Topicality

Shell
The affirmative should defend a topical plan.
(INSERT APPROPRIATE T VIOLATION USING TOPICALITY
FILE)
Their interpretation is bad:
Plans are good: they are falsifiable and put a clear burden on
the negative to prove the plan is worse than the status quo or a
competitive counterplan any other advocacy is not stable.
Limits: the negative should have to disprove desirability of a
policy action implemented within the bounds of the resolution
otherwise, the floodgates are opened to an infinite number of
advocacies.
Limits are key to a worthwhile debate otherwise the negative is
not prepared, clash is impossible, and the round becomes a onesided lecture only a dialogic exchange can accrue educational
benefits.
Hanghj, University of Bristol Author, 08
[Thorkild Hanghj, author affiliated with Danish Research Centre on Education and
Advanced Media Materials, research the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and
Interactive Technologies (L-KIT), the Institute of Education at the University of Bristol
and the institute formerly known as Learning Lab Denmark at the School of Education,
2008 (PLAYFUL KNOWLEDGE: An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming,
University of Southern Denmark, p. 50-51 Available Online at
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_udda
nnelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf)
Debate games are often based on pre-designed scenarios that include descriptions of
issues to be debated, educational goals, game goals, roles, rules, time frames etc. In this
way, debate games differ from textbooks and everyday classroom instruction as debate
scenarios allow teachers and students to actively imagine, interact and communicate
within a domain-specific game space. However, instead of mystifying debate games as a
magic circle (Huizinga, 1950), I will try to overcome the epistemological dichotomy
between gaming and teaching that tends to dominate discussions of educational
games. In short, educational gaming is a form of teaching. As mentioned, education and
games represent two different semiotic domains that both embody the three faces of
knowledge: assertions, modes of representation and social forms of organisation (Gee,
2003; Barth, 2002; cf. chapter 2). In order to understand the interplay between these
different domains and their interrelated knowledge forms, I will draw attention to a

central assumption in Bakhtins dialogical philosophy. According to Bakhtin, all forms of

communication and culture are subject to centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin,
1981). A centripetal force is the drive to impose one version of the truth, while a
centrifugal force involves a range of possible truths and interpretations. This means that
any form of expression involves a duality of centripetal and centrifugal forces: Every
concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as
centripetal forces are brought to bear (Bakhtin, 1981: 272). If we take teaching as an
example, it is always affected by centripetal and centrifugal forces in the on-going
negotiation of truths between teachers and students. In the words of Bakhtin: Truth is
not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between
people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction
(Bakhtin, 1984a: 110). Similarly, the dialogical space of debate games also embodies
centrifugal and centripetal forces. Thus, the election scenario of The Power Game
involves centripetal elements that are mainly determined by the rules and outcomes of
the game, i.e. the election is based on a limited time frame and a fixed voting procedure.
Similarly, the open-ended goals, roles and resources represent centrifugal elements and
create virtually endless possibilities for researching, preparing, presenting, debating
and evaluating a variety of key political issues. Consequently, the actual process of
enacting a game scenario involves a complex negotiation between these
centrifugal/centripetal forces that are inextricably linked with the teachers and students
game activities. In this way, the enactment of The Power Game is a form of teaching that
combines different pedagogical practices (i.e. group work, web quests, student
presentations) and learning resources (i.e. websites, handouts, spoken language) within
the interpretive frame of the election scenario. Obviously, tensions may arise if there is
too much divergence between educational goals and game goals. This means that game
facilitation requires a balance between focusing too narrowly on the rules or facts of a
game (centripetal orientation) and a focusing too broadly on the contingent possibilities
and interpretations of the game scenario (centrifugal orientation). For Bakhtin, the
duality of centripetal/centrifugal forces often manifests itself as a dynamic between
monological and dialogical forms of discourse. Bakhtin illustrates this point with the
monological discourse of the Socrates/Plato dialogues in which the teacher never learns
anything new from the students, despite Socrates ideological claims to the contrary
(Bakhtin, 1984a). Thus, discourse becomes monologised when someone who knows and
possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error, where a
thought is either affirmed or repudiated by the authority of the teacher (Bakhtin, 1984a:
81). In contrast to this, dialogical pedagogy fosters inclusive learning environments that
are able to expand upon students existing knowledge and collaborative construction of
truths (Dysthe, 1996). At this point, I should clarify that Bakhtins term dialogic is
both a descriptive term (all utterances are per definition dialogic as they address other
utterances as parts of a chain of communication) and a normative term as dialogue is an
ideal to be worked for against the forces of monologism (Lillis, 2003: 197-8). In this
project, I am mainly interested in describing the dialogical space of debate games. At the
same time, I agree with Wegerif that one of the goals of education, perhaps the most
important goal, should be dialogue as an end in itself (Wegerif, 2006: 61).

A stasis point is key to debate we offer the only one rooted in

the resolution.

Shively, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2K [Ruth Lessl, Assistant
Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2000 Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p.
182-3)

The point may seem trite, as surely the ambiguists would agree that basic terms must be
shared before they can be resisted and problematized. In fact, they are often very candid
about this seeming paradox in their approach: the paradoxical or "parasitic" need of the
subversive for an order to subvert. But admitting the paradox is not helpful if, as usually
happens here, its implications are ignored; or if the only implication drawn is that order
or harmony is an unhappy fixture of human life. For what the paradox should tell us is
that some kinds of harmonies or orders are, in fact, good for resistance; and some ought
to be fully supported. As such, it should counsel against the kind of careless rhetoric
that lumps all orders or harmonies together as arbitrary and inhumane. Clearly some
basic accord about the terms of contest is a necessary ground for all further contest. It
may be that if the ambiguists wish to remain full-fledged ambiguists, they cannot admit
to these implications, for to open the door to some agreements or reasons as good and
some orders as helpful or necessary, is to open the door to some sort of rationalism.
Perhaps they might just continue to insist that this initial condition is ironic, but that the
irony should not stand in the way of the real business of subversion. Yet difficulties
remain. For and then proceed to debate without attention to further agreements. For
debate and contest are forms of dialogue: that is, they are activities premised on the
building of progressive agreements. Imagine, for instance, that two people are having an
argument about the issue of gun control. As noted earlier, in any argument, certain
initial agreements will be needed just to begin the discussion. At the very least, the two
discussants must agree on basic terms: for example, they must have some shared sense
of what gun control is about; what is at issue in arguing about it; what facts are being
contested, and so on. They must also agreeand they do so simply by entering into
debatethat they will not use violence or threats in making their cases and that they are
willing to listen to, and to be persuaded by, good arguments. Such agreements are simply
implicit in the act of argumentation.

The impact is decision-making skills - focused deliberation is key

to informed opponents that are adequately prepared to debate.
Steinberg, University of Miami, and Freeley, John Caroll University, 8
[Austin L. and David L., 2/13/2008, Argumentation and Debate: Critical
Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, 12th edition,
http://teddykw2.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/argumentation-anddebate.pdf, p. 43-44]

Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a

conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a fact or
value or policy, there is no need for debate; the matter can be settled by unanimous
consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate Resolved: That
two plus two equals four, because there is simply no controversy about this statement.
Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas,
proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition,
debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or
questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad
topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants are in the United States?
What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is
their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from
American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem
that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal
immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity to
gain citizenship? Does illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do
illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights
as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by
employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are their families impacted
by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to
maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a
national identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite
immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be
addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in
this debate is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be
productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line
demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively,
controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused
deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by
the failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate
during the summer of 2007.Someone disturbed by the problem of a growing underclass
of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, Public schools are
doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in
their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain
order in their classrooms. That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of
issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as We ought to do something about
this or, worse, Its too complicated a problem to deal with. Groups of concerned
citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their
frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a
focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education
without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But
if a precise question is posedsuch as What can be done to improve public
education?then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a
focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased
in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for
legislative assemblies. The statements Resolved: That the federal government should
implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities and Resolved: That the
state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program more clearly identify specific

ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate.
They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points
of difference.

Shell
1. Interpretationthe affirmative should defend a federal
government policy that ____
A. Colon means USFG is the Agent
Army Officer School 2004 (5-12, # 12, Punctuation The Colon and Semicolon,
http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)

The colon introduces the following: a.

A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is
an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The
company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one
or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you
learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues
for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is
fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's
motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam:

A formal
resolution, after the word "resolved:"Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor .
(colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g.

B. United States Federal Government should means the

debate is solely about the outcome of a policy established
by governmental means
Ericson 2003 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts California Polytechnic U., et
al., The Debaters Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each

topic contains certain key

elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions . 1. An
agent doing the acting ---The United States in The United States should adopt a policy of free
trade. Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The
verb shouldthe first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb
combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though
governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for
example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs,
discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing
has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do,
then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to
perform the future action that you propose.

2. Vote Neg
A) Limits Specific, limited resolutions ensure mutual
ground which is key to sustainable controversy without
sacrificing creativity or openness
Steinberg & Freeley 2008
*Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, AND **David L.
Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned
Decision Making pp45-

Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or

a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact

there is no need for debate: the matter can be settled by

unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate
"Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply no controversy about
this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no
clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In
addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification
of a question or questions to be answered . For example, general argument may occur
about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants are in the
United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is
their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American
or value or policy,

workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak
English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by
not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal

Do illegal immigrants do work that

American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at
immigration pose a security threat to our country?

risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low
are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state
to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border , establish a national
identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become

Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a

conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this
"debate" is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be
productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification
of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively,
controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in
unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as
evidenced by the failure of the United States Congress to make progress on
the immigration debate during the summer of 2007 . Someone disturbed by
the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially
disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible
job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best
U.S. citizens?

teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned
citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do

Groups of concerned
citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to
express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but
without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry
state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A
gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posedsuch as "What can be
done to improve public education?"then a more profitable area of discussion is
opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution
step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate
propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative
assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of
something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with."

charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school
voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a

They provide specific policies to be investigated

and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. To have a productive
debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the
manageable form, suitable for debate.

decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined . If we merely
talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we
are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable
basis for argument. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the pen is
mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear
argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical
force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or
physical force for a specific purpose. Although

we now have a general subject, we have not

It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument.

