Why evaluation could be a bit weirder—or, queering evaluation

“I’ve been trying to recruit people who are a bit weird,” Lauren said to me, soon after I started at String Theory in late 2022. 

I took it as a compliment. What else could I do, when it was coming from someone known for terrorising Fitzroy in an inflatable dinosaur suit? 

Over the last six months, I’ve been reflecting on why I feel so comfortable at String Theory, and why Loz’s unconventional approach to evaluation speaks to me. Her healthy abandonment of professional standards has not only been funny and refreshing but also affirming. I am not forcing myself to fit. 

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When I applied for my first graduate position in a research agency, I had no idea what to wear to the interview. An awkward dresser at the best of times, I was now stumped. I cobbled together an outfit that I did not like, but that I could at least move and breathe in: a long, roomy cotton skirt, Birkenstocks, and a lace top over a singlet. Sitting in the air-conditioned reception, I focused on breathing and relaxing my body, while researchers with blazers and suit pants and heels and lanyards came and went.  

A week later, the call came. While my interview had gone well, I’d not been selected. “We went with a candidate who was a bit more … professionally presented,” the woman said. “Someone who can hit the ground running.” 

Before the next interview, I went to Savers and bought a blazer that did not quite fit my broad shoulders.  

Clothing norms in white-collar work are often taken as self-evident, even though they are closely tied to white, middle-class notions of respectability. I absorbed these self-evident truths as I acclimatised to office culture and etiquette. Of course you need to dress ‘appropriately’ for a job interview. Of course you need to be ‘presentable’ for client meetings. You need to be ‘professional’ so that clients and managers will take you seriously.  

I learned that clothing signifies your apparent competence and your worthiness of respect. Faced with the possibility of being overlooked, I chose to fit the mould as best I could. 

The expectation to dress ‘appropriately’ for a ‘professional environment’ stayed with me into my eventual grad position and my next job. I squeezed myself into clothes that constricted my body and felt ‘off’. I was often uncomfortable at work. The lockdowns were a relief.

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4.01pm, 22 November, 2022: Lauren’s name materialised on my phone lock screen. 

Can you send me a photo to use as profile? It also can be a picture you really like, it doesn’t matter as long as you like it. SFW!!

I smirked. I’m not that wild, Loz. I re-read the message, though. Safe for work was the only parameter? Not ‘appropriate for work’, just … safe? 

It sank in: I could choose any photo. 

I had come out as trans a couple of months earlier and the photos I felt comfortable sharing were few. But there was one: a selfie I’d taken on impulse, when my newly shorn hair had finally fallen into line. In the photo, I stood in front of a brick wall, wearing a scarf and a washed black denim jacket. It was a photo that made me glow with the knowledge that this person was me. 

The text from Loz had a subtext. There is no mould for you to fit into here. Come to work as you are.

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What does it mean to ‘queer’ evaluation?

To me, it’s more than a primer on ‘how to do evaluation with LGBTQIA+ people’. I want to think about a queering of evaluation that doesn’t just tweak methodologies to be ‘more inclusive’ and ‘do no harm’, but which goes to the roots of evaluation’s paradigm.

Jory Catalpa defines queering evaluation as “an act of transforming, decentering, and disrupting social norms, reorienting focus towards subjectivities that mainstream society and research silences, erase, elides, and delegitimizes.” 

Evaluation’s social norms are steeped in colonial ways of being and knowing. As a discipline, evaluation still values positivist forms of knowing (neutrality and objective facts) and colonial ways of being and relating (hierarchy and separation between people/animals/nature). On the whole, it’s a practice that has become professionalised, corporatised and bureaucratised. 

What alternatives are there? How can we replace objectivity with perspective, hierarchy with anarchism, conformity with weirdness, seriousness with play?

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It’s 1.02pm and I’m sitting in Meeting Room B, waiting for Loz and George to arrive for a video call with a client. A pitter-patter of paws on polished concrete and they round the corner. Loz is in her exercise gear, fresh from a personal training session. “Sorry, I’m sweaty,” she says, pulling out a chair and setting down her coffee. 

George is mad with delight. He’s got his paws up on my knees, snorting and attempting to lick my palm. “Come on, you,” Loz says to him, positioning a chair so he can jump up between us. He’s so overcome that it takes a few tries before he makes the leap. He skids a little on his haunches as he lands on the seat. He nuzzles me for pats, smack bang in the middle of the video call. The client practically melts at the sight.  

There are few epistemological perspectives more elided in evaluation’s knowledge economy than that of animals. We are not kidding ourselves: George is definitely a dog, but his contribution to our work is undeniable, even though Loz rolls her eyes at him. 

“I like making people in my team and those working with us happy,” reads George’s bio on the String Theory website. A hefty two-year-old French bulldog, George brings with him an uncrushable playfulness wherever he goes: team meetings, client meetings, lunchtime walks. If he’s not trying to lick my ankle sensuously, he is writhing on the carpet, or drooling into my lap in an awkward position. He is charismatic, rambunctious and charming. I crack up whenever he is around. 

If the norms of evaluation and other white-collar work require the serious countenance of a professional, it so follows that playfulness is another form of queering evaluation. George’s presence is part of what turns that which might otherwise be dry and mundane into that which is mischief and lightness. 

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Colonialism and its attendant ways of being and knowing have not only oppressed First Nations people but have also contributed to the erasure and persecution of LGBTQIA+ people. It follows that a queered evaluation has a close affinity with decolonial evaluation.

In decolonial evaluation and research, it’s vital that marginalised communities have ownership of knowledge production that involves them. Yet it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that most evaluation and research is conducted by white, middle-class people for white, middle-class funders.

By expanding the ways of being and knowing that are valued and celebrated in workplaces, evaluation could be a work culture where more people feel they belong. I don’t just mean LGBTQIA+ folk, but anyone who has to mould themselves to fit white-collar work norms: First Nations mob, people of colour, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people. If we want to see a greater diversity of people in evaluation, those people need to feel they have inherent value and the right to be there.

Let there be many forms of dress, speech and gesture that are seen as ‘appropriate’ in evaluation work culture. And let there be many valued ways of knowing, whether these be academic, experiential, relational, creative or ludic. Let the workplace fit the person and not the other way around.