Explore every episode of the podcast The May 13 Group PODCAST
Dive into the complete episode list for The May 13 Group PODCAST. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.
Rows per page:
50
1–6 of 6
Title
Pub. Date
Duration
September Announcement
10 Sep 2024
00:01:12
We're going to be taking a break this month, but we'll be back in October. In the meantime, you can stay connected with us on our website themay13group.net.
What is solidarity?
13 Aug 2024
00:54:33
Summary
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, who market ourselves in terms of how much more value we produce for the people who pay for our goods and services? Can we think of financial exchange differently? How could we organize accountability in knowledge work horizontally across class status—not necessarily around shared experiences of oppression, but rather around shared resistance against it?
In this episode, Carolina and Vidhya reflect on the tension among learning from the past, meeting immediate needs in the present, and both imagining and building a better future. We discuss evaluation’s origins as a tool for capital and grapple with our status as members of the professional/ managerial class. Folx with our training and current positionality find uncertainty “risky.” Whose interests do we ultimately serve? Could a solidarity economy offer evaluators a safety net or better fallback position from which to make collective demands—by organizing ourselves or joining existing movements that serve the working class?
24:44: It is racist in that there are no regular Black or indigenous characters. Additionally, although there IS an Asian adoptee and a Colombian immigrant character, the Asian adoptee is not old enough to speak for much of the show’s run. Jokes are made at Asians’ expense, including hers. Plots about the Colombian immigrant largely reinforce stereotypes about Latine women.
Nonprofit Industrial Complex: a set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class control with surveillance over public political ideology, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements (Rodriguez, 2006)
Scientific management brought the scientific method into managerial practice to address the loss that capital incurs through “inefficiency” in labor productivity
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, when 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?
19:45: Access to the written word provides an advantage only in hierarchical systems that devalue oral traditions and non-written languages and knowledge to justify the displacement of entire bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing and the corresponding domination of entire peoples who are portrayed as primitive or unfit to govern themselves
20:30: (Vidhya’s elaboration) Tamil language and culture predate Sanskrit and what people now call Hinduism. But the language that brahmins typically claim is Sanskrit. Though no longer spoken, Sanskrit is still used within Hindu hegemony in much the same way that Latin and Greek are used within European hegemony: to provide authority and legitimacy to specific ideas and practices and to discredit others.
23:15: The only time that there is not an adversarial relationship between workers and management is when workers are management, as in self-governed cooperatives
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them” (p. 139 of Assata: An autobiography, 1987; Lawrence Hill)
In this episode, we (hosts Vidhya Shanker and Carolina De La Rosa Mateo) introduce ourselves, share how our worlds came together, and discuss The May 13 Group. We talk about our personal histories inside and outside evaluation, the Minnesota IBPOC in Evaluation Community of Praxis, how The May 13 Group came to be, and what it could possibly become. We invite anyone who works in and around evaluation or other knowledge work (e.g., philanthropy, nonprofits, NGOs, government, academia) to take a listen and help craft the ecosystem!
1 correction: At the 45:34 mark, Vidhya misspoke by saying "before my generation and even before me" when she meant to say "before me and even before my generation."
References
Why is Evaluation So White? (90-min video of Center for Evaluation Innovation webinar that took place on 5/13/2020)
Pangea World Theater (comrades who helped create the stop-action play entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Culturally Competent, which led to the MN IBPOC in Evaluation Community of Praxis)
Theater of the Oppressed (playlist of videos ranging from 5 to 30 min on Augusto Boal and the performance traditions underlying The Revolution Will Not Be Culturally Competent)
The May 13 Group is an emerging ecosystem oriented toward—and energized by—epistemic healing and wholeness in, through, and around evaluation. 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.