What sort of writing are we concerned with poems, novels, government documents,
website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context?
yet stated a problem.

What kind of physical force is being comparedfists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what?
A more specific question might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective

The basis for argument could be

phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved : That the United States
should enter into a mutual defense treatv with Laurania." Negative advocates
might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better
solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative
interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over
competing interpretations of the controversy ; in fact, these sorts of debates
may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the
guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will
be outlined in the following discussion.
in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain crisis?"

A) Education Scenario simulation lets students test

decisions and strategies without the real stakes of
having to implement themthis process is more
transformative than the content of the 1ac
Hanghoj 2008
[Thorkild, PhD, assistant professor, School of Education, University of Aarhus, also affiliated with the Danish Research
Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials, located at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at
the University of Southern Denmark
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/Thor
kilHanghoej.pdf]
Joas re-interpretation of Deweys pragmatism as a theory of situated creativity raises a critique of humans as purely
rational agents that navigate instrumentally through meansends- schemes (Joas, 1996: 133f). This critique is particularly

games are enacted and validated within the realm of educational

institutions that by definition are inscribed in the great modernistic narrative of progress where nation states,
important when trying to understand how

teachers and parents expect students to acquire specific skills and competencies (Popkewitz, 1998; cf. chapter 3).
However, as Dewey argues, the actual doings of educational gaming

means-ends schemes.

cannot be reduced to rational

Instead, the situated interaction between teachers, students, and learning resources

which often make

classroom contexts seem messy from an outsiders perspective (Barab & Squire,
are played out as contingent re-distributions of means, ends and ends in view,

2004). 4.2.3. Dramatic rehearsal The two preceding sections discussed how Dewey views play as an imaginative
activity of educational value, and how his assumptions on creativity and playful actions represent a critique of rational

social
actors deliberate by projecting and choosing between various scenarios for
future action. Dewey uses the concept dramatic rehearsal several times in his work but presents the most
extensive elaboration in Human Nature and Conduct: Deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in
means-end schemes. For now, I will turn to Deweys concept of dramatic rehearsal, which assumes that

imagination) of various competing possible lines of action [It] is an experiment in

finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like (...) Thought runs ahead and
foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of
actual failure and disaster. An act overtly tried out is irrevocable, its consequences cannot be blotted out. An
act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable (Dewey, 1922: 132-3).
This excerpt illustrates how Dewey views the process of decision making
(deliberation) through the lens of an imaginative drama metaphor. Thus,
decisions are made through the imaginative projection of outcomes, where the possible
competing lines of action are resolved through a thought experiment . Moreover,
Deweys compelling use of the drama metaphor also implies that decisions cannot be reduced to utilitarian, rational or
mechanical exercises, but that they have emotional, creative and personal qualities as well. Interestingly, there are
relatively few discussions within the vast research literature on Dewey of his concept of dramatic rehearsal. A notable

Schtz, who praises Deweys concept as a fortunate

image for understanding everyday rationality (Schtz, 1943: 140). Other attempts are
exception is the phenomenologist Alfred

primarily related to overall discussions on moral or ethical deliberation (Caspary, 1991, 2000, 2006; Fesmire, 1995, 2003;
Rnssn, 2003; McVea, 2006). As Fesmire points out, dramatic rehearsal is intended to describe an important phase of
deliberation that does not characterise the whole process of making moral decisions, which includes duties and
contractual obligations, short and long-term consequences, traits of character to be affected, and rights (Fesmire, 2003:

dramatic rehearsal should be seen as the process of crystallizing

possibilities and transforming them into directive hypotheses (Fesmire, 2003: 70). Thus,
deliberation can in no way guarantee that the response of a thought
experiment will be successful. But what it can do is make the process of
choosing more intelligent than would be the case with blind trial-and-error (Biesta, 2006: 8). The notion of
dramatic rehearsal provides a valuable perspective for understanding
educational gaming as a simultaneously real and imagined inquiry into domainspecific scenarios. Dewey defines dramatic rehearsal as the capacity to stage and evaluate acts, which
70). Instead,

implies an irrevocable difference between acts that are tried out in imagination and acts that are overtly tried out

This description shares obvious similarities with games as they

require participants to inquire into and resolve scenario-specific problems (cf.
chapter 2). On the other hand, there is also a striking difference between moral
deliberation and educational game activities in terms of the actual
consequences that follow particular actions. Thus, when it comes to educational games, acts are both
imagined and tried out, but without all the real-life consequences of the
practices, knowledge forms and outcomes that are being simulated in the game world. Simply put, there is a
difference in realism between the dramatic rehearsals of everyday life and in games, which only play at or
simulate the stakes and risks that characterise the serious nature of moral
deliberation, i.e. a real-life politician trying to win a parliamentary election experiences more personal and
emotional risk than students trying to win the election scenario of The Power Game. At the same time, the lack of
real-life consequences in educational games makes it possible to design a relatively
safe learning environment, where teachers can stage particular game scenarios to be enacted and
validated for educational purposes. In this sense, educational games are able to provide a safe but
meaningful way of letting teachers and students make mistakes (e.g. by giving a poor
with real-life consequences (Dewey, 1922: 132-3).

political presentation) and dramatically rehearse particular competing possible lines of action that are relevant to

the educational
value of games is not so much a question of learning facts or giving the right
answers, but more a question of exploring the contingent outcomes and domainspecific processes of problem-based scenarios.
particular educational goals (Dewey, 1922: 132). Seen from this pragmatist perspective,

These skills are key to policy transformation internal link

turns the aff
Mitchell 2010
[Gordon, associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Communication at the University of
Pittsburgh Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 13.1, SWITCH-SIDE DEBATING MEETS DEMAND-DRIVEN RHETORIC OF SCIENCE]
The watchwords for the intelligence communitys debating initiative collaboration, critical thinking, collective awarenessresonate with key
terms anchoring the study of deliberative democracy. In a major new text, John Gastil defines deliberation as a process whereby people
carefully examine a problem and arrive at a well-reasoned solution aft er a period of inclusive, respectful consideration of diverse points of
view.40 Gastil and his colleagues in organizations such as the Kettering Foundation and the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation
are pursuing a research program that foregrounds the democratic telos of deliberative processes. Work in this area features a blend of

much of this literature concerns

the relationship between deliberation and debate, with the latter term often
loaded with pejorative baggage and working as a negative foil to highlight the positive qualities of deliberation.42
concrete interventions and studies of citizen empowerment.41 Notably, a key theme in

Most political discussions, however, are debates. Stories in the media turn politics into a never-ending series of contests. People get swept
into taking sides; their energy goes into figuring out who or what theyre for or against, says Kettering president David Mathews and coauthor

Deliberation is different. It is neither a partisan argument where opposing

sides try to win nor a casual conversation conducted with polite civility. Public deliberation is a means by which citizens
make tough choices about basic purposes and directions for their communities and their country. It is a way of reasoning
and talking together.43 Mathews and McAfees distrust of the debate process is almost
paradigmatic amongst theorists and practitioners of Kettering-style deliberative democracy. One conceptual mechanism for
Noelle McAfee.

reinforcing this debate-deliberation opposition is characterization of debate as a process inimical to deliberative aims, with debaters adopting
dogmatic and fixed positions that frustrate the deliberative objective of choice work. In this register, Emily Robertson observes, unlike
deliberators, debaters are typically not open to the possibility of being shown wrong. . . . Debaters are not trying to find the best solution by
keeping an open mind about the opponents point of view.44 Similarly, founding documents from the University of HoustonDowntowns
Center for Public Deliberation state, Public deliberation is about choice work, which is different from a dialogue or a debate. In dialogue,
people oft en look to relate to each other, to understand each other, and to talk about more informal issues. In debate, there are generally two

Debate, cast here as the theoretical

scapegoat, provides a convenient, low-water benchmark for explaining how other forms of deliberative interaction better promote
cooperative choice work. The Kettering-inspired framework receives support from perversions of
the debate process such as vapid presidential debates and verbal
pyrotechnics found on Crossfire-style television shows.46 In contrast, the intelligence
communitys debating initiative stands as a nettlesome anomaly for these theoretical frameworks,
with debate serving, rather than frustrating, the ends of deliberation. The presence of such an
anomaly would seem to point to the wisdom of fashioning a theoretical
orientation that frames the debate-deliberation connection in contingent,
rather than static terms, with the relationship between the categories shift ing along with the various contexts in which
positions and people are generally looking to win their side.45

they manifest in practice.47 Such an approach gestures toward the importance of rhetorically informed critical work on multiple levels. First,
the contingency of situated practice invites analysis geared to assess, in particular cases, the extent to which debate practices enable and/ or
constrain deliberative objectives. Regarding the intelligence communitys debating initiative, such an analytical perspective highlights, for
example, the tight connection between the deliberative goals established by intelligence officials and the cultural technology manifest in the
bridge projects online debating applications such as Hot Grinds. An additional dimension of nuance emerging from this avenue of analysis
pertains to the precise nature of the deliberative goals set by bridge. Program descriptions notably eschew Kettering-style references to
democratic citizen empowerment, yet feature deliberation prominently as a key ingredient of strong intelligence tradecraft . Th is caveat is
especially salient to consider when it comes to the second category of rhetorically informed critical work invited by the contingent aspect of
specific debate initiatives. To grasp this layer it is useful to appreciate how the name of the bridge project constitutes an invitation for those
outside the intelligence community to participate in the analytic outreach eff ort. According to Doney, bridge provides an environment for
Analytic Outreacha place where IC analysts can reach out to expertise elsewhere in federal, state, and local government, in academia, and
industry. New communities of interest can form quickly in bridge through the web of trust access control modelaccess to minds outside the
intelligence community creates an analytic force multiplier.48 This presents a moment of choice for academic scholars in a position to
respond to Doneys invitation; it is an opportunity to convert scholarly expertise into an analytic force multiplier. In reflexively pondering this

