Part 1: 'Rhetorics of reaction' in today’s Brazil

In his book The Rhetoric of Reaction. Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, Albert O. Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of the rhetoric of intransigence in which public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing against progressive agendas and reforms. His analytical framework proves very adapted to understand contemporary dynamics in Brazil, as explored in the first part of the seminar by Mario Luis Grangeia. 

Part 2: Evaluation of development projects: lessons from the work of Judith Tendler

Judith Tendler (1938-2016) was a development economist who, as consultant for international development agencies combined in an original way scholarship in the social sciences and professional work. She was able to extract theoretical concepts from field exploration that she used in her fruitful and extraordinary “teaching cum research”, especially with graduate students at MIT. Since her Ph.D. dissertation, conducted under the supervision of Albert Hirschman, she worked out her unconventional way of looking at reality: she suggested to “look at any successes with a sense of awe (...) explaining what is happening against a background of what is predictable and what is a surprise”.

In the second part of the seminar, Nicoletta Stame will delve into Tendler’s contribution, discussing the fields for which she has been a forerunner for a large group of evaluators (from fieldwork to theory-based evaluation, to positive thinking) and those for whom she kept being provocative by proposing something “new and good” for the ongoing evaluation debate: on independence and ethical issues, on theories of change, and on evaluation designs and methods.

• Mario Luis Grangeia is a visiting researcher at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, with a project about official images of social policy in Brazil and South Africa associated with the SNF project on elites and inequalities led by Prof. Graziella Moraes Silva. He is also a communication adviser in the Brazilian Federal Prosecution Service and was a research fellow at the Escola Superior do Ministério Público da União, Fundação Biblioteca Nacional (Brazil) and Centro Nacional de Cultura (Portugal). In his Ph.D. dissertation in Sociology (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), he focused on governmental rhethoric about inequality in Brazil. 
   

• Nicoletta Stame is co-founder of the A Colorni Hirschman Institute and professor of social policy at Sapienza University of Rome. She was a co-founder and first president of the Italian Evaluation Association. She was subsequently the president of the European Evaluation society.  She is a member of the editorial board of “Evaluation. The International Journal of  Evaluation Theory and Methodology”.  Her recent publications include Valutazione possibilista  (2016), Beautiful Pages by Judith Tendler (2018), The Evaluation Enterprise, a Critical View (2019). 

For participants who will attend the event in person: please register in advance in order to ensure seating availability and to get information about the sandwich lunch organised before the seminar.

PLEASE NOTE: Access to indoor public events is limited to attendees with a Swiss or European COVID certificate. In addition, face masks must be worn to all in-person events at the Graduate Institute.