Why Evaluation?

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/gendered capitalism, when capital developed evaluation to support its interests and continues to control the means and ends of knowledge production. Can evaluators renounce capitalism and positivism to 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?

Episode 1.2 TRANSCRIPT

Notes

• 7:19: Vidhya should have referred to the imperial wars in Southeast Asia.
• 19:45: Access to the written word provides an advantage only in hierarchical systems that devalue oral traditions and non-written languages and knowledge 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
• 20:30: (Vidhya’s elaboration) Tamil language and culture predate Sanskrit and what people now call Hinduism. But the language that brahmins typically claim is Sanskrit. Though no longer spoken, Sanskrit 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.
• 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
• 47:06: We just resist being reduced to numbers. There is also ⁠the stereotype⁠ that Asians only like numbers—from the 1965 Immigration Act⁠

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.
• ⁠Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production⁠ (6,000-word blog)
• ⁠How Environmentalism was Separated from Class Politics⁠ (60-min video of a Jacobin talk by Matt Huber)
• ⁠Professional-Managerial Class⁠ (2-hr video of a Jacobin talk with ⁠Catherine Liu⁠)
• ⁠Dialectic of Enlightenment⁠ (25-min video)
• How Europe Under-developed Africa: 50 Years Since its Publication⁠ (2-hr video about Walter Rodney’s activist scholarship)
• Vidhya’s understanding is based on personal communication over time with Justin Laing of ⁠Hillombo Consulting⁠
• ⁠Why Marx was Right: Alienation⁠ (25-min video)
• How Capitalism Absorbs Anticapitalism⁠ (15-min video)
• ⁠West India Emancipation⁠ speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 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 of Assata: An autobiography, 1987; Lawrenc