Greene and Hickss proposition that switch-side

debating should be viewed as a cultural technology in light of Langdon Winners maxim that
invitation, it may be valuable for scholars to read

technological artifacts have politics.49 In the case of bridge, politics are informed by the history of intelligence community policies and
practices. Commenter Th omas Lord puts this point in high relief in a post off ered in response to a news story on the topic: [W]hy should this
thing (bridge) be? . . . [Th e intelligence community] on the one hand sometimes provides useful information to the military or to the civilian
branches and on the other hand it is a dangerous, out of control, relic that by all external appearances is not the slightest bit reformed, other
than superficially, from such excesses as became exposed in the cointelpro and mkultra hearings of the 1970s.50 A debate scholar need not
agree with Lords full-throated criticism of the intelligence community (he goes on to observe that it bears an alarming resemblance to
organized crime) to understand that participation in the communitys Analytic Outreach program may serve the ends of deliberation, but not
necessarily democracy, or even a defensible politics. Demand-driven rhetoric of science necessarily raises questions about whats driving the
demand, questions that scholars with relevant expertise would do well to ponder carefully before embracing invitations to contribute their
argumentative expertise to deliberative projects. By the same token, it would be prudent to bear in mind that

the technological

determinism about switch-side debate endorsed by Greene and Hicks may

tend to flatten reflexive assessments regarding the wisdom of supporting a
given debate initiativeas the next section illustrates, manifest differences
among initiatives warrant context-sensitive judgments regarding the
normative political dimensions featured in each case . Public Debates in the EPA Policy Process
The preceding analysis of U.S. intelligence community debating initiatives highlighted how analysts are challenged to navigate discursively the

Public policy planners are

tested in like manner when they attempt to stitch together institutional arguments from
various and sundry inputs ranging from expert testimony, to historical precedent, to public comment. Just as intelligence
managers find that algorithmic, formal methods of analysis often dont work when it
comes to the task of interpreting and synthesizing copious amounts of
disparate data, public-policy planners encounter similar challenges. In fact, the argumentative turn in
public-policy planning elaborates an approach to public-policy analysis that foregrounds deliberative interchange and critical
thinking as alternatives to decisionism, the formulaic application of objective
decision algorithms to the public policy process. Stating the matter plainly, Majone suggests, whether in written or oral form,
argument is central in all stages of the policy process . Accordingly, he notes, we miss a
great deal if we try to understand policy-making solely in terms of power,
influence, and bargaining, to the exclusion of debate and argument .51 One can see
heteroglossia of vast amounts of diff erent kinds of data flowing through intelligence streams.

similar rationales driving Goodwin and Daviss EPA debating project, where debaters are invited to conduct on-site public debates covering

For example, in the 2008

Water Wars debates held at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., resolutions were crafted to focus
resolutions craft ed to reflect key points of stasis in the EPA decision-making process.

attention on the topic of water pollution, with one resolution focusing on downstream states authority to control upstream states discharges
and sources of pollutants, and a second resolution exploring the policy merits of bottled water and toilet paper taxes as revenue sources to

Gannon and Seungwon

Chung from Wake Forest University argued in favor of downstream state control, with the Michigan State University team
of Carly Wunderlich and Garrett Abelkop providing opposition. In the second debate on taxation policy, Kevin Kallmyer
and Matthew Struth from University of Mary Washington defended taxes on bottled water and toilet
paper, while their opponents from Howard University, Dominique Scott and Jarred McKee, argued
against this proposal. Reflecting on the project, Goodwin noted how the intercollegiate Switch-Side Debating Meets DemandDriven Rhetoric of Science 107 debaters ability to act as honest brokers in the policy
arguments contributed positively to internal EPA deliberation on both issues.52 Davis
fund water infrastructure projects. In the first debate on interstate river pollution, the team of Seth

observed that since the invited debaters didnt have a dog in the fight, they were able to give voice to previously buried arguments that

Such findings are

consistent with the views of policy analysts advocating the argumentative
turn in policy planning. As Majone claims, Dialectical confrontation between generalists and experts
often succeeds in bringing out unstated assumptions, conflicting
interpretations of the facts, and the risks posed by new projects .54 Frank Fischer goes
some EPA subject matter experts felt reticent to elucidate because of their institutional affiliations.53

even further in this context, explicitly appropriating rhetorical scholar Charles Willards concept of argumentative epistemics to flesh out his
vision for policy studies: Uncovering the epistemic dynamics of public controversies would allow for a more enlightened understanding of what
is at stake in a particular dispute, making possible a sophisticated evaluation of the various viewpoints and merits of different policy options. In
so doing, the differing, oft en tacitly held contextual perspectives and values could be juxtaposed; the viewpoints and demands of experts,
special interest groups, and the wider public could be directly compared; and the dynamics among the participants could be scrutizined.

This would by no means sideline or even exclude scientific assessment; it

would only situate it within the framework of a more comprehensive
evaluation.55 As Davis notes, institutional constraints present within the EPA communicative milieu can complicate eff orts to provide
a full airing of all relevant arguments pertaining to a given regulatory issue. Thus, intercollegiate debaters can play
key roles in retrieving and amplifying positions that might otherwise remain
sedimented in the policy process . The dynamics entailed in this symbiotic relationship are underscored by
deliberative planner John Forester, who observes, If planners and public administrators are to make democratic political debate and argument
possible, they will need strategically located allies to avoid being fully thwarted by the characteristic self-protecting behaviors of the planning
organizations and bureaucracies within which they work.56 Here, an institutions need for strategically located allies to support deliberative
practice constitutes the demand for rhetorically informed expertise, setting up what can be considered a demand-driven rhetoric of science.

As an instance of rhetoric of science scholarship, this type of switch-side

public 108 Rhetoric & Public Affairs debate differs both from insular contest tournament
debating, where the main focus is on the pedagogical benefit for student
participants, and first-generation rhetoric of science scholarship, where critics
concentrated on unmasking the rhetoricity of scientific artifacts circulating in what many
perceived to be purely technical spheres of knowledge production.58 As a form of demand-driven rhetoric of
science, switch-side debating connects directly with the communication
fields performative tradition of argumentative engagement in public controversya
different route of theoretical grounding than rhetorical criticisms tendency to locate its
foundations in the English fields tradition of literary criticism and textual analysis.59 Given this
genealogy, it is not surprising to learn how Daviss response to the EPAs institutional need for rhetorical expertise took the form of a public
debate proposal, shaped by Daviss dual background as a practitioner and historian of intercollegiate debate. Davis competed as an
undergraduate policy debater for Howard University in the 1970s, and then went on to enjoy substantial success as coach of the Howard team
in the new millennium. In an essay reviewing the broad sweep of debating history, Davis notes, Academic debate began at least 2,400 years
ago when the scholar Protagoras of Abdera (481411 bc), known as the father of debate, conducted debates among his students in Athens.60

Sophists such as Protagoras taught Greek students the value of

dissoi logoi, or pulling apart complex questions by debating two sides of an
issue.61 The few surviving fragments of Protagorass work suggest that his notion of dissoi logoi stood for the principle that two accounts
As John Poulakos points out, older

[logoi] are present about every thing, opposed to each other, and further, that humans could measure the relative soundness of
knowledge claims by engaging in give-and-take where parties would make the weaker argument stronger to activate the generative aspect
of rhetorical practice, a key element of the Sophistical tradition.62 Following in Protagorass wake, Isocrates would complement this centrifugal
push with the pull of synerchesthe, a centripetal exercise of coming together deliberatively to listen, respond, and form common social
bonds.63 Isocrates incorporated Protagorean dissoi logoi into synerchesthe, a broader concept that he used flexibly to express interlocking
senses of (1) inquiry, as in groups convening to search for answers to common questions through discussion;64 (2) deliberation, with
interlocutors gathering in a political setting to deliberate about proposed courses of action;65 and (3) alliance formation, a form of collective
action typical at festivals,66 or in the exchange of pledges that deepen social ties.67 Switch-Side Debating Meets Demand-Driven Rhetoric of

one sees in Isocratic

synerchesthe, as well as in the EPA debating initiative, a fusion of debate with deliberative
functions. Echoing a theme raised in this essays earlier discussion of intelligence tradecraft , such a fusion troubles categorical
Science 109 Returning once again to the Kettering-informed sharp distinction between debate and deliberation,

attempts to classify debate and deliberation as fundamentally opposed activities. Th e significance of such a finding is amplified by the
frequency of attempts in the deliberative democracy literature to insist on the theoretical bifurcation of debate and deliberation as an article of

Tandem analysis of the EPA and intelligence community debating initiatives also
brings to light dimensions of contrast at the third level of Isocratic synerchesthe, alliance formation. Th e intelligence communitys
theoretical faith.

Analytic Outreach initiative invites largely one-way communication flowing from outside experts into the black box of classified intelligence

deliberative alliance
building. In this vein, Howard Universitys participation in the 2008 EPA Water Wars debates can be seen as the harbinger of a trend by
analysis. On the contrary, the EPA debating program gestures toward a more expansive project of

historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) to catalyze their debate programs in a strategy that evinces Daviss dual-focus vision. On
the one hand, Davis aims to recuperate Wiley Colleges tradition of competitive excellence in intercollegiate debate, depicted so powerfully in
the feature film The Great Debaters, by starting a wave of new debate programs housed in hbcus across the nation.68 On the other hand,
Davis sees potential for these new programs to complement their competitive debate programming with participation in the EPAs public
debating initiative. Th is dual-focus vision recalls Douglas Ehningers and Wayne Brockriedes vision of total debate programs that blend
switch-side intercollegiate tournament debating with forms of public debate designed to contribute to wider communities beyond the
tournament setting.69 Whereas the political telos animating Daviss dual-focus vision certainly embraces background assumptions that
Greene and Hicks would find disconcertingnotions of liberal political agency, the idea of debate using words as weapons70there is little
doubt that the project of pursuing environmental protection by tapping the creative energy of hbcu-leveraged dissoi logoi differs significantly
from the intelligence communitys eff ort to improve its tradecraft through online digital debate programming. Such diff erence is especially
evident in light of the EPAs commitment to extend debates to public realms, with the attendant possible benefits unpacked by Jane

Having a public debater argue against their

convictions, or confess their indecision on a subject and subsequent embrace of argument as a way to seek clarity, could
shake up the prevailing view of debate as a war of words. Public uptake of the
possibility of switch-sides debate may help lessen the polarization of issues
inherent in prevailing debate formats because students are no longer seen as wedded to their
arguments. This could transform public debate from a tussle between advocates, with each public
debater trying to convince the audience in a Manichean struggle about the truth of their side, to a more inviting
exchange focused on the content of the others argumentation and the process of
deliberative exchange.71 Reflection on the EPA debating initiative reveals a striking
convergence among (1) the expressed need for dissoi logoi by government
agency officials wrestling with the challenges of inverted rhetorical situations, (2) theoretical claims by scholars regarding the
centrality of argumentation in the public policy process , and (3) the practical wherewithal of
intercollegiate debaters to tailor public switch-side debating performances in
Munksgaard and Damien Pfister: 110 Rhetoric & Public Affairs

