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.

Why streams? What we have learned:

Post-conference surveys from recent AEA conferences consistently indicate that attendees—particularly first-time attendees—experience:

• Unpredictability in learning value
• Difficulty choosing between sessions across more than 50 TIGs
• Mismatch between session expectations and delivery
• Fatigue from navigating too many concurrent options

At the same time, financial and logistical realities now require a more coordinated and sustainable conference structure, including a centralized review process.

Streams were developed to provide a more coherent way to organize and structure the conference program. The Conference Advisory Working Group used post-conference evaluation data, past conference programs, and feedback from AEA members and TIG leaders to develop and refine the proposed streams.

How do I select which stream to submit my proposal to?

Select the stream that best reflects the primary purpose and learning focus of your session—not necessarily your TIG affiliation or topic area.

Each stream description includes guidance on intended content. While many proposals could reasonably fit more than one stream, we encourage you to identify the stream that most closely aligns with your session’s central contribution. The review process will ensure proposals are evaluated using consistent criteria regardless of stream.

Why is equity, culture, and justice in evaluation a separate stream? Why isn't it cross-cutting all streams?

Equity, culture, and justice remain important considerations across all evaluation work. The dedicated stream signals that equity-focused approaches, cultural responsiveness, and justice-centered practice are essential areas of professional learning that deserve clear visibility in the conference program.

At the same time, equity-related proposals may intersect with methods, innovation, or professional development. Streams are intended to clarify learning intent, not limit how topics connect across areas of practice.

Will streams replace TIGs?

No. TIGs remain vital communities within AEA. Streams are an organizing structure for proposal submission and conference navigation; TIGs continue to provide a professional community, curated sessions, reviewer expertise, and engagement throughout the year and at the conference.

TIG leaders and members are also encouraged to participate in shaping the conference program by serving as proposal reviewers and promoting high-quality submissions from their communities. Streams clarify how conference content is organized; TIGs continue to provide the community, expertise, and identity that strengthen the field.

Are the streams permanent?

Streams will be evaluated after implementation. As with other conference structures, adjustments may be made based on member feedback and experience.