The Power of
Perspective:

Generations of Evaluators Generating Change

...the beautifully provocative #PowerOfPerspective installation...

— Giovanni Dazzo

The Power of Perspective is probably the best known dimension of The May 13 Group’s work so far. A multi-part, interactive installation first produced in partnership with the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Working Group for AEA’s 2022 annual conference, it honors pivotal, yet often obscured, evaluation scholar-practitioners. These leaders shaped evaluation’s journey to understand and change persistent patterns of inequity in, through, and around evaluation—particularly on the basis of classifications of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability status, and other dimensions.

Attendees are invited to put themselves and their people (however defined) on the journey map. We use the metaphor of an iceberg to illustrate how broader societal movements and world events, evaluation and related fields, and our own personal and community experiences relate to each other. Personal experiences break through the water’s surface. Submerged from view are the deeper undercurrents.

The evergreen installation, along with accompanying programming, is available to be mounted at evaluation-related gatherings upon request for a modest fee.

An Interactive Journey Map

  • A Timeline of Evaluation's DEI Journey

    To connect seemingly isolated occurrences, the timeline presents events and movements around the world and in the USA along with key moments in and around the field of evaluation. It allows us to see patterns: different milestones that occurred in the same period and similar milestones that occurred in different periods—not just within evaluation but also in relation to deeper currents.

  • Scholar-Practitioner Profiles

    To remind us that we are not alone, we profile select evaluation scholar-practitioners who shaped evaluation’s journey toward understanding and changing persistent patterns of inequity. We have a lineage of intellectual ancestors from the first phase of the American Evaluation Association’s life. We will continue to add profiles as we move into the next phase of its life.

  • A People’s History of Evaluation

    Inevitably partial, the timeline and profiles are a call awaiting evaluators’ response. A crowd-sourced People’s History of Evaluation allows each of us to tie our personal and community experiences to something bigger than our individual selves, democratizing evaluation’s narrative.

Participants’ reflections

This was a really thoughtful and thought-provoking experience. Thank you and your team for this.

— Martha Brown

If you engage in #evaluation as a practitioner or user, I strongly encourage you to follow the work of #TheMay13Group. Their journey map presents events and movements around the world and in the United States of America that have contributed to a white supremacist culture of evaluation and its ongoing undoing....

— Katie Winters

I wanted and needed a lot more time with it—so rich! Thank you for this amazing contribution to redefining what matters in our field of evaluation.

— Madeleine Frey

At #Eval22? Check out the beautiful Power of Perspective interactive installation in the exhibit hall (by registration).

— Julia Coffman

Love what you and your collaborators have created.... I learned a lot and was eager to contribute my own story to the installation. What a beautiful, immersive experience.

— Nina Sabarre

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Intersectionality

The Power of Perspective: Generations of Evaluators Generating Change is one step in a different direction, but it is far from a summative solution to ongoing patterns of exclusion, exploitation, silencing, co-optation, erasure, and punishment in evaluation. We are aware of and take responsibility for (de)limitations in the timelines’ content.

The dissertation research (Shanker, 2019) that the timeline and profile content draws from uses an intersectional lens to examine the portrayal of race in peer-reviewed evaluation literature from its formalization in the late 1960s through 2017. It did not examine literature focused on educational research and assessment or evaluation of public health or international development efforts.

As part of the efforts of AEA’s DEI Working Group and for this installation, supplementary research was supported by Mesq’al Kebra to add milestones in evaluation’s portrayal of race from 2017 to 2022.

Beyond updating milestones in the portrayal of race through 2022, primary and secondary research was conducted to add milestones in areas not examined directly in the dissertation—regarding gender, sexuality, disability, language, international aid, and the environment—including pivotal events like the establishment of various Topical Interest Groups since the field’s formalization. Additional content was contributed by session participants at Eval Reimagined 21.

In the interest of space, we listed the editors of topical anthologies without necessarily listing each contributing author’s work. We similarly listed first authors alone when space was tight.