These points of convergence

specific ways requested by agency collaborators.

both underscore previously articulated
theoretical assertions regarding the relationship of debate to deliberation, as well as deepen understanding of the political role of deliberation

suggest

in institutional decision making. But they also

how decisions by rhetorical scholars about whether to contribute switch-side
debating acumen to meet demand-driven rhetoric of science initiatives ought to involve careful reflection. Such an approach mirrors the way

policy planning in the argumentative turn is designed to respond to the

weaknesses of formal, decisionistic paradigms of policy planning with
situated, contingent judgments informed by reflective deliberation. Conclusion Dilip
Gaonkars criticism of first-generation rhetoric of science scholarship rests on a key claim regarding what he sees as the inherent thinness of
the ancient Greek rhetorical lexicon.72 That lexicon, by virtue of the fact that it was invented primarily to teach rhetorical performance, is ill
equipped in his view to support the kind of nuanced discriminations required for eff ective interpretation and critique of rhetorical texts.
Although Gaonkar isolates rhetoric of science as a main target of this critique, his choice of subject matter Switch-Side Debating Meets
Demand-Driven Rhetoric of Science 111 positions him to toggle back and forth between specific engagement with rhetoric of science
scholarship and discussion of broader themes touching on the metatheoretical controversy over rhetorics proper scope as a field of inquiry
(the so-called big vs. little rhetoric dispute).73 Gaonkars familiar refrain in both contexts is a warning about the dangers of universalizing or
globalizing rhetorical inquiry, especially in attempts that stretch the classical Greek rhetorical vocabulary into a hermeneutic
metadiscourse, one pressed into service as a master key for interpretation of any and all types of communicative artifacts. In other words,
Gaonkar warns against the dangers of rhetoricians pursuing what might be called supply-side epistemology, rhetorics project of pushing for
greater disciplinary relevance by attempting to extend its reach into far-flung areas of inquiry such as the hard sciences. Yet this essay
highlights how rhetorical scholarships relevance can be credibly established by outsiders, who seek access to the creative energy flowing
from the classical Greek rhetorical lexicon in its native mode, that is, as a tool of invention designed to spur and hone rhetorical performance.
Analysis of the intelligence community and EPA debating initiatives shows how this is the case, with government agencies calling for
assistance to animate rhetorical processes such as dissoi logoi (debating different sides) and synerchesthe (the performative task of coming
together deliberately for the purpose of joint inquiry, collective choice-making, and renewal of communicative bonds).74 Th is demand-driven
epistemology is diff erent in kind from the globalization project so roundly criticized by Gaonkar. Rather than rhetoric venturing out from its
own academic home to proselytize about its epistemological universality for all knowers, instead here we have actors not formally trained in
the rhetorical tradition articulating how their own deliberative objectives call for incorporation of rhetorical practice and even recruitment of
strategically located allies75 to assist in the process. Since the productivist content in the classical Greek vocabulary serves as a critical
resource for joint collaboration in this regard, demand-driven rhetoric of science turns Gaonkars original critique on its head. In fairness to
Gaonkar, it should be stipulated that his 1993 intervention challenged the way rhetoric of science had been done to date, not the universe of
ways rhetoric of science might be done in the future. And to his partial credit, Gaonkar did acknowledge the promise of a performanceoriented rhetoric of science, especially one informed by classical thinkers other than Aristotle.76 In his Ph.D. dissertation on Aspects of

ancient sophists were the greatest champions

112 Rhetoric & Public Affairs of socially useful science ,77 and also how the sophists essentially practiced the art of
Sophistic Pedagogy, Gaonkar documents how the

rhetoric in a translational, performative register: Th e sophists could not blithely go about their business of making science useful, while
science itself stood still due to lack of communal support and recognition. Besides, sophistic pedagogy was becoming increasingly dependent
on the findings of contemporary speculation in philosophy and science. Take for instance, the eminently practical art of rhetoric. As taught by

it was not simply a handbook of recipes which anyone could

mechanically employ to his advantage. On the contrary, the strength and vitality of
sophistic rhetoric came from their ability to incorporate the relevant info rmation
obtained from the on-going research in other fields .78 Of course, deep trans-historical diff erences
the best of the sophists,

make uncritical appropriation of classical Greek rhetoric for contemporary use a fools errand. But to gauge from Robert Harimans recent

appropriations can help us

forge a new political language suitable for addressing the complex
raft of intertwined problems facing global society. Such retrospection is long overdue, says Hariman, as the history,
reflections on the enduring salience of Isocrates, timely, suitable, and eloquent
postmoderns

literature, philosophy, oratory, art, and political thought of Greece and Rome have never been more accessible or less appreciated.79 Th is
essay has explored ways that some of the most venerable elements of the ancient Greek rhetorical traditionthose dealing with and

can be retrieved and adapted to answer calls in the contemporary milieu for
cultural technologies capable of dealing with one of our times most daunting
challenges. This challenge involves finding meaning in inverted rhetorical
situations characterized by an endemic surplus of heterogeneous content.
deliberation

Definitions

Resolved
Resolved expresses intent to implement a plan
American Heritage Dictionary 2000, www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?
term=resolved

To find a solution to; solve

To bring to a usually successful conclusion

Resolved requires a vote on a formal resolution

American Heritage Dictionary 11 (The American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language, Fifth Edition copyright 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company., resolved 2011,
http://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=resolved&submit.x=826&submit.y=-210,)

resolve (r-zlv)v. resolved, resolving, resolves

v.tr.
1.a. To make a firm decision about: resolved that I would do better next time. See
Synonyms at decide.
b. To decide or express by formal vote: The legislature resolved that the official should be
impeached.
2. A formal resolution made by a deliberative body.

A resolution requires not only a formal vote, but a formal

proposition that was submitted to those voting upon it.
Blacks Law Dictionary 9
(The Law Dictionary Featuring Black's Law Dictionary Free Online Legal Dictionary
What is RESOLUTION? definition of RESOLUTION October 23, 2009,
http://thelawdictionary.org/resolution/)

A motion or formal proposition offered for adoption by such a body. In

legislative practice. The term is usually employed to denote the adoption of a
motion, the subject-matter of which would not properly constitute a statute;

such as a mere expression of opinion; an alteration of the rules ; a vote of thanks or

of censure,

Resolved means to enact a resolution

Merriam-Webster 13 (resolve, Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, 2013,
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resolve)
resolve verb \ri-zlv, -zolv also -zv or -zov\
resolvedresolving
Definition of RESOLVE
3
: to cause resolution of (a pathological state

Colon
The topic is defined by the phrase following the colon the
USFG is the agent of the resolution, not the individual debaters
Websters Guide to Grammar and Writing 2000,
http://ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/colon.htm

Use of a colon before a list or an explanation that is preceded by a clause that can stand
by itself. Think of the colon as a gate, inviting one to go on If the introductory phrase
preceding the colon is very brief and the clause following the colon represents the real
business of the sentence, begin the clause after the colon with a capital letter.

USfg
Federal Government means the central government in
Washington D.C.
Encarta 2K

(Online Encyclopedia, http://encarta.msn.com)

The federal government of the United States is centered in Washington DC

The USfg is the government established via the constitution.

USLegal, Acc 2010, http://definitions.uslegal.com/u/united-states-federal-government/

The United States Federal Government is established by the US Constitution. The

Federal Government shares sovereignty over the United Sates with the individual
governments of the States of US. The Federal government has three branches: i) the
legislature, which is the US Congress, ii) Executive, comprised of the President and Vice
president of the US and iii) Judiciary. The US Constitution prescribes a system of
separation of powers and checks and balances for the smooth functioning of all the
three branches of the Federal Government. The US Constitution limits the powers of the
Federal Government to the powers assigned to it; all powers not expressly assigned to
the Federal Government are reserved to the States or to the people.

Should
Should requires we perform the actions of the following verb,
its a necessity
Cambridge Dictionary 13 (published by Cambridge University Press, Should
[American Version], 2013, http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/americanenglish/should_1?q=should)

should
modal verb (DUTY) /d, d/
Definition
used to express that it is necessary, desirable, or important to perform the action of the
following verb

Should is mandatory, in legal context it must be obeyed

Oxford English Dictionary 13 (Shall- should[American-Business Version],
Oxford University Press, Copyright 2013,
Press.http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/177350?
isAdvanced=true&result=10&rskey=XZ3VE5&,)

II. Followed by an infinitive (without to).

Except for a few instances of shall will, shall may (mowe), shall conne in the 15th c., the
infinitive after shall is always either that of a principal verb or of have or be.
2. In general statements of what is right or becoming: = ought. Obs.
(Superseded by the pa. subjunctive should: see sense 18)
In Old English the subjunctive present sometimes occurs in this use (e.g. c888 in A. 4).
c. In conditional clause, accompanying the statement of a necessary
condition: = is to.
4. Indicating what is appointed or settled to take place = the modern is to,
am to, etc. Obs.
5. In commands or instructions.

Should requires a mandate, implies that the action will be

followed through
Merriam-Webster Dictionary 13 (Should, Merriam-Webster Incorporated,
2013, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/should?show=0&t=1373233008,)

should verbal auxiliary \shd, shuu d\

Definition of SHOULD
1
used in auxiliary function to express condition <if he should leave his father, his father
would die Genesis 44:22(Revised Standard Version)>
2
used in auxiliary function to express obligation, propriety, or expediency
<'tis commanded I should do so Shakespeare> <this is as it should be H. L. Savage>
<you should brush your teeth after each meal>

Should denotes an expectation of enacting a plan

American Heritage Dictionary 2000 [www.dictionary.com]
3 Used to express probability or expectation

2NC Blocks

Critique Fails
Critiques get bogged down in theoretical jargon that distract
from efforts for true political change we must engage in the
rhetoric of policymaking.
McClean Rutgers Philosophy Professor 1
[David E., Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of American
Philosophy, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, http://www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion
%20papers/david_mcclean.htm]

Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our
Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the
eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany
of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me
hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy
prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of
homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to
suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group,
those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a
disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step
program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies"
wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies
are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what
shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be
protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined
(heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak
our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty").
As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been
'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either
philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of
economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political
relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts
a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice
produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The
Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost
between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for
lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to
consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action."
Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left,
which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good
reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure
culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the

barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything
like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge
and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this
country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And
Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural
Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain.
Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they
bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge
public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our
country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X;
the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace
and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the
American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the
"beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet
diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan
ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be
part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not
seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of
social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create
from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who
has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move
past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting"
but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it
possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the
character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How
can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system
with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a
"law of peoples?"
The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade
theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international
markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics
of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our
arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social
institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but
where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often
unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making
honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the
actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us
from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are
talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they
proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures
from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called
"managerial class."

