ABSTRACT

Formal evaluation of policies, programmes and people has become ubiquitous in contemporary western contexts. This is the case for equity and widening participation (WP) agendas in higher education, for which evaluation is often required to measure ‘what works’. Although evaluation has a ‘fundamentally social, political, and value-oriented character’ (Guba and Lincoln. 1989. Fourth Generation Evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 7), an experimental approach, situated within hegemonic positivist epistemologies, has tended to prevail. In this paper, we argue that it is misguided to pursue evaluation with an apolitical pretext of independence and objectivity. Drawing on Butler’s concept of performativity, we explore how hegemonic anti-democratic evaluation practices can potentially re-inscribe and reproduce the very inequalities that WP seeks to address. By critiquing the technologies of evaluation, we lay out one way of understanding how democratic evaluation practices can reclaim evaluation to make possible more diverse and socially just worlds.

摘要

在当代西方背景下，对政策、计划和人员的正式评估已变得无处不在。高等教育中的公平和扩大参与（WP）议程就是这种情况，通常需要评估来衡量“什么有效”。尽管评估具有“基本的社会、政治和价值导向特征”（Guba and Lincoln. 1989. Fourth Generation Evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 7)，一种位于霸权实证主义认识论中的实验方法，已趋于盛行。在本文中，我们认为以独立和客观的非政治借口进行评估是错误的。借鉴巴特勒的表演性概念，我们探索霸权的反民主评估实践如何可能重新铭刻和再现 WP 试图解决的不平等。通过批评评估技术，我们提出了一种理解民主评估实践如何重新获得评估以使世界变得更加多样化和社会公正的方式。