In this episode, thought partner and podcast producer Nayantara Premakumar joins hosts Carolina and Vidhya to reflect on and update listeners on our retreat and recent milestones. We share our struggles resisting racial/gendered capitalism through cooperative, decentralized, and transparent governance and ownership structures. This includes a discussion of fiscal sponsorship and technocratic tools for decision-making. We also highlight upcoming changes to the podcast, including efforts to tie together our personal, professional, and political analyses; to acknowledge the lands we’ve inhabited; and to explicitly prompt reflection and action.

In this episode, Sarah Stachowiak joins Carolina and Vidhya in reflecting transparently on our financial relationship. How does the owning class’s control over manufacturing processes and products show up in the knowledge economy and the evaluation of public and nonprofit/nongovernmental programs? What does it mean for the “raw material” (data about/from program participants)? For the “independence” of knowledge workers? How could we organize accountability in knowledge work horizontally across class status—not around shared experiences of oppression, but around shared resistance to it?

In this episode, Carolina and Vidhya explore the tension among learning from the past, meeting present needs, and imagining and building a future. We examine evaluation’s roots as a tool for capital and reflect on our roles within the professional/managerial class, where uncertainty feels “risky.” Whose interests do we serve? Could a solidarity economy provide evaluators with a safety net or fallback position to make collective demands—by organizing ourselves or joining movements that prioritize the working class?

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, considering that 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?