Simulation
Simulating government discourses allows students to synthesize
theory and fact creating useful real-world knowledge.
Esberg and Sagan, special assistant to the director at New York University's and
Professor at Stanford, Center 12
(Jane Esberg is special assistant to the director at New York University's Center on.
International Cooperation. She was the winner of 2009 Firestone Medal, AND Scott
Sagan is a professor of political science and director of Stanford's Center for
International Security and Cooperation NEGOTIATING NONPROLIFERATION:
Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Nuclear Weapons Policy, The Nonproliferation Review,
19:1, 95-108 accessed 5-7-13, RRR

These government or quasi-government think tank simulations often provide very

similar lessons for high-level players as are learned by students in educational
simulations. Government participants learn about the importance of understanding
foreign perspectives, the need to practice internal coordination, and the necessity to
compromise and coordinate with other governments in negotiations and crises. During
the Cold War, political scientist Robert Mandel noted how crisis exercises and war games
forced government officials to overcome bureaucratic myopia, moving beyond their
normal organizational roles and thinking more creatively about how others might react
in a crisis or conflict.6 The skills of imagination and the subsequent ability to predict
foreign interests and reactions remain critical for real-world foreign policy makers. For
example, simulations of the Iranian nuclear crisisheld in 2009 and 2010 at the
Brookings Institution's Saban Center and at Harvard University's Belfer Center, and
involving former US senior officials and regional expertshighlighted the dangers of
misunderstanding foreign governments preferences and misinterpreting their
subsequent behavior. In both simulations, the primary criticism of the US negotiating
team lay in a failure to predict accurately how other states, both allies and adversaries,
would behave in response to US policy initiatives.7
By university age, students often have a pre-defined view of international affairs, and the
literature on simulations in education has long emphasized how such exercises force
students to challenge their assumptions about how other governments behave and how
their own government works.8 Since simulations became more common as a teaching
tool in the late 1950s, educational literature has expounded on their benefits, from
encouraging engagement by breaking from the typical lecture format, to improving
communication skills, to promoting teamwork.9 More broadly, simulations can deepen
understanding by asking students to link fact and theory, providing a context for facts
while bringing theory into the realm of practice.10 These exercises are particularly
valuable in teaching international affairs for many of the same reasons they are useful for
policy makers: they force participants to grapple with the issues arising from a world in
flux.11 Simulations have been used successfully to teach students about such disparate
topics as European politics, the Kashmir crisis, and US response to the mass killings in

Darfur.12 Role-playing exercises certainly encourage students to learn political and

technical factsbut they learn them in a more active style. Rather than sitting in a
classroom and merely receiving knowledge, students actively research their
government's positions and actively argue, brief, and negotiate with others.13 Facts can
change quickly; simulations teach students how to contextualize and act on information.

Dialogue
Their interpretation results in a monologic dialogue where
debate becomes a one-sided lecture only a dialogic exchange
can accrue educational benefits.
Hanghj, University of Bristol Author, 08
[Thorkild Hanghj, author affiliated with Danish Research Centre on Education and
Advanced Media Materials, research the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and
Interactive Technologies (L-KIT), the Institute of Education at the University of Bristol
and the institute formerly known as Learning Lab Denmark at the School of Education,
2008 (PLAYFUL KNOWLEDGE: An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming,
University of Southern Denmark, p. 50-51 Available Online at
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_udda
nnelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf)
Debate games are often based on pre-designed scenarios that include descriptions of
issues to be debated, educational goals, game goals, roles, rules, time frames etc. In this
way, debate games differ from textbooks and everyday classroom instruction as debate
scenarios allow teachers and students to actively imagine, interact and communicate
within a domain-specific game space. However, instead of mystifying debate games as a
magic circle (Huizinga, 1950), I will try to overcome the epistemological dichotomy
between gaming and teaching that tends to dominate discussions of educational
games. In short, educational gaming is a form of teaching. As mentioned, education and
games represent two different semiotic domains that both embody the three faces of
knowledge: assertions, modes of representation and social forms of organisation (Gee,
2003; Barth, 2002; cf. chapter 2). In order to understand the interplay between these
different domains and their interrelated knowledge forms, I will draw attention to a
central assumption in Bakhtins dialogical philosophy. According to Bakhtin, all forms of
communication and culture are subject to centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin,
1981). A centripetal force is the drive to impose one version of the truth, while a
centrifugal force involves a range of possible truths and interpretations. This means that
any form of expression involves a duality of centripetal and centrifugal forces: Every
concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as
centripetal forces are brought to bear (Bakhtin, 1981: 272). If we take teaching as an
example, it is always affected by centripetal and centrifugal forces in the on-going
negotiation of truths between teachers and students. In the words of Bakhtin: Truth is
not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between
people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction
(Bakhtin, 1984a: 110). Similarly, the dialogical space of debate games also embodies
centrifugal and centripetal forces. Thus, the election scenario of The Power Game
involves centripetal elements that are mainly determined by the rules and outcomes of
the game, i.e. the election is based on a limited time frame and a fixed voting procedure.
Similarly, the open-ended goals, roles and resources represent centrifugal elements and
create virtually endless possibilities for researching, preparing, presenting, debating

and evaluating a variety of key political issues. Consequently, the actual process of
enacting a game scenario involves a complex negotiation between these
centrifugal/centripetal forces that are inextricably linked with the teachers and students
game activities. In this way, the enactment of The Power Game is a form of teaching that
combines different pedagogical practices (i.e. group work, web quests, student
presentations) and learning resources (i.e. websites, handouts, spoken language) within
the interpretive frame of the election scenario. Obviously, tensions may arise if there is
too much divergence between educational goals and game goals. This means that game
facilitation requires a balance between focusing too narrowly on the rules or facts of a
game (centripetal orientation) and a focusing too broadly on the contingent possibilities
and interpretations of the game scenario (centrifugal orientation). For Bakhtin, the
duality of centripetal/centrifugal forces often manifests itself as a dynamic between
monological and dialogical forms of discourse. Bakhtin illustrates this point with the
monological discourse of the Socrates/Plato dialogues in which the teacher never learns
anything new from the students, despite Socrates ideological claims to the contrary
(Bakhtin, 1984a). Thus, discourse becomes monologised when someone who knows and
possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error, where a
thought is either affirmed or repudiated by the authority of the teacher (Bakhtin, 1984a:
81). In contrast to this, dialogical pedagogy fosters inclusive learning environments that
are able to expand upon students existing knowledge and collaborative construction of
truths (Dysthe, 1996). At this point, I should clarify that Bakhtins term dialogic is
both a descriptive term (all utterances are per definition dialogic as they address other
utterances as parts of a chain of communication) and a normative term as dialogue is an
ideal to be worked for against the forces of monologism (Lillis, 2003: 197-8). In this
project, I am mainly interested in describing the dialogical space of debate games. At the
same time, I agree with Wegerif that one of the goals of education, perhaps the most
important goal, should be dialogue as an end in itself (Wegerif, 2006: 61).

Decisionmaking
Critical frameworks destroy decision-making skills we become
intellectually invested in utopian alternatives that lack political
traction.
Strait, George Mason University, and Wallace, George Washington University
Communications Professors, 7
[L. Paul and Brett, The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision Making,
http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/2007/The%20Scope%20of
%20Negative%20Fiat%20and%20the%20Logic%20of%20Decision%20Making.pdf, p.
A-5)

Negative claims that excluding critical alternatives is detrimental to education fail to be

persuasive when decision-making logic is taken into account. Critical intellectuals and
policymakers both take into account the probability that their actions will be successful.
Fiating that individuals alter their method of thinking circumvents these questions of
probability and thus not only destroys education about policymaking, but offers a flawed
approach to activism (or any other purview of action/ philosophy the negative is
advocating). Intellectuals and activists have many important considerations relating to
resources, press coverage, political clout and method. These questions all are directly
related to who is taking action. Alternative debates thus often become frustrating
because they do a poor job of explaining who the subject is. Consider the popular
Nietzschean alternative, do nothing. Who is it that the negative wants to do nothing?
Does the USFG de nothing? Is it the debaters? Is it the judge who does nothing? Is it
every individual, or just individuals in Africa that have to do with the affirmative harm
area? All of these questions directly implicate the desirability of the alternative, and thus
the education that we can receive from this mode of debate. Alternatives like vote
negative to reject capitalism, detach truth from power. or embrace an infinite
responsibility to the other" fall prey to similar concerns. This inability to pin the negative
down to a course of action allows them to be shifty in their second rebuttal, and sculpt
their alternative in a way that avoids the affirmatives offense. Rather than increasing
education, critical frameworks are often a ruse that allows the negative to inflate their
importance and ignore crucial decision-making considerations. Several other offensive
arguments can be leveraged by the affirmative in order to insulate them from negative
claims that critical debate is a unique and important type of education that the
affirmative excludes. The first is discussed above, that the most important benefit to
participation in policy debate is not the content of our arguments, but the skills we learn
from debating. As was just explained, since the ability to make decisions is a skill
activists and intellectuals must use as well, decision- making is a prerequisite to effective
education about any subject. The strength of this argument is enhanced when we realize
that debate is a game. Since debaters are forced to switch sides they go into each debate
knowing that a non-personal mindset will be necessary at some point because they will
inevitably be forced to argue against their own convictions. Members of the activity are
all smart enough to realize that a vote for an argument in a debate does not reflect an

absolute truth, but merely that a team making that argument did the better debating.
When it comes to education about content, the number of times someone will change
their personal convictions because of something that happens in a debate round is
extremely low, because everyone knows it is a game. On the other hand with cognitive
skills like the decision-making process which is taught through argument and debate,
repetition is vital .The best way to strengthen decision-makings cognitive thinking skills
is to have students practice them in social settings like debate rounds. Moreover, a lot of
the decision-making process happens in strategy sessions and during research periods
debaters hear about a particular affirmative plan and are tasked with developing the best
response. If they are conditioned to believe that alternate agent counterplans or utopian
philosophical alternatives are legitimate responses, a vital teaching opportunity will have
been lost.

