The evaluative inquiry was proposed by Fochler and De Rijcke (2017) as a way to contribute to ongoing discussions about quality and relevance of research. Our team at CWTS (Leiden University, The Netherlands) has since then put the evaluative inquiry into practice in several projects, and this work informs this paper. Our ambition with these experiments in research evaluation is, in essence, to enable better conversations about academic value and its beneficiaries and rewards, rather than to further encourage "accounting for impact" (Rushforth and De Rijcke, 2015) by way of standardised formats and rankings.

This article discusses a number, 6.15%, as it comes into being in the course of an evaluation study of education in a southern Afghan province. This number indicates that out of 100 school-aged girls 6.15 go to school. While this kind of number may invite refl ections on its epistemic accuracy, more often it draws attention to its inherent negative — the girls that do not go to school — substantiating a need for sustained international commitment. As this article will show, numbers work to establish girls as research entities, as part of populations, and as a concern for the Afghan government and the international intervention. This interfacing work of numbers — between girls, states, interventions, and research protocols — is often absent from academic work that takes numbers to be stable and passive tools with which the world can be known. This article, instead, takes numbers to have an internally complex multiplicity and to actively engage with their environments. In this article, I use the interface between numbers and environment as a space for ethnographic exploration of world-making. By describing three moments in the lifecycle of the number — data cleaning, analysis and presentation — I describe three distinct moments of interfacing in which the number comes to act in three capacities: effecting reference, constituting proportional comparison, and evoking doubt and certainty. Detailed understanding of numbering practices provides an opportunity to not just critically assess numbers as end products but to carefully assess the worlds that emerge alongside numbering practices and the ways in which numbers contribute in processes of governance.

Since the summer of 2020, researchers from ten projects pertaining to the Horizon2020 Science with and for Society (SwafS) call have been meeting virtually as the SwafS14 Monitoring and Evaluation ecosystem. Topics of discussion were the trials and tribulations of their regional Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) projects as well as their strategies for monitoring and evaluation. In this paper we make a first attempt at presenting these issues as problems of translation between different kinds of stakeholders. After an exploration of the diversity of stakeholders and the process of translation in regional RRI, we suggest evaluative conversations as a way of improving regional RRI. We intend to develop this idea in the future and that these conversations will facilitate more responsible and engaged monitoring and evaluation and contribute to better R&I policies.

`Amr Khâlid, prédicateur en vogue au sein de la jeunesse cairote, doit une bonne part de son succès au fait qu’il répond aux attentes d’une jeunesse plutôt aisée, en quête de spiritualité mais pas prête à renoncer à ses avantages matériels pour autant. En analysant la trajectoire de ce jeune « shaykh » rompu à l’utilisation des nouveaux médias, cet article montre que l’innovation religieuse en Égypte est moins affaire de doctrine que de pratiques sociales où les dynamiques de l’individuation jouent un rôle central.

No abstract