Troubling calls for evidence: A critical race, class and gender analysis of whose evidence counts

Abstract

Writing in the spirit of feminist psychologists who have historically refused to narrow the gaze of our craft, I want to cast a critical eye on popular calls for 'evidence-based practice' and more specifically research epistemologies funded to produce such evidence. Surrounded by sprawling debris reflecting the gendered, raced, classed and sexualized collateral damage of economic and political crisis, I find it most peculiar that psychologists have eagerly answered calls for 'evidence' - without a pause for asking: Why now? Whose evidence counts? What kinds of evidence are being privileged? What are we not seeing? As psychologists seek to produce 'evidence' of program effectiveness in contexts of huge inequality gaps in which state supports are being cut, funding streams, publication mandates, Impact Factors and high tier journals actively encourage researchers to narrow our focus on a discrete set of standardized indicators, drawn from random assignment of 'subjects' to 'conditions,' thereby whiting out the non-random cumulative landscape of injustice, resilience and resistance. © The Author(s) 2011.