Date: Sunday, January 18, 2026
Hello-I’m Jill Chouinard, a professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. This past semester I taught a course in culturally responsive evaluation (CRE), what is for us the final course in the Graduate Certificate in Evaluation. This year I included a new assignment that asked students to write a short essay on the potential impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on culturally responsive practice. I asked students to look specifically at intersectionality, race, gender, age, ability, diversity of thought, all key considerations in CRE. How might AI change/alter CRE practices? Do you see AI as a benefit to CRE? If so, how? Alternatively, how might AI prove problematic? If so, how? Their submissions were critically reflective and thoughtfully composed. I was blown away! In the posts that follow, six students share some key insights from their assignments. But first, a few thoughts that motivated the creation of this new assignment.
The recent explosion of GenAI is quickly transforming the field of evaluation, providing new approaches in designing and implementing evaluations, ways of working with collaborators and partners, and new techniques for analyzing and disseminating findings. While many evaluators welcome the benefits GenAI will bring about in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, insight, productivity, and accuracy, its capacity to tackle huge amounts of data, automate repetitive tasks, and increase consistency and speed in interpreting results, others remain skeptical.
GenAI is not neutral, and with this new technology comes a great deal of uncertainty about ethical implications, concentrations of power, technological colonialism, lack of contextual, cultural and interpretive reasoning, potential harm in data privacy, informed consent, representation, accuracy, equity and equality, and paradigmatic tensions and conflicts with interpretivism.
As a culturally responsive evaluator, I have concerns about how this new technology will change how we construct knowledge, with GenAI quite clearly positivist in orientation, and concerns with epistemic justice in terms of who knows and how they come to know, who has access and who does not, leading to a greater separation between so-called experts in the availability and use of technology and others. As community-based researchers, the cost will be felt in our relationships with others in the co-construction of knowledge, particularly concerning in terms of culturally responsive practice and the use of interpretive ontologies.
I’m also concerned with who is constructing this new infrastructure (and why), and who is and is not included, not only in its production, but in its content. Ramesh Srinivasan, a Professor of Information Technology at UCLA wrote a compelling book entitled Whose Global Village: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World, where he vividly describes how this new technology ultimately perpetuates inequality globally.
I worry about what we are leaving behind as we move forward with this technology. While I recognize the inevitability of this new technology at this point in time, let’s not forget to keep an eye on the rearview mirror. As one of the students has written, “AI enters this space in complicated ways.” And it is because of this that, as culturally responsive researchers and evaluators, we need to think critically about this new and quickly evolving technology that is forever changing our world.
I love these books/lectures because they remind us that technology is not neutral and that technological innovation threatens to radically alter more than just the tools in our toolkit.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting GenAI and Culturally Responsive Evaluation week. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from students and faculty of the School of Public Administration‘s Graduate Certificate in Evaluation program at the University of Victoria. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.