Response-ability: re-E-valuing shameful measuring processes within the Australian Academy

Evaluative practices dominate contemporary conditions of existence for academics in higher education. These measures are reductive and limit knowledge-making capacity. This chapter considers the concept of evaluation (linked to measurement) as dynamic and of consequence. In an experimental methodological approach, we read ‘evaluation’ through two of our own personally stultifying and shameful encounters within the Australian academy. This critique does not simply oppose evaluative methods but opens up a discussion that allows the conceptualisation of evaluation as mattering otherwise. We promote an ethics of affect in relation to the performance of academics as knowledge makers by considering how consequences of practices are always co-constituted. Evaluation processes are re-conceptualised response-ably, to build capacity for a diversity of knowledges and to matter otherwise.