Rethinking evaluation of research from feminist perspectives

This chapter addresses the complexities and problematics of contemporary approaches to evaluating research in the context of feminisms and qualitative research. We propose that research practices connected to feminism, ecologies of relationality, posthumanism, anthropocentricism, politics and postcolonialism necessitate a different approach to the ‘quality question’. This approach included elements of plurality, radical imagination, and speculative practices in the evaluation process. The future of evaluation must remain open, continuously shifting, situated, multiple, and complex - like the complexity of our current socio-political worlds and systems. Evaluations of this kind could also involve the researcher problematizing themself, by asking questions about their purposes, structures and processes, and considering the ecologies and stakeholders involved in evaluation. Rather than focusing on the object of evaluation, we suggest that evaluation is a relational, speculative process guided by discourses of usefulness, communal value, responsibility, and the potential for future thinking associated with scholarly inquiry.