The 26th annual conference of the European Access Network (EAN) will take place September 20-22, 2017 at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany. It is hosted by ArbeiterKind.de, Germany´s largest network for first generation students. The overall conference theme is ‘Sharing stories of empowerment: Creating new strategies for diversity and inclusion in higher education’. Practitioners, researchers and policy makers are invited to submit proposals for paper, project, workshop and poster presentations addressing the following conference strands/thematic areas: