Performing No More: Positionality, Power, and the Praxis of a Counter-Hegemonic Evaluation

Abstract

Entanglements of power and individual and collective commitments remain persistent issues for evaluation's potential impact. Dominant approaches have long operated hegemonically, privileging singular ways of knowing. Thus, concentrating epistemic authority in ways that silence community knowledge traditions and reproduce the very inequities evaluation is charged with examining. The need to confront internalized oppression and reevaluate power dynamics to shift them is a persistent blockage in the potential impact of evaluation. Though the shortcomings of positionality statements as performative gestures have received scholarly attention, the material conditions that prevent evaluators from enacting positionality in practice, and what they might do differently, remain underexplored. In this article, I call for culturally responsive and community-engaged approaches that resist extractive and constricting traditions. To operationalize this call, I offer a stage-specific framework that situates positionality as praxis across the stages of evaluation, providing evaluators with concrete and actionable guidance for enacting relational accountability at every phase of their work. When evaluators move beyond identity statements toward sustained, community-accountable praxis, positionality becomes a tool for dismantling the very systems of power that evaluation has too often upheld.