) – come to present your work, come to learn from, and come to engage with one another.
CIES 2017 will feature a number of exciting new innovations including the introduction of Roundtable Paper Sessions to accompany Paper Sessions, Panel Sessions and Poster Sessions. We are also able to offer subsidized on-site childcare.
Our 2017 conference venue, the Sheraton Atlanta Downtown, provides an excellent range of smaller and larger meeting rooms, as well as superb socializing spaces for receptions and conversations over coffee or drinks. In fact, we’ll be dedicating one ballroom space to serve as a conference lounge area for the informal conversations and meet-ups that make our Society’s conferences as enriching as they are. Alongside this we have some space available (at no cost) for any groups or teams that want to hold private meetings either before or after the conference.
In the coming months please give thought to how we can bring the promise of comparative and international education to problematize inequality near and far.
-Noah W. Sobe
Professor, Cultural & Educational Policy Studies, Loyola University Chicago
Director, Center for Comparative Education, Loyola University Chicago
President-Elect (2016-2017), CIES