Informed Citizenry
Critique disavows our responsibility to being an informed
citizenry their framework arguments are intrinsically
apolitical.
Lundberg University of North Carolina Communications Professor, 10
[Christian 0., January 2010, The Allred Initiative and Debate Across the
Curriculum: Reinventing the Tradition of Debate at North Carolina,
http://academia.edu/968401/LundbergOnDebate, p. 311, accessed 7/5/13,
ALT]
The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating
debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of
debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited
to speechas indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of
public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of
modern political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of
increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and
technological change, outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and
ever-expanding insular special-interest and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling
solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If
democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the
challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenrys capacities can change,
which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Dewey in The
Public and Its Problems place such a high premium on deducation (Dewey 1988, 63,
154). Debate provides an indispensable form of education in the modern articulation of
democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and
be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the
evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly
information-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward
policies that matter the most to them.

Critical Thinking
Debate is key to critical thinking skills - arguing opposing points
of view enables a self-reflexive thought process that checks
dogmatism and ideological rigidity.
Keller, University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration Professor, et.
al, 01 [Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago (Thomas
E., James K., and Tracly K., Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of
Chicago, professor of Social Work, and doctoral student School of Social Work, 2001
(Student debates in policy courses: promoting policy practice skills and knowledge
through active learning, Journal of Social Work Education, Spr/Summer 2001,
EBSCOhost)

The authors believe that structured student debates have great potential for promoting
competence in policy practice and in-depth knowledge of substantive topics relevant to
social policy. Like other interactive assignments designed to more closely resemble "realworld" activities, issue-oriented debates actively engage students in course content.
Debates also allow students to develop and exercise skills that may translate to political
activities, such as testifying before legislative committees. Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, debates may help to stimulate critical thinking by shaking students free
from established opinions and helping them to appreciate the complexities involved in
policy dilemmas. Relationships between Policy Practice Skills, Critical Thinking, and
Learning Policy practice encompasses social workers' "efforts to influence the
development, enactment, implementation, or assessment of social policies" (Jansson,
1994, p. 8). Effective policy practice involves analytic activities, such as defining issues,
gathering data, conducting research, identifying and prioritizing policy options, and
creating policy proposals (Jansson, 1994). It also involves persuasive activities intended
to influence opinions and outcomes, such as discussing and debating issues, organizing
coalitions and task forces, and providing testimony. According to Jansson (1984,pp. 5758), social workers rely upon five fundamental skills when pursuing policy practice
activities: value-clarification skills for identifying and assessing the underlying values
inherent in policy positions; conceptual skills for identifying and evaluating the relative
merits of different policy options; interactional skills for interpreting the values and
positions of others and conveying one's own point of view in a convincing manner;
political skills for developing coalitions and developing effective strategies; and positiontaking skills for recommending, advocating, and defending a particular policy. These
policy practice skills reflect the hallmarks of critical thinking (see Brookfield, 1987;
Gambrill, 1997). The central activities of critical thinking are identifying and challenging
underlying assumptions, exploring alternative ways of thinking and acting, and arriving
at commitments after a period of questioning, analysis, and reflection (Brookfield, 1987).
Significant parallels exist with the policy-making process--identifying the values
underlying policy choices, recognizing and evaluating multiple alternatives, and taking a
position and advocating for its adoption. Developing policy practice skills seems to share

much in common with developing capacities for critical thinking. R.W. Paul (as cited in
Gambrill, 1997) states that critical thinkers acknowledge the imperative to argue from
opposing points of view and to seek to identify weakness and limitations in one's own
position. Critical thinkers are aware that there are many legitimate points of view, each
of which (when thought through) may yield some level of insight. (p. 126) John Dewey,
the philosopher and educational reformer, suggested that the initial advance in the
development of reflective thought occurs in the transition from holding fixed, static ideas
to an attitude of doubt and questioning engendered by exposure to alternative views in
social discourse (Baker, 1955, pp. 36-40). Doubt, confusion, and conflict resulting from
discussion of diverse perspectives "force comparison, selection, and reformulation of
ideas and meanings" (Baker, 1955, p. 45). Subsequent educational theorists have
contended that learning requires openness to divergent ideas in combination with the
ability to synthesize disparate views into a purposeful resolution (Kolb, 1984; Perry,
1970). On the one hand, clinging to the certainty of one's beliefs risks dogmatism,
rigidity, and the inability to learn from new experiences. On the other hand, if one's
opinion is altered by every new experience, the result is insecurity, paralysis, and the
inability to take effective action. The educator's role is to help students develop the
capacity to incorporate new and sometimes conflicting ideas and experiences into a
coherent cognitive framework. Kolb suggests that, "if the education process begins by
bringing out the learner's beliefs and theories, examining and testing them, and then
integrating the new, more refined ideas in the person's belief systems, the learning
process will be facilitated" (p. 28). The authors believe that involving students in
substantive debates challenges them to learn and grow in the fashion described by
Dewey and Kolb. Participation in a debate stimulates clarification and critical evaluation
of the evidence, logic, and values underlying one's own policy position. In addition, to
debate effectively students must understand and accurately evaluate the opposing
perspective. The ensuing tension between two distinct but legitimate views is designed to
yield a reevaluation and reconstruction of knowledge and beliefs pertaining to the issue

Empathy
Using a statis point to debate multiple sides of an issue
humanizes people with opposing views and creates empathy.
Zwarensteyn, Grand Valley State Masters student, 12 [Ellen C., 8-1-2012 High
School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating
Possibilities for Political Learning http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1034&context=theses)

Other scholars note benefits to debate outside traditional academic achievement or

behavioral measures. These studies theorize the importance in face-to-face
communication and adversarial dialectics. Galloway, Debate Director at Samford
University, studies the benefits to communication through dialogue and the switch-side
requirement of policy debate. Galloway (2007) encourages audiences to view debate as a
critical dialogue, where every argument is crafted to begin a meaningful, if not strategic,
dialogue. The values not only advance intellectual gain, but also to look for
argumentative consistency and personal validity.
[I]n a dialogical exchange, debaters come to realize the positions other than their own
have value, and that reasonable minds can disagree on controversial issues. This respect
encourages debaters to modify and adapt their own positions on critical issues without
the threat of being labeled a hypocrite. The conceptualization of debate as a dialogue
allows challenges to take place from a wide variety of perspectives. By offering a stable
referent the affirmative must uphold, the negative can choose to engage the affirmative
on the widest possible array of counterwords, enhancing the pedagogical process
produced by debate (p. 12).
Viewing debate as a dialogue helps move understanding debate beyond students set in
one political ideology to those who must consider the best in arguments from multiple
sides of an argument. One of the most compelling arguments as to how debate increases
empathy, regards the practice of debating multiple sides of the same issue. This practice
is one of political understanding as it helps create empathy by humanizing people who
advance opposing arguments. This practice bridges the world of argument with political
and personal understanding. [T]he unique distinctions between debate and public
speaking allow debaters the opportunity to learn about a wide range of issues from
multiple perspectives. This allows debaters to formulate their own opinions about
controversial subjects through an in-depth process of research and testing of
ideas(Galloway, 2007, p. 13).

Civic Engagement Impact

We have a responsibility to advocate for political, collective
action to resolve the worlds problems.
Small 6 (Jonathan, former Americorps VISTA for the Human Services Coalition,

Moving Forward, The Journal

for Civic Commitment, Spring, http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/other/engagement/Journal/Issue7/Small.jsp)
What will be the challenges of the new millennium? And how should we equip young people to face these
challenges? While we cannot be sure of the exact nature of the challenges, we can say unequivocally that humankind
will face them together. If the end of the twentieth century marked the triumph of the capitalists, individualism, and
personal responsibility, the

new century will present challenges that require collective

action, unity, and enlightened self-interest. Confronting global warming, depleted natural resources,
global super viruses, global crime syndicates, and multinational corporations with no conscience and no
accountability will require cooperation, openness, honesty, compromise, and most of all solidarity ideals
not exactly cultivated in the twentieth century. We can no longer suffer to see life through the tiny lens of our own
existence. Never in the history of the world has our collective fate

been so intricately interwoven. Our

very existence depends upon our ability to adapt to this new paradigm, to envision a more cohesive
society. With humankinds next great challenge comes also great opportunity. Ironically, modern individualism
backed us into a corner. We have two choices, work together in solidarity or perish together in alienation. Unlike any
other crisis before, the noose is truly around the neck of the whole world at once. Global super viruses will ravage
rich and poor alike, developed and developing nations, white and black, woman, man, and child. Global warming
and damage to the environment will affect climate change and destroy ecosystems across the globe. Air pollution
will force gas masks on our faces, our depleted atmosphere will make a predator of the sun, and chemicals will
invade and corrupt our water supplies. Every single day we are presented the opportunity to change our current
course, to survive modernity in a manner befitting our better nature. Through zealous cooperation and radical
solidarity we can alter the course of human events. Regarding the practical matter of equipping young people to face
the challenges of a global, interconnected world, we need to teach cooperation, community, solidarity, balance and
tolerance in schools. We need to take a holistic approach to education. Standardized test scores alone will not begin
to prepare young people for the world they will inherit. The three staples of traditional education (reading, writing,
and arithmetic) need to be supplemented by three cornerstones of a modern education, exposure, exposure, and
more exposure. How can we teach solidarity? How can we teach community in the age of rugged individualism?
How can we counterbalance crass commercialism and materialism? How can we impart the true meaning of power?
These are the educational challenges we face in the new century. It will require a radical transformation of our
conception of education. Well need to trust a bit more, control a bit less, and put our faith in the potential of youth
to make sense of their world. In addition to a declaration of the gauntlet set before educators in the twenty-first
century, this paper is a proposal and a case study of sorts toward a new paradigm of social justice and civic
engagement education. Unfortunately, the current pedagogical climate of public K-12 education does not lend itself
well to an exploratory study and trial of holistic education. Consequently, this proposal and case study targets a
higher education model. Specifically, we will look at some possibilities for a large community college in an urban
setting with a diverse student body. Our guides through this process are specifically identified by the journal Equity

