The Impact of HIV/AIDS on the University of Botswana: Developing a Comprehensive Strategic Response

Health Economics and Policy,

The Commitment Mural: Let’s Decolonize Evaluation Together

In this mural we demonstrate liberation of evaluation from normalized publication structures. The article is a challenge to publication structures, more specifically journals, to open space for diversity of expression of thought. In this mural,  practitioners, academics, policymakers, development partners, VOPEs (Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluations), speak to the strategies to decolonize evaluation. The immediate impact of this mural is a demonstrated commitment to decolonize evaluation by more than 50 individuals and entities. Taking up the commitment will be a demonstrable change that came with the mural. The mural also provides an open space for the exchange of ideas, and strategies to decolonize evaluation. Moreover, the contributing voices are preserved in their own voices and their contribution to global knowledge production is acknowledged. This is indeed a departure from the ethics of confidentiality in research where the participants in an evaluation inquiry largely remain anonymous even in the co-creation of knowledge. We believe that when participants in an evaluation inquiry come across their commitments in evaluation journals, they are encouraged to further form coalitions with like minds and hold themselves accountable collectively to liberate evaluation from the remnants of colonialism

Sounding Situated Knowledges - Echo in Archaeoacoustics

This article proposes that feminist epistemologies via Donna Haraway's “Situated Knowledges” can be productively brought to bear upon theories of sonic knowledge production, as “sounding situated knowledges.” Sounding situated knowledges re-reads debates around the “nature of sound” with a Harawayan notion of the “natureculture of sound.” This aims to disrupt a traditional subject-object relation which I argue has perpetuated a pervasive “sonic naturalism” in sound studies. The emerging field of archaeoacoustics (acoustic archaeology), which examines the role of sound in human behaviour in archaeology, is theorized as an opening with potentially profound consequences for sonic knowledge production which are not currently being realized. The echo is conceived as a material-semiotic articulation, which akin to Haraway's infamous cyborg, serves as a feminist figuration which enables this renegotiation. Archaeoacoustics research, read following Haraway both reflectively and diffractively, is understood as a critical juncture for sound studies which exposes the necessity of both embodiedness and situatedness for sonic knowledge production. Given the potential opened up by archaeoacoustics through the figure of echo, a critical renegotiation of the subject-object relation in sound studies is suggested as central in further developing theories of sonic knowledge production

Special Issue Editors' Introductory Note: The Why and How of the Decolonization Discourse

The theme of the special issue decolonizing evaluation: towards a fifth paradigm,  an initiative of the International Evaluation academy (IEA), was inspired by the concerns that while evaluation reports largely tell stories of success, on the ground there is minimal change, communities remain impoverished, interventions cause harm to the environment and evaluation allow that to happen