Tanya Allport, Gill Potaka-Osborne, Mel Potaka-Osborne, and Teresa Taylor recently attended the 2023 Australian Evaluation Society's International Evaluation Conference in Brisbane, Queensland. The theme of this year's conference was ‘Through the Lens', celebrating the diversity of evaluative thinking and practice. The four sub-themes were:
The conference started with Welcome to Country by Billy Cummings. This was followed by AES (Australian Evaluation Society) President Kiri Parata, who officially opened the conference. Kiri, with the help of Sharon Clarke, the Cultural Capacity and Diversity Committee Chairperson, introduced the 20 successful recipients of the Conference Support Grants for Emerging Indigenous Evaluators. Kiri and Sharon have had a long relationship with Whakauae. Gill, Mel, and Teresa are past award recipients.
The first keynote speaker was Dr Maggie Walters, who spoke about the realities of evaluating in an Indigenous space. Maggie is a proud Palawa woman and Distinguished Professor of Sociology (Emerita) at the University of Tasmania. Maggie's keynote was entitled “Evaluation and the Indigenous lifeworld: Whose purpose; whose logic and whose reality?” Of particular interest was Maggie's use of the word ‘Fracasomania', which describes a policy mindset that has made a comfortable adjustment of policy failure. She talked about Albert Hirschman's notion that policy emanates from those outside of the community that is defined as having the problem; it is driven by a sense of urgency to solve the problem, and the motivation to solve the policy problem moves far ahead of the actual understanding of the problem and how this is reflected in Indigenous policy.
On the first day of the conference, Whakauae delivered two presentations under the ‘Reflect' sub-theme:
Both presentations created a space for other Indigenous evaluators to speak about issues for them and their communities.
The team attended the Conference Gala Awards Dinner on Thursday at Brisbane City Hall. The event was a great networking opportunity to make new friends and catch up with old friends. At this event, Awards Committee Chair Farida Fleming announced the Excellence Awards winners.
Other presentations that interested the team included a thought-provoking presentation entitled “Evaluating the unseen five years on ChatGPT, algorithms and machine learning” by Kirsty Hornby. Kirsty talked about how bias was perpetuated through these algorithms and could disadvantage indigenous populations. The team also attended a session by Jeff Adams and Anthea Rutter, who spoke about “Sharing evaluation practice through publication in the Evaluation Journal of Australasia”. This session encouraged the team to submit an article to this journal.
Potaka-Osborne, G., Allport, T., Taylor, T. (2023) He Whetū Arataki – growing Indigenous leadership. AES23 – International Evaluation Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 27-29 September 2023.
Potaka-Osborne, G., Potaka-Osborne, M. (2023) Shifting the gaze from white to brown: Indigenous pathways for indigenous evaluators. AES23 – International Evaluation Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 27-29 September 2023.
