Conference Streams: Supporting Learning and Community
Streams provide a learning-focused structure for organizing sessions, reducing duplication, and creating clearer pathways for attendees with different interests and needs. At the same time, they are designed to complement the community-building roles of TIGs and other member networks rather than replace them. As a result, this structure supports a more coherent conference experience while sustaining the connections, relationships, and shared identities that are central to AEA.
We recognize that the topic you address in your submission may fit in multiple streams. However, when selecting a stream for submission, you should select the stream that aligns with the primary focus of your submission.
Stream 1: Foundations and Core Practice
This stream focuses on the foundational knowledge and practices that ground the evaluation profession. Sessions explore core competencies, ethical practice, professional standards, theory-informed evaluation, and the day-to-day realities of evaluation work across contexts. By engaging with shared principles and practical challenges, this stream supports both professional learning and a common understanding of what it means to practice evaluation well.
Stream 2: Design, Methods, Evidence, and Use
This stream focuses on methodological learning and design choices that produce credible, useful evidence to support evaluation learning, use, and influence. Sessions explore qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods; experimental and non-experimental designs; measurement, analysis, and emerging approaches to evidence, including AI methods; and evaluation use and influence. Through shared exploration of methods and design tradeoffs, this stream builds a community of practice around methodological rigor, innovation, and fit-for-purpose evaluation.
Stream 3: Equity, Culture, and Justice in Evaluation
This stream highlights sessions that foreground equity, cultural responsiveness, and justice across contexts. Sessions explore how culture, power, history, identity, and evaluator positionality shape evaluation questions, relationships, methods, interpretation, and use. Content emphasizes cultural competence as an ongoing stance rather than a fixed achievement, engaging diverse communities with humility and critical self-reflection, and recognizing that there are myriad ways of knowing. Sessions may address culturally responsive, Indigenous, participatory, and community-centered approaches; equity-focused and justice-oriented frameworks; and critical systems perspectives, underscoring that culture and reflexivity are integral to ethical, high-quality evaluation practice.
Stream 4: Innovation, Complexity, Systems, and Futures
This stream focuses on evaluation in or of dynamic systems and/or uncertain environments or contexts. Sessions explore systems thinking, complexity-awareness, developmental approaches, innovative methods, technology-enabled evaluation, futures-oriented thinking, and foresight approaches. These sessions examine evaluation through seemingly non-traditional lenses, sharing perspectives on the non-linear nature of evaluation, how to center adaptation/experimentation to make sense of complexity, and how to look forward to what could be to help make decisions today.
Stream 5: Building Professional Community Within and Beyond AEA
This stream centers explicitly on the people and relationships that sustain the evaluation profession. Sessions focus on professional identity, career pathways, mentoring, leadership development, collaboration, and community building within and beyond AEA. This stream reinforces learning through shared experience while strengthening the networks and relationships that support evaluators across career stages and contexts.