Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello! I’m Arthur Hernández, an evaluator and educator whose work focuses on evaluation, community engagement, and the forms of knowledge we authorize as credible. I want to address a persistent and perhaps unvoiced misunderstanding: the idea that “lived experience” is either redundant or somehow a threat to scholarly expertise.
Lesson Learned: Lived experience is not merely “experience”.
The phrase “lived experience” can sound redundant because, in one sense, all experience is lived. All learning requires experience of some kind. We read, listen, observe, analyze, compare, infer, and test meaning through experience. Even academic expertise is built through experience: disciplined study, repeated inquiry, methodological practice, critique, and participation in scholarly communities.
But that does not make all experience the same. Lived experience, as I use the term, refers to first-hand encounter with a phenomenon, condition, institution, place, policy, culture, or pattern of treatment. It involves more than exposure to information about something. It includes the situated, embodied, relational, and often consequential experience of being in contact with the thing itself. It often requires active engagement, interaction, navigation, vulnerability, interpretation from within, and direct participation in the meanings and effects being evaluated.
A person may study poverty, disability, schooling, immigration, policing, public health, or community violence with rigor and care. That expertise is real. But it is not the same as having had to live, negotiate, resist, survive, make meaning within, or be shaped by those realities.
Hot Tip: Stop treating lived experience as anti-intellectual.
One of the most unhelpful moves in evaluation is to position lived experience against academic or scholarly expertise, as though recognizing one diminishes the other. That is a false opposition. Lived experience does not automatically make someone correct, any more than a degree automatically makes someone wise or expert. But lived experience can be a worthy candidate for expertise because it may disclose meaning, consequence, feasibility, harm, benefit, and legitimacy in ways that external analysis alone may not.
The issue is not whether lived experience should replace technical expertise. It should not. The issue is whether evaluation can responsibly claim to judge merit, worth, significance, or consequence while dismissing the knowledge of those most directly implicated. It cannot.
Lesson Learned: Authenticity is not the same as accuracy.
Accuracy asks whether a statement corresponds to evidence. Authenticity asks whether an interpretation is faithful to the meaning, situated reality, and lived consequence of what is being described. A finding can be technically accurate and still be incomplete, distorted, extractive, or illegitimate to those whose lives are being represented.
This is why lived experience matters across epistemological and ontological traditions. Positivist evaluators can value it for construct clarity, measurement relevance, and interpretation. Pragmatists can value it for use, consequence, and fit. Critical, Indigenous, feminist, and participatory evaluators can value it because it challenges whose knowledge counts and who has authority to interpret reality. Across these traditions, lived experience strengthens evaluation because evaluation is never conducted from nowhere.
Across these traditions, lived experience strengthens evaluation because evaluation is never conducted from nowhere.
Rad Resource: Ask who is appropriately positioned to participate.
A better question than “Who has data?” is “Who is positioned in relation to the purpose for/of evaluation in ways that make their participation appropriate, necessary, and legitimate?” Community positionality matters. Engagement is not a courtesy added after technical work is complete. It is part of determining whether participation is meaningful, whether interpretation is warranted, and whether evaluative judgment can be considered legitimate.
Lived experience is not the enemy of expertise. It is one of the ways evaluation becomes more authentic, more accountable, and more worthy of the communities it claims to serve.
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Thank you for elevating this insight Arthur. I wholeheartedly agree. To me, as an evaluator, my main goal is to get out of the way and elevate the perspective of those with lived experience. Sometimes that means standing down when there’s an evaluator with lived experience relevant to a project, sometimes that means coaching evaluation capacity, and sometimes that just means ensuring the evaluation plan is designed to triangulate ‘objective’ findings with the voices of participants.
Thank you for your thoughts, Art. Years ago, I heard the term lived expertise in relation to lived experiences, as you conceptualize it in this blog. As a critical, community and equity-focused evaluator, scholar, and practitioner, I have used the term lived expertise ever since because it affirms the power and significace of my lived experiences as a Puerto Rican woman, first-gen scholar from Brick City (Newark, NJ), a historically excluded and marginalized community.