Evaluation 2022 Equity Working Group Week: (Re)imagining Equity, Social Justice and Decolonization in Evaluation Week by Gabriela Garcia, Libby Smith, Ayesha Boyce, Elizabeth Taylor-Schiro, Dana Wanzer, Aisha Rios, and Stephen Porter

Greetings evaluation community! We are Gabriela Garcia, Libby Smith, Ayesha Boyce, Elizabeth Taylor-Schiro, Dana Wanzer, Aisha Rios, and Stephen Porter, members of the Evaluation 2022 Equity working group.

One of the areas of focus for this year’s AEA conference is equity, social justice, and decolonization in evaluation. But to engage in critical conversations about how we, as evaluators, can more effectively address systemic oppression within our work, we need to pause and be explicit about what these concepts mean for us and our practices. This is the purpose of this week’s focus on equity, social justice, and decolonization.

Throughout this week, we’ll hear from:

  • dr. monique liston, founder, Chief Strategist, and Joyful Militant at UBUNTU Research and Evaluation, on how her organization reflects on and has learned about equity, decolonization, and liberation.
  • Dr. Zuri Tau, CEO of Social Insights Research and the founder of www.LiberatoryResearch.com, on the importance of interrogating what is valued by Western academia and what it means to practice liberatory evaluation and research.
  • Carlos Romero, from Apex, on Equitable Evaluation and disrupting the system in which evaluation operates.
  • Drs. Albertina Lopez (she/her) and Chera Reid (she/her) from the Center for Evaluation Innovation (CEI) on the importance of embracing your mind and body in evaluation work as a liberatory practice.
  • Dr. Laura Peck, Principal Scientist at Abt Associates and Global Director for Abt’s Research, Monitoring & Evaluation Capability Center, on equity and experimental evaluation.

Hot Tip:

Join our Town Hall, titled What Do You Mean When You Say Equity, Social Justice, & Decolonization? A Roundtable Discussion, on Thursday, September 29, 2022, from 2pm-3pmEDT to hear more from these guests and from other members on how these terms are understood and applied within evaluation work. Register here

Hot Tip:

Start exploring and making a plan for the AEA conference! Look out for sessions on this topic such as:

  • “How?” and “So What?” in equitable evaluation: Lessons of practice and learning scheduled for Thursday (11/10) from 11:15am to 12:15pm ET.
  • Moving beyond disparities and disproportionalities: Centering equity in the identification, collection, analysis, reporting, and use of data scheduled for Thursday (11/10) from 3:15pm to 4:15pm ET.  
  • Looking at Equity, Social Justice, and Decolonization through the lens of Evaluation Capacity Building, Participatory Evaluation, Culturally Responsive Evaluation, and Indigenous Evaluation scheduled for Friday (11/11) from 10:15am to 11:15am ET.
  • Decolonizing Evaluation and Data: Transforming Learning by Centering Equity, Community y Cultura scheduled for Saturday (11/12) from 9am to 10am ET.

How do you think about equity, decolonization, and liberation within your evaluation work? How does it show up in your work? In what ways is it driving the social change you want to see in the world? Join the conversation this week, during our Town Hall and at the Conference in New Orleans!


Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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