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Public Administration

GenAI and Culturally Responsive Evaluation Week on AEA365

January 19, 2026

It's a blog takeover! The American Evaluation Association is hosting 'GenAI and Culturally Responsive Evaluation' week on the AEA365 blog - featuring blog posts every day for 8 days from faculty and students in our very own Graduate Certificate in Evaluation program. In the first post, SPA Director Jill Anne Chouinard set's the stage for the week, providing context and inspiration for a critical examination of GenAI and its potential impacts on culturally responsive evaluation.

GenAI and Culturally Responsive Evaluation Week: An Evaluation Class Reflects on the Potential Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Culturally Responsive Evaluation

by Dr. Jill Chouinard

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, 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 of the 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 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 rear-view 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.

Rad Resources:

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.

💡Read this post on AEA365 here: https://aea365.org/blog/genai-week-an-evaluation-class-reflects-on-the-potential-impact-of-artificial-intelligence-and-culturally-responsive-evaluation-by-jill-chouinard/)
📫Check AE365 everyday Jan 18-25 to watch the conversation unfold! https://aea365.org/blog/