The 2026 Plenary sessions will feature in-depth presentations that focus on this year’s theme: Evaluation Across Boundaries.
Wednesday, November 18
40 for 40: The Countdown to What's Next
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
As evaluators, we know that the ideal time to assess any program is right at a milestone—and 40 years is no exception.
This is not your usual opening plenary. AEA members Dr. Nina Sabarre and Dr. Monique Liston are bringing the energy of a live Top 40 countdown to the AEA stage—except this one tracks the ideas and people that changed how we measure what matters.
From #40 to #1, we will celebrate people, ideas, methods, moments, and movements that shape evaluation and the forces that will propel AEA forward.
Expect surprises, dissenting opinions, audience participation, nostalgia, and beautifully controlled chaos. Sounds like your run-of-the-mill evaluation project to us!
It is a live show, a love letter, and a 40th-anniversary countdown. Come ready to cheer, debate the list, and celebrate 40 years of evaluation community and leadership!
Emcees:
- Nina Sabarre, Ph.D., Founder & CEO at Intention 2 Impact, Inc.
- Monique Liston, Ph.D., Founder, Chief Strategist and Joyful Militant at UBUNTU Research and Evaluation
Thursday, November 19
Evaluation Across Human and Artificial Boundaries: Rethinking What Evaluators Need to Know and Be
8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
From supporting evaluation design to generating insights, increasing efficiency, and creating new possibilities for communicating and using findings, artificial intelligence is rapidly expanding what evaluators can do. AI is already part of the landscape in which we learn, work, and practice evaluation. The question is no longer simply whether AI belongs in evaluation, but how we harness its possibilities thoughtfully while remaining attentive to its limitations and consequences. As technological capabilities grow, this moment invites us to reconsider not only what evaluators need to know and do, but also what evaluators need to be.
Bringing together artificial intelligence, evaluator education, and culturally responsive evaluation, this keynote explores what should guide evaluation as we move across human and artificial boundaries. What becomes more important about culture and context, values and power, relationships, reflexivity, and evaluative judgment as AI augments aspects of our practice? What new capabilities do evaluators need, and what foundational commitments must remain? Rather than asking us to choose between technological advancement and human-centered evaluation, this keynote considers how we can bring them together and how doing so might help us prepare evaluators, seasoned and emerging alike, not simply to adapt to the future of evaluation, but to help shape it.
Speaker:
- Dr. Ayesha Boyce, Professor at Arizona State University
Friday, November 20
Indigenous Evaluation: Ancestral Practice In Action
3:15 - 4:45 p.m.
American Indian and Alaska Native peoples have practiced evaluation since time immemorial—observing, interpreting, adapting, and passing knowledge from the past into the future to sustain thriving communities. Indigenous evaluation begins with this truth: we carry the answers to all questions in our stories, our lands, our relationships, and our blood memory. This keynote will challenge the boundaries that have separated Indigenous knowledge from science, stories from evidence, and love from scientific rigor. Drawing upon the Urban Indian Health Institute’s Indigenous Evaluation Framework, this presentation will demonstrate how Indigenous communities are reclaiming authority over how our stories are collected, interpreted, and used. Participants will explore evaluation grounded in reciprocity, consent, community accountability, data sovereignty, and strength. Together, we will move beyond documenting historical trauma toward advancing historical healing—gathering what colonization attempted to break and stitching it together into bold patterns of culture, resilience, beauty, and collective action.
Speaker:
- Abigail Echo-Hawk, Director at Urban Indian Health Institute and Executive Vice President at Seattle Indian Health Board