The May 13 Group

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Join hosts Carolina De La Rosa Mateo and Vidhya Shanker as they dive into ideas and stories that deepen our understanding of how structurally-focused collective action, including direct action organizing, can challenge capitalist relations of knowledge production and colonial ways of knowing, reclaim the means and ends of knowledge production, and build the foundation for a solidarity economy. For more information about its purpose and intended audience, please see Introducing the May 13 Group Podcast: Your friendly nonprofit/ nongovernmental industrial complex deprogramming chamber or this LinkedIn article.

Vidhya Shanker Vidhya Shanker

Quarterly Compost (Spring ‘25)

In this episode, hosts Carolina and Vidhya reflect on our first year building a solidarity economy through this podcast. We connect recent topics—collective knowledge-making, individualism, and the idea of an economy—to each other, evaluation, accountability, and resource distribution. We note the years of work ahead, as today's socio-political situation results from decades of deliberate effort, not recent elections. Grateful for your feedback, we commit to being accessible to everyone fighting within the nonprofit industrial complex.

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Vidhya Shanker Vidhya Shanker

What is an economy?

In this episode, Carolina and Vidhya engage in dialogue with Justin Laing of Hillombo Consulting to understand the idea of an economy, which is foundational to building a solidarity economy. We delve into the way knowledge—or perhaps narrative—is produced within racial and gendered capitalism and the role evaluation plays for the owning and ruling class. We close with an invitation to imagine what knowledge work could look like, and what individual roles we each may play, in alternative economic structures.

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Vidhya Shanker Vidhya Shanker

What is individualism?

In this episode, hosts Carolina and Vidhya unpack one of the central pillars upholding racial and gendered capitalism and neoliberalism: individualism. We reflect on how individualism is associated with freedom, AKA “the West,” and contrasted with tradition, AKA “the rest.” We interrogate how it shows up in our personal lives and is built into our work—including NPIC and evaluation’s training, practice, and literature as well as existing field-building and change efforts.

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Vidhya Shanker Vidhya Shanker

What is The Power of Perspective?

In this episode, we discuss “The Power of Perspective: Generations of Evaluators Generating Change,” an interactive journey map featured at the 2022 American Evaluation Association conference. Rooted in popular education and critical pedagogy, it highlighted the suppression of critical voices in evaluation and connected participants’ lives to a lineage of resistance within the field. We discuss its development, installation, and reception, along with future plans, including digital platforms, workshops, university curricula, and ‘zines. Efforts to enhance accessibility, including language and disability justice, are part of the ongoing collaboration’s dreams.

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