17/07/2024
American Journal of Evaluation
Ethics, Values, and Culture Section
Drs. Ayesha Boyce, Nicky Bowman, Gregory Phillips II
CALL FOR PAPERS Positionality in Evaluation (Due Sept 6, 2024; links below)
Elevating the voices of minoritized, marginalized, and underrepresented scholars, practitioners, and community members is a priority for us as Editors of the Ethics, Values, and Culture Section of the American Journal of Evaluation. As such, we are requiring all authors who submit manuscripts to our section to include a positionality statement. Positionality statements allow authors to intentionally reflect on their backgrounds and articulate their social identities (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation, religion) that are relevant to their scholarship. Positionality statements also allow readers to contextualize the content within journal articles, which is critical for understanding how data were collected, analyzed, and interpreted.
As positionality statements are relatively new to AJE, but are becoming increasingly common, we are releasing a call for manuscripts about positionality statements in evaluation. We are interested in receiving extended abstracts (500-750 words) from one or more authors who answer the following prompts:
• What is your positionality within evaluation?
• How do you utilize and bring forth your positionality in your own work?
• How much and what parts of your identity do you bring to your evaluation work?
o What do/don’t you expose, and why?
• How do these practices benefit the communities you are working with?
• Provide a case example: What does active positionality look like in practice?
• If more people did this, what could it mean for our field?
This special section will include a preface from the section editors reflecting on their own positionalities within the field of evaluation. We will also discuss why positionalities are needed for social science inquiry and evaluation. Some topics we will touch on include epistemicide, educational violence, and erasure in academia/evaluation; typical framing of voice and identity in social science inquiry; and upholding the sovereign rights of Indigenous peoples.
We encourage submissions from authors traditionally underrepresented in evaluation scholarship, including those under 40 years of age, those whose first language is not English, those who live outside the U.S., those who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community, those who are Black, Latine, and/or Indigenous, and those who have a disability. We are also interested in receiving abstracts and reflections from those with many identities that also afford them privilege. Manuscript authors should not only reflect on their minoritized identities, but also their privileged positions in society. We seek authors who will also unpack their positions of privilege by boldly and vulnerably discussing the contexts and pathways that privilege has served them and how they have become allies over time to unlearn, learn, and re-learn how to use their components of privilege to make room, advocate, and support evaluation policy, publishing, funding, and practices that are by, for, and with communities different than them. Please submit abstracts HERE by September 6th, 2024 https://forms.gle/iybZoh3CsAkEcaAQ9
We will send notifications of acceptance by September 20th, 2024. The first drafts of the full manuscript (roughly 2,000 – 3,000 words) will be due December 13th, 2024. We expect to go through one round of reviews with section editors and then manuscripts will be sent for peer-review in February or March 2025. We welcome questions or inquiries from interested authors. Section editors will provide copy-editing support for those who are invited to submit a full manuscript.
Click here for example positionality statements from the section editors: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VzRXo8NcxBJ-qZtPXRt0Zn0ezrnJ3RFg/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103205430842784099744&rtpof=true&sd=true
Click here for some resources about positionality: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VuafZytxzjrvgD3MsN4yJ-pd_G8dQoW-/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103205430842784099744&rtpof=true&sd=true
