Why Evaluation?
Summary
In this episode, hosts Carolina De La Rosa Mateo and Vidhya Shanker ask, “why evaluation?” We wonder if evaluation can be a site of resistance against racial and gendered capitalism, considering that capital developed evaluation to support its imperial interests and continues to control the means and the ends of knowledge production, including through the nonprofit/ nongovernmental industrial complex. Can evaluators from groups who may currently inhabit the professional/ managerial class renounce what capitalism and positivism offer us and instead organize against exploitation alongside the working class? Can we refuse to take EEI, DEI, CRE, GEDI, CRT, etc. for granted and change the structure of the knowledge economy?
Notes
7:19: Vidhya should have referred to the imperial wars in Southeast Asia.
19:45: To be clear, access to the written word provides an advantage only in hierarchical systems (like those underlying philanthro-capitalism, the nonprofit/ nongovernmental industrial complex, and evaluation) that devalue oral traditions and non-written languages and knowledge in order to justify the displacement of entire bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing and the corresponding domination of entire peoples who are portrayed as primitive or unfit to govern themselves. Of course, non-written language and knowledge are invaluable for such groups, as they are under constant surveillance and their knowledge is routinely exploited, co-opted, and de-fanged.
20:30: (Vidhya’s elaboration) Tamil language and culture predate Sanskrit and what people now know as Hinduism. But the language that brahmins typically claim, even those hailing from areas now called Tamil Nadu and Kerala like my ancestors, is Sanskrit. That’s why I said “even Sanskrit.” The reason that I said Sanskrit is the “dominant” and “elite” language, despite it no longer being spoken, is because it is still used within Hindu hegemony in much the same way that Latin and Greek are used within European hegemony: to provide authority and legitimacy to specific ideas and practices and to discredit others. The Hindu right wing and fundamentalist movement characterize local, non- and pre-vedic South Asian languages and knowledge traditions, like Tamil, as both less scientific and less spiritual than Sanskrit.
23:15: The only time that there is not an adversarial relationship between workers and management is when workers are management, as in self-governed cooperatives. Otherwise, the relationship between labor and capital is inherently and intentionally adversarial, and that relationship is reflected in business-as-usual practices wherein profit is accounted for as an asset (for the ruler/ owner), whereas labor is considered a liability or cost (to the ruler/ owner). That’s why workers seeking greater security, protections, autonomy, and a role in governance, distribution of profits, and ownership should expect pushback from capital unless they can argue that such measures will result—ultimately—in higher profits for capital (via greater job satisfaction and morale and thus increased effectiveness and efficiency).
47:06: We just resist being reduced to numbers. Of course there is also the stereotype that Asians, and South Asians especially, only like numbers—cultivated in large part through the 1965 Immigration Act, which lifted U.S. immigration policy’s longstanding ban against Asians and gave priority to individuals with specialized skills or skills in sectors facing labor shortages and to refugees.
47:47: While this did happen in 2020, what Vidhya actually meant was the 2016 elections, which was the first time she saw established members of her field name their precarity, as a result of neoliberalism, but without ever expressing any kinship or solidarity with black/brown/indigenous peoples who suffer disproportionately under neoliberalism. It was the first time that they expressed feelings of powerlessness and considered the possibility that “science” may not effectuate the kind of change that would be necessary to secure their livelihood or the planet. Because with the 45th POTUS, they could not use the power that positivism had historically afforded them in influencing decision-makers, they began to see value in building a different kind of power through protest.
References
Rodríguez, D. (2016). The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Scholar and Feminist Online—Navigating Neoliberalism in the Academy, Nonprofits, and Beyond, 13.2 explains this relationship.
Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production (6,000-word/ 30- to 60-min blog entry that we found while looking for parallel efforts in other fields by searching for some of the phrases that we are using to explain The May 13 Group. While this blog entry explains the genealogy of many terms that we take for granted and that we often use without really understanding where they come from, what’s driving them, and what they mean, The May 13 Group is not politically aligned with the higher-education organization hosting the blog series.)
How Environmentalism was Separated from Class Politics (60-min video of a Jacobin talk by Matt T. Huber, Associate Professor of Geography at Syracuse University. Based on Huber’s 2019 article entitled Ecological Politics for the Working Class in Catalyst Journal, it explains how class is defined by one’s relationship to production, NOT by income or even wealth, per se. It also describes who the professional class is and how members of it like evaluators, as a general rule, are invested in ideas about “knowledge” and “science” that serve our class interests, which discredit other knowledge systems and ways of knowing.)
The Professional-Managerial Class (2-hr video of a Jacobin talk with Catherine Liu, Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class. It parses out how we as members of the professional-managerial class focus on individual saviourism and change, rather than engaging in collective action toward structural change alongside/ in solidarity with the working class. A focus on individual virtue allows us to profit in the short-term, by branding ourselves as virtuous and by promising others their own attainment of individual virtue by commissioning our services and purchasing our products. Our focus on individual virtue detracts from efforts toward economic redistribution that can only be achieved through movement organizing.)
