Sankofa Reflections on Bridging Ethnography and Evaluation

Abstract

This concluding chapter provides a historical reflection of my bridging theories of ethnography and evaluation and the mentor guides who influenced this initial work from Charlottesville, VA, to Baltimore, MD, to Pittsburgh, PA. In reflecting on these Sankofa reflections by looking backward and forward, just as the Adinkra bird symbol illustrates, I highlight key lessons learned in doing ethnography as a doctoral and postdoctoral student, which sparked my initial conceptual and bridging work in public health, anthropology of education, and evaluation. My nascent ideas were fostered with advisors and mentors, Dell Hymes and Michael Agar, who themselves were bridging and leveraging theories and concepts from vast (inter)disciplinary networks and experiences in the field. The featured manuscripts below were meant to illustrate the ethnography-evaluation connections that I thought were so necessary then for my own understandings and lay fodder for the coalescing transformative, intersectional, and comparative themes of the book. Fast forward 25 years and the themes that I garnered as a “fair-haired youth” in the field are now more mature as reflected by the authors of this important and timely book. The beauty of the volume of chapters that preceded this conclusion is their conceptual depth toward notions, especially positionality, criticality, authenticity, and reciprocity. As such, I take these overarching concepts that are embedded in the chapters like the Sankofa bird's feet – with an eye toward the future. The concepts illustrated in the book do not reside in only one chapter but reflect a commonality across chapters and common concepts discussed in the overall volume.

Citation

Hopson, R. (2024), "Sankofa Reflections on Bridging Ethnography and Evaluation", Goodnight, M.R. and Hopson, R. (Ed.) Theories Bridging Ethnography and Evaluation (Studies in Educational Ethnography, Vol. 20), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 157-168. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-210X20240000020015