civic engagement, and

service learning in education will be the lantern in the dark cave of uncertainty. As
and Excellence in Education. The dynamic interplay between ideas of social justice,

such, a simple and straightforward explanation of the three terms is helpful to direct this inquiry. Before we look at
a proposal and case study and the possible consequences contained therein, this paper will draw out a clear
understanding of how we should characterize these ubiquitous terms and how their relationship to each other
affects our study. Social Justice, Civic Engagement, Service Learning and Other Commie Crap Social justice is often
ascribed long, complicated, and convoluted definitions. In fact, one could fill a good-sized library with treatises on
this subject alone. Here we do not wish to belabor the issue or argue over fine points. For our purposes, it will suffice
to have a general characterization of the term, focusing instead on the dynamics of its interaction with civic
engagement and service learning. Social justice refers quite simply to a community vision and a community
conscience that values inclusion, fairness, tolerance, and equality. The idea of social justice in America has been
around since the Revolution and is intimately linked to the idea of a social contract. The Declaration of
Independence is the best example of the prominence of social contract theory in the US. It states quite emphatically
that the government has a contract with its citizens, from which we get the famous lines about life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. Social contract theory and specifically the Declaration of Independence are concrete
expressions of the spirit of social justice. Similar clamor has been made over the appropriate definitions of civic
engagement and service learning, respectively. Once again, lets not get bogged down on subtleties. Civic
engagement is a measure or degree of the interest and/or involvement an individual and a community demonstrate

around community issues. There is a longstanding dispute over how to properly quantify civic engagement. Some
will say that todays youth are less involved politically and hence demonstrate a lower degree of civic engagement.
Others cite high volunteer rates among the youth and claim it demonstrates a high exhibition of civic engagement.
And there are about a hundred other theories put forward on the subject of civic engagement and todays youth. But
one thing is for sure;

todays youth no longer see government and politics as an effective or

valuable tool for affecting positive change in the world . Instead of criticizing this judgment,
perhaps we should come to sympathize and even admire it. Author Kurt Vonnegut said, There is a tragic flaw in our
precious Constitution, and I dont know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president.
Maybe the youths rejection of American politics isnt a shortcoming but rather a rational and appropriate response
to their experience. Consequently, the term civic engagement takes on new meaning for us today. In order to foster
fundamental change on the systemic level, which we have already said is necessary for our survival in the twentyfirst century, we need to fundamentally change our systems. Therefore, part of our

challenge becomes
convincing the youth that these systems, and by systems we mean government and commerce, have
the potential for positive change. Civic engagement consequently takes on a more specific and political
meaning in this context. Service learning is a methodology and a tool for teaching social
justice, encouraging civic engagement, and deepening practical understanding of a
subject. Since it is a relatively new field, at least in the structured sense, service learning is only beginning to define
itself. Through service learning students learn by experiencing things firsthand and by exposing themselves to new
points of view. Instead of merely reading about government, for instance, a student might experience it by working
in a legislative office. Rather than just studying global warming out of a textbook, a student might volunteer time at
an environmental group. If service learning develops and evolves into a discipline with the honest goal of making
better citizens, teaching social justice, encouraging civic engagement, and most importantly, exposing students to
different and alternative experiences, it could be a major feature of a modern education. Service learning is the
natural counterbalance to our current overemphasis on standardized testing. Social justice, civic engagement, and
service learning are caught in a symbiotic cycle. The more we have of one of them; the more we have of all of them.
However, until we get momentum behind them, we are stalled. Service learning may be our best chance to jumpstart
our democracy. In the rest of this paper, we will look at the beginning stages of a project that seeks to do just that.

Debate=Policy
The resolution was created for two distinct sides to determine the
desirability of policy action.
PARCHER 2001 (Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February,
http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)

(1) Pardon me if I turn to a source besides Bill. American Heritage Dictionary: Resolve: 1. To
make a firm decision about. 2. To decide or express by formal vote. 3. To separate something into
constiutent parts See Syns at *analyze* (emphasis in orginal) 4. Find a solution to. See Syns at
*Solve* (emphasis in original) 5. To dispel: resolve a doubt. - n 1. Frimness of purpose; resolution.
2. A determination or decision. (2) The very nature of the word "resolution" makes it a question.
American Heritage: A course of action determined or decided on. A formal statemnt of a deciion,
as by a legislature. (3) The resolution is obviously a question. Any other conclusion is utterly
inconcievable. Why? Context. The debate community empowers a topic committee to write

a topic for ALTERNATE side debating. The committee is not a random group of people
coming together to "reserve" themselves about some issue. There is context - they are
empowered by a community to do something. In their deliberations, the topic community
attempts to craft a resolution which can be ANSWERED in either direction . They focus on
issues like ground and fairness because they know the resolution will serve as the basis for
debate which will be resolved by determining the policy desireablility of that resolution.
That's not only what they do, but it's what we REQUIRE them to do. We don't just send the topic
committtee somewhere to adopt their own group resolution. It's not the end point of a resolution
adopted by a body - it's the prelimanary wording of a resolution sent to others to be answered or
decided upon. (4) Further context: the word resolved is used to emphasis the fact that it's policy
debate.

AT Exclusionary
C/A Limits their interpretation excludes the rest of the
tournament.
Effective subversion occurs within the limits of the game, not
from the outside.
Shively, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2K [Ruth Lessl, Assistant
Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, 2000 Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p.
180)
Thus far, I have argued that if the ambiguists mean to be subversive about anything,
they need to be conservative about some things. They need to be steadfast
supporters of the structures of openness and democracy: willing to say "no" to
certain forms of contest; willing to set up certain clear limitations about acceptable
behavior. To this, finally, I would add that if the ambiguists mean to stretch the
boundaries of behaviorif they want to be revolutionary and disruptive in their
skepticism and iconoclasmthey need first to be firm believers in something. Which
is to say, again, they need to set clear limits about what they will and will not
support, what they do and do not believe to be best. As G. K. Chesterton observed,
the true revolutionary has always willed something "definite and limited." For
example, "The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but
(what was more important) the system he would not rebel against..." He "desired the
freedoms of democracy." He "wished to have votes and not to have titles . . ." But
"because the new rebel is a skeptic"because he and/or she cannot bring him
and/or herself to will something definite and limited "he and/or she cannot be a
revolutionary." For "the fact that he wants to doubt everything really gets in his way
when he wants to denounce anything" (Chesterton 1959,41). Thus, the most radical
skepticism ends in the most radical conservatism. In other words, a refusal to judge
among ideas and activities is, in the end, an endorsement of the status quo. To
embrace everything is to be unable to embrace a particular plan of action, for to
embrace a particular plan of action is to reject all others, at least for that moment.
Moreover, as observed in our discussion of openness, to embrace everything is to
embrace self-contradiction: to hold to both one's purposes and to that which defeats
one's purposesto tolerance and intolerance, open-mindedness and closemindedness, democracy and tyranny. In the same manner, then, the ambiguists'
refusals to will something "definite and limited" undermines their revolutionary
impulses. In their refusal to say what they will not celebrate and what they will not
rebel against, they deny themselves (and everyone else in their political world) a
particular plan or ground to work from. By refusing to deny incivility, they deny
themselves a civil public space from which to speak. They cannot say "no" to the
terrorist who would silence dissent. They cannot turn their backs on the bullying of
the white supremacist. And, as such, in refusing to bar the tactics of the antidemocrat, they refuse to support the tactics of the democrat. In short, then, to be a
true ambiguist, there must be some limit to what is ambiguous. To fully support
political contest, one must fully support some uncontested rules and reasons. To

generally reject the silencing or exclusion of others, one must sometimes silence or
exclude those who reject civility and democracy.

Their revolution only reifies tyranny only an effective dialogue

can prevent this.
Morson, Northwestern Prof, 4
(Greg, Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning, 317-23)

Sarah Freedman and Arnetha Ball describe learning

as a dialogic process. It is not merely a

transmission of knowledge, but an activity in which whole selves are formed and acquire new
capacities for development. We live in a world of enormous cultural diversity, and the various languages and
points of view ideologies in Bakhtins sense of students have become a fact that cannot be ignored. Teachers need to
enter into a dialogue with those points of view and to help students do the same. For difference may best be understood
not as an obstacle but as an opportunity. The range of authoritative and innerly persuasive discourses in our
classrooms appears to be growing along with our cultural diversity. Freedman and Ball observe: This rich and complex
contact zone inside the classroom yields plentiful opportunity for students to decide what will be internally persuasive for
them, and consequently for them to develop their ideologies. This diversity presents both challenges and opportunities as
teachers seek to guide their students on this developmental journey (pp. 8 9, this volume). The journey they have in
mind does not so much lead to a particular goal as establish an ever-enriching process of learning. Freedman and Balls
approach grows out of Bakhtins key concepts, especially one that has been largely neglected in research on him:
ideological becoming (see Chapter 1, this volume). The implications of the essays in this volume therefore extend well
beyond educational theory and practice to the humanities and social sciences generally. How does a thinking person and
we are all thinking people develop? What happens when ideas, embodied in specific people with particular voices, come
into dialogic contact? What factors guide the creation of a point of view on the world? The specific problematic of
pedagogy serves as a lens to make the broader implications of such questions clearer. 318 Authority and testing How
does a person develop a point of view on the world, a set of attitudes for interpreting and evaluating it ? How systematic is
that point of view? Is our fundamental take on the world a philosophy with implicit doctrines or is it more like a set of
inclinations and a way of probing? Perhaps it is not one, but a collection of ways of probing, a panoply of skills and habits,
which a person tries out one after another the way in which one may, in performing a physical task, reach for one tool after
another? What does our point of view have to do with our sense of ourselves, whether as individuals or as members of
groups? What role does formal education play in acquiring and shaping it? What happens when contrary evidence
confronts us or when the radical uncertainty of the world impinges on us? Whatever that point of view is, how does it
change over time ? In any given culture or subculture, there tends to be what Bakhtin would call an authoritative
perspective. However, the role of that perspective is not necessarily authoritarian. Despite Bakhtins experience as a Soviet
citizen, where the right perspective on just about all publicly identified perspectives was held to be already known and
certain, he was well aware that outside that circle of presumed certainty life was still governed by opinion. It is not just
that rival ideologies Christian, liberal, and many others were still present; beyond that, each individuals experiences
led to half-formed but strongly held beliefs that enjoyed no formal expression. Totalitarianism was surely an aspiration of
the Soviet and other such regimes, but it could never realize its ideal of uniformitythe new Soviet man who was all of a
piece for some of the same reasons it could not make a centrally planned economy work. There is always too much
contingent, unexpected, particular, local, and idiosyncratic, with a historical or personal background that does not fit.
Bakhtin may be viewed as the great philosopher of all that does not fit. He saw the world as irreducibly messy,
unsystematizable, and contingent, and he regarded it as all the better for that. For life to have meaning, it must possess
what he called surprisingness. If individual people are to act morally, they cannot displace their responsibility onto some
systematic ideology, whether Marxist, Christian, or any other. What I do now is not reducible to any ethical, political, or
metaphysical system; and I each I must take responsibility for his or her acts at this moment. As Bakhtin liked to say,
there is no alibi. Authoritative words in their fully expressed form purport to offer an alibi. They say, like Dostoevskys
Grand Inquisitor: we speak the truth and you need not question, only obey, for your conscience to be at rest. Yet, every
authoritative word is spoken or heard in a milieu of difference. It may try to insulate itself from dialogue with reverential
tones, a special script, and all the other signs of the authority fused to it, but at the margins 319 dialogue waits with a
challenge: you may be right, but you have to convince me. Once the authoritative word responds to that challenge, it
ceases to be fully authoritative. To be sure, it may still command considerable deference by virtue of its past, its moral
aura, and its omnipresence. But it has ceased to be free from dialogue and its authority has changed from unquestioned to
dialogically tested. Every educator crosses this line when he or she gives reasons for a truth. My daughter once had a