The Dialectic of Enlightenment (25-min video that explains the relationship between the European Enlightenment, “reason,” positivism, domination, and fascism as well as how “science” has become as unfailingly believed in as religion historically has been.)
How Europe Under-developed Africa: 50 years since its publication (2-hr video about Walter Rodney that illustrates how material analysis and theorization can serve liberatory movement organizing on the ground.)
Vidhya’s understanding is based on personal communication over time with Justin Laing of Hillombo Consulting.
Why Marx was Right: Alienation (25-min video about alienation from work and the desire for meaningful work, which we resonated with considering our role as evaluators, who are often reduced to technicians. Funders’ strategies, programs, questions, and standards of evidence as well as prescriptions regarding approaches, methodologies, budgets, timelines, etc. offer us little chance to exercise any discretion over our work. Those of us who live personally and politically interdependent with and accountable to oppressed groups are expected not only to work within these constraints, like other evaluators, but also to employ the field’s (neo)liberal framings such as DEI, EEI, CREE, etc. that negate our own and our peoples’ analyses of our experience as well as our ways of preserving, generating, and passing along knowledge.)
How Capitalism Absorbs Anticapitalism (15-min video that covers some of the difficulties that workers experience and some of the risks that we take in organizing.)
West India Emancipation, speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857. Two speeches by Frederick Douglass; one on West India emancipation, delivered at Canandaigua, Aug. 4th, and the other on the Dred Scott decision, delivered in New York, on the occasion of the anniversary of the American Abolition Society, May, 1857, Rochester, 1857.
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them” (p. 139, Shakur, 1987). Assata: An autobiography (Lawrence Hill). A concise rendition of Assata Shakur’s life can be found here.
Marshall, A. G. (2015). Black Liberation and the Foundations of Social Control. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 74(4), 775–795. This 21-page article by Andrew Gavin Marshall explains how, with respect to the civil rights and Black power movements in the USA, the major philanthropic foundations funded social engineering and incremental reforms designed to establish and maintain social control, ultimately serving the long-term financial and political interests of corporate wealth represented among foundation founders and board members.
Delgado, R. (2009.) Explaining the Rise and Fall of African-American Fortunes: Interest Convergence and Civil Rights Gains. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 37: 369–387. In this 17-page article, Richard Delgado discusses the financial role that the Ford Foundation played in establishing the Office of Equal Opportunity as a calculated response against Black radicalism. See also Funding Policy Research under ‘Distasteful Regimes’: The Ford Foundation and the Social Sciences in Brazil, 1964–71 and “Nuance” as Carceral Worldmaking: A Response to Darren Walker.
Kohl-Arenas, E. (2015). The Self-Help Myth: Towards a Theory of Philanthropy as Consensus Broker. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 74(4), 796–825. In this 30-page article, Erica Kohl-Arenas draws from Gramscian concepts to present an approach to studying how the grantmaking process promotes funding frameworks that exclude questions about the effects of relations of production on poverty as well as how the grantmaking process constructs seemingly participatory spaces and theories of change that draw attention away from structural inequality and antagonism.
The MN IBPOC in Evaluation Community of Praxis is co-created by/for/as Minnesotans with life experience as members of groups that are Indigenous, Black, and/or Of Color, working in evaluation, and interested in structural change—to build relationships, knowledge, opportunities, and collective power.
The Frankfurt School, Student Radicalism, and Anti-Communism (75-min podcast by Unequal Exchange in which Gabriel Rockhill discusses the failure of critical theorists from the Frankfurt School to connect their theorizing about capitalism with action against capitalism and to build something else to replace it. In fact, he discusses how they squashed working class struggles and socialist liberation movements around the world every chance that they could. As with evaluators and other members of the professional/ managerial class, their social location/ class status afforded them the luxury of not having to get their hands dirty. Or perhaps they were just self-interested opportunists all along, who profited from theories that they never practiced. Rockhill’s full paper is available here. Some characterizations of the critical theorists he discusses in the paper fall short in fully thinking through identity, interests, intentions, and effects; this under-development could play into antisemitic tropes.)
The Frankfurt School: From a Failed Revolution to Critical Theory (25-min video explaining the relationship between base and superstructure as well as the Frankfurt’s school’s cultural analysis, which came at the expense of substantive, material change.)
A place for solitude, community, and healing for attendees who identify as Indigenous, Black, and People of Color (IBPOC) at Evaluation 2019! (AEA365 Blog post from 2019)
Music
“Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
Linktree (Vidhya): https://linktr.ee/dr.vidhyashankerphd
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