#25.1 AES26 Making Space, Valuing Place: Day 1 - Reflect. Reflect. Reflect.

But a little bit on where we are.

The Larrakia are the traditional owners of the lands and waters around Darwin.

They call themselves Saltwater People, and their country stretches along the harbor and out to the coast and the Cox Peninsula.

Larrakia people were at the front of the land rights movements in this country.

1972, they gathered signatures for a petition to the Queen asking for recognition of their land, and the Kenbi land claim they lodged a few years later took nearly 40 years to resolve.

Now, layered over that experience is then the settler city that most people know.

Uh, Darwin was originally founded as Palmerston in 1869.

It was renamed to Darwin in 1911.

Uh, it's been-- It was bombed in 1942, uh, during the Second World War, and it was flattened by Cyclone Tracy on Christmas Eve in 1974 before being rebuilt.

It's a place that's h-had to think hard about what it values and how it recovers more than once.

This makes it a fitting home for this year's theme, Making Space, Valuing Place.

The committee's framing is about making space for multiple disciplines, methodologies and worldviews, and about valuing place by creating space for the many different perspectives a-and understandings of place, uh, to be held and listened to by the many different people that are in attendance.

I think this year's conference theme, more than many, uh, has really centered, uh, and tried to honor the Indigenous, uh, worldviews and knowledge systems that we can all benefit from spending time learning more about.

The program is organized around four strands, traditions and new ways, ethics and integrity, boundaries and bridges, and roots and routes.

Now, if you wanna learn a little bit more about the background behind this, there is a, a, uh, podcast episode with, uh, Cristobal D'Arcy and Alison Reedy, um, who are kind of talking a little bit more about, uh, the kind of understandings of, of, um, what they want to achieve at the conference.

But why does a theme like this matter for evaluation as a field? Oftentimes, I think conference themes can be a bit, uh, superficial, a bit surface level, um, but I think we need to kind of bring ourselves back to this understanding that actually every single decision we make about the way the conference is designed is a decision.

And ultimately, this year's theme, uh, is one that matters because e-evaluation is, at its core, a practice about making judgments about value, and value is never placeless.

What counts as a good outcome in Darwin is not necessarily what counts in Canberra or Melbourne or Suva or, or any other place.

Beyond this, uh, is my place or the way in which I understand what my place is different to yours.

Uh, can we both have different understandings of place in the context of the same space? Are spaces only one thing, or can spaces and places be many things to many different people? Uh, our methods, our timelines, and our reporting formats, you know, they've all emerged from requirements that have been set by others elsewhere, uh, and they carry assumptions about what is important, uh, with them, with them as well.

So a theme like this is asking us to notice those assumptions rather than treat them as neutral.

But it's also naming something the field doesn't always give itself room.

Conferences, and in particular the Australian Evaluation Conference, is one of the, and I do, yes, joke about this, but it is one of the highlights of my year.

These conferences are one of the few places where evaluators step out of delivery mode or out of doing the work and timelines and deadlines and reports, uh, and we get to ask ourselves some of the bigger questions.

We make space for ourselves to ask questions that really, really matter.