Greetings from Carolina De La Rosa Mateo, Vidhya Shanker, and Nayantara Premakumar, co-creators of The May 13 Group Podcast. We have been asked to share about our budding initiative.
What is The May 13 Group?
The May 13 Group is an emerging ecosystem—a solidarity economy—oriented toward and energized by epistemic healing and wholeness in, through, and around evaluation. We recognize groups that the nonprofit/nongovernmental-industrial-complex exploits, peripheralizes, and infantilizes as protagonists with ideas of our own rather than perpetual protégés. The May 13 Group challenges capitalist relations of knowledge production and colonial ways of knowing. Unlike other evaluation-related initiatives created by funders for funders, The May 13 Group is being built by and for knowledge workers to foster relationships and build power.
Why May 13?
May 13 is the date in 2020 that Carolina, Vidhya, and the MN IBPOC in Evaluation Community of Praxis publicly discussed the ideas underlying our work. It’s also the day after May 12. About 60 years ago, despite (or because of?) all the movements for equality worldwide, evaluation’s recognized founders convened an invitation-only group that they called The May 12 Group—one precursor to the American Evaluation Association (AEA). They intentionally and explicitly chose that obscure name to restrict membership. Although Black evaluators practiced and published since at least the 1940s, The May 12 Group seems to have been entirely White. Its well-placed members exchanged and amplified each other’s ideas, citations, and opportunities for contracts, employment, conferences, and publications to create the field we know today. Today, their legacies—and the ideological and epistemological traditions they espouse—dominate all representations of evaluation’s canon. In the late 1980s, evaluation journals first published articles challenging their (post)positivist, liberal understanding of difference and inequality. But evaluation omitted these counter-narratives from its canon, including most syllabi. If The May 12 Group represents exclusion and harm, The May 13 Group represents repair, redress, and regeneration.
Why a podcast?
Building a functioning solidarity economy requires about ten years of organizing—including learning and practicing concepts unfamiliar to most evaluators. Evaluation’s client-centered training and business model often lead us to accept social structures as neutral, limiting our imagination for anything outside service delivery. As a first step towards organizing, Carolina had the ingenious idea to start a podcast. We have grown to appreciate the potential of this vehicle to carry deep, reflective dialogue not just between us but also with listeners.
Who’s the podcast for?
In a field that prefers binaries, hierarchies, and the illusion of prediction and control, The May 13 Group Podcast is intentionally created by, for, and as people…
- navigating ever-changing, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting roles, identities, and allegiances;
- with different types and levels of training in different types and areas of knowledge and ways of knowing;
- doing any kind of paid or unpaid work that helps produce or helps people consume knowledge within/ for/ about school, health, housing, livelihoods, and similar areas both inside and outside the nonprofit/nongovernmental industrial complex;
- coming from and seeking solidarity among peoples whose land, labor, and knowledge are systematically extracted, exploited, excluded, or erased to produce profit for other groups.
We invite anyone who works in and around evaluation or other knowledge work (community organizing, mutual aid, cooperative economics, nonprofits, NGOs, philanthropy, government, academia) to take a listen.
What’s the podcast about?
Our podcast questions where our field’s assumptions come from and explores how business-as-usual reinforces oppressive logics, structures, relations, and patterns of behavior. We draw from our personal and professional lives, as well as various readings and videos to deepen understanding of how collective action can challenge capitalist relations of knowledge production and colonial ways of knowing. Each episode is transcribed with references, notes, and ways to engage.
Join us in building the foundation for an alternative knowledge economy and reclaiming the means, ends, and narratives of knowledge production through The May 13 Group Podcast!
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