'And what is the Center for Applied Local Research?'
Mike
Thanks mike,
We are a small non-profit research and consulting company in the Bay Area
doing mostly program evaluations and proposals for the Counties and other
non-profits. Web: http://www.cal-research.org
Here is a brief background:
1. I was drawn to CHAT by your collective sense of commitment to better ways
of learning and teaching, your frank and warm listserve, and my curiosity
about what can I get out of CHAT and apply if to program evaluation.
2. our evaluation approach is based on constructing evaluation agenda and
criteria for success (and failure) from the experience of the local program
itself--staff, clients, community, etc. this is of course in opposition to
the traditional funder-mandated use of predetermined criteria. With the w
admin's move to even centrally plan the 'scientific method' and impose the
'gold standard' of random assignment, as Jay and Eugene mentioned, we are
breathing the recycled dirty air from 1930,s Europe!
3. What I found most helpful for local programs is to respect and explore
ways to add to their sense of 'self-determination.' eg, by using evaluation
activities and process and turning it into a collective tasks that are
empowering the staff and the program, while generating data for evaluation
too. (Sorry about being too general on this--you may not be that interested
in this kind of stuff.)
4. Translating into CHAT: generally, evaluation process is turned into a
tool (actions and concepts) mediating with the program itself--as a dynamic
feedback loop.
5. regarding jumping into your conversations, because you are a very
specialized group with specific interests-frankly, like a club, it is not
easy to 'jump in.' while I enjoy and learn from many of your posts, most of
them, to an outsider like me, seem 'too technical'. This is an observation
that applies to any tight professional group, or friends. Otherwise, you
will not be in it, in the first place!
6. here is my 2 cents outsider, naïve and humble view on CHAT: from my
self-interest spatial perspective, I see a great potential for theoretically
integrating CHAT with Henry Lefebvre and Soja's spatial theories. Kevin
Leander's article was the most interesting to me. Because it brought into
CHAT what it lacks--a geographical imagination. Out of the three windows of
human sciences, CHAT is strong in the social and historical
'imaginations'--the most traditionally developed and accepted. Spatial or
geographical 'imagination' is least developed and most ignored, except for
Lefebvre, Harvey, and Soja's pioneering works (and others recently). This
geographical 'imagination' is weak in details in the historical and the
social imaginations. So there you have it. Here is the complementarity that
I see between both traditions that have a common base in critical theory and
in marx. Kevin's work was an excellent example to bring them together in a
case study. I love to see a conversation between Kevin's interest
inspatiality and Jay's interest in temporality!
7. one last thing for space! Because it is sui generous, like air, it has
mostly remained under the radar of general social theory and in personal
phenomenology. If anything globalization of any kind bring forward is its
spatial connectedness and all the things that go with it.
Let me end with a quote from Lefebvre for the New Year: "If you want to
create something new, first create a space for it [real and imagined]."
Cheers to all the CHATers!
iraj
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