math teacher who, when asked why a certain procedure was used to solve an equation, would reply, because some old,
dead guy said so. Of course, no answer could be further from the spirit of mathematics, where logic counts for everything
and authority for nothing. Nobody proves the Pythagorean theorem by saying Pythagoras said so. Compare this reply with
actually showing the logic of a procedure so the student understands the why. In that case, one immediately admits that
there must be a good reason for proceeding in a certain way, and that it needs to be shown. The procedure does not end up
as less sure because of this questioning; quite the contrary. Rather, questioning is seen as intrinsic to mathematics itself,
which enjoys its authority precisely because it has survived such questioning. Even in fields that do not admit of
mathematical proof, an authoritative word does not necessarily lose all authority when questioning enters into it. We can
give no mathematically sure reason why democracy is preferable to dictatorship or market economies are generally more
productive than command economies. But we can give reasons, which admit the possibilities of challenges we had not
foreseen and may have to think about. Education and all inquiry are fundamentally different when the need for reasons is
acknowledged and when questioning becomes part of the process of learning. Truth becomes dialogically tested and
forever testable. In short, authoritative words may or may not be authoritarian. In the Soviet Union, authoritarian words
were the norm and questioning was seen as suspect. One no more questioned Marxism-Leninism than one questioned the
law of gravity (a common comparison, suggesting that each was equally sure). What the Party said was right because it
was the outcome of sure historical laws guaranteeing the correctness of its rulings. Education reflected this spirit.
Bakhtins embrace of dialogue, then, challenged not so much the economic or historical theories the regime propounded,
but its very concept of truth and the language of truth it embraced. Dialogue by its very nature invites questioning, thrives
on it, demands it. It follows from Bakhtins argument that nonauthoritarian authoritative words are not necessarily
weaker than authoritarian ones. After all, one may believe something all the more because one has questioned it, provided
that defenders have been willing to answer and have been more or less cogent in their defense. They need not answer all
objections perfectly we are often convinced with qualifications, with a just in case, with loopholes. 320 However,
they must demonstrate that the authority is based on generally sound reasons. Morever, for many, enormous persuasive
power lies in the very fact that the authoritative belief is so widely held. Everyone speaks it, even if with ironizing
quotation marks. An authoritative word of this nonauthoritarian kind functions not as a voice speaking the Truth, but as
a voice speaking the one point of view that must be attended to. It may be contested, rejected, or modified, the way in
which church dogmas are modified over time by believers, but it cannot be ignored. Think of Huck Finn (discussed by
Mark Dressman, this volume). Even when he cannot bring himself to turn in Jim as a runaway slave, he accepts the
authority of the social voice telling him that such an action would be right. He does not question that voice, just realizes he
will not follow it and will do wrong. Much of the moral complexity of this book lies in Hucks self-questioning, as he does
what we believe to be right but what he thinks of as wrong; and if we read this book sensitively, we may ask ourselves how
much of our own behavior is Huckish in this respect. Perhaps our failure to live up to our ideals bespeaks our intuition
without overt expression that there is something wrong with those ideals. What Huck demonstrates is that there may be a
wisdom, even a belief system, in behavior itself: we always know more than we know, and our moral sensitivity may be
different from, and wiser than, our professed beliefs. our own authoritative words The basic power of an authoritative
voice comes from its status as the one that everyone hears. Everyone

has heard that democracy is good and

apartheid is bad, that the environment needs preserving, that church must not be merged with state;
and people who spend their lives in an academic environment may add many more to the list. In our academic
subculture, we are, almost all of us, persuaded of the rightness of greater economic equality, of plans
for inclusion and affirmative action, of abortion rights, of peace, of greater efforts to reach out to all the people
in the world in all their amazing diversity. These are our authoritative voices, and , too, we may accept
either because they are simply not to be questioned or because we have sought out
intelligent opponents who have questioned them and have thought about , if not
ultimately accepted, their answers. Again, educators know the moment when a student from a background
different from ours questions one of our beliefs and we experience the temptation to reply like that math teacher.

Thinking of ourselves as oppositional, we often forget that we, too, have our own
authoritative discourse and must work to remember that, in a world of difference, authority
may not extend to those unlike us. The testable authoritative voice: we hear it always, and
though some may disagree with it, they cannot ignore it. Its nonauthoritarian power is based 321 above all on its
ubiquity. In

a society that is relatively open to diverse values, that minimal, but still
significant, function of an authoritative voice is the most important one . It demands not
adherence but attention. And such a voice is likely to survive far longer than an
authoritarian voice whose rejection is necessarily its destruction. We have all these accounts of
Soviet dissidents say, Solzhenitsyn who tell their story as a narrative of rethinking (to use Christian Knoellers
phrase): they once believed in Communist ideology, but events caused them to raise some questions that by their nature
could not be publicly voiced, and that silence itself proved most telling. You can hear silence if it follows a pistol shot. If
silence does not succeed in ending private questioning, the word that silence defends is decisively weakened. The story of
Soviet dissidents is typically one in which, at some point, questioning moved from a private, furtive activity accompanied
by guilt to the opposite extreme, a clear rejection in which the authoritative voice lost all hold altogether. Vulnerability
accompanies too much power. But in more open societies, and in healthier kinds of individual development, an

authoritative voice of the whole society, or of a particular community (like our own academic community), still sounds,
still speaks to us in our minds. In fact, we commonly see that people who have questioned and rejected an authoritative
voice find that it survives within them as a possible alternative, like the minority opinion in a court decision. When they
are older, they discover that experience has vindicated some part of what they had summarily rejected. Perhaps the
authoritative voice had more to it than we thought when young? Now that we are teachers, perhaps we see some of the
reasons for practices we objected to? Can we, then, combine in a new practice both the practices of our teachers and the
new insights we have had? When we do, a flexible authoritative word emerges, one that has become to a great extent an
innerly persuasive one. By a lengthy process, the word has, with many changes, become our own, and our own word has in
the process acquired the intonations of authority. In much the same way, we react to the advice of our parents. At some
point it may seem dated, no more than what an earlier generation unfortunately thought, or we may greet it with the sign
of regret that our parents have forgotten what they experienced when our age. However, the dialogue goes on. At a later
point, we may say, you know, there was wisdom in what our parents said, only why did they express it so badly? If only I
had known! We may even come to the point where we express some modified form of parental wisdom in a convincing
voice. We translate it into our own idiolect, confident that we will not make the mistakes of our parents when we talk to
our children. Then our children listen, and find our own idiolect, to which we have devoted such painful ideological and
verbal work, hopelessly dated, and the process may start again. It is always a difficult moment when we realize that our
own voice is now the authority, especially because we have made it different, persuasive in its 322 own terms, not like
our parents voice. When we reflect on how our children see us, we may even realize that our parents authoritative words
may not have been the product of blind acceptance, but the result of a process much like our own. They may have done the
same thing we did question, reject, adapt, arrive at a new version and that rigid voice of authority we heard from them
was partly in our own ears. Can we somehow convey to our students our own words so they do not sound so rigid? We all
think we can. But so did our parents (and other authorities). Dialogue, Laughter, And Surprise Bakhtin viewed the
whole process of ideological (in the sense of ideas and values, however unsystematic) development as an endless

we may think of ours as the

rebels voice, because our rebelliousness against society at large speaks in the
authoritative voice of our subculture. We speak the language and thoughts of academic
educators, even when we imagine we are speaking in no jargon at all , and that jargon,
inaudible to us, sounds with all the overtones of authority to our students. We are so prone to
think of ourselves as fighting oppression that it takes some work to realize that we ourselves
may be felt as oppressive and overbearing, and that our own voice may provoke the same
reactions that we feel when we hear an authoritative voice with which we disagree. So it is
dialogue. As teachers, we find it difficult to avoid a voice of authority, however much

often helpful to think back on the great authoritative oppressors and reconstruct their self-image: helpful, but often
painful. I remember, many years ago, when, as a recent student rebel and activist, I taught a course on The

Theme of
the Rebel and discovered, to my considerable chagrin, that many of the great rebels of history were
the very same people as the great oppressors. There is a famous exchange between Erasmus and Luther,
who hoped to bring the great Dutch humanist over to the Reformation, but Erasmus kept asking Luther how he could be
so certain of so many doctrinal points. We must accept a few things to be Christians at all, Erasmus wrote, but surely
beyond that there must be room for us highly fallible beings to disagree. Luther would have none of such tentativeness. He
knew, he was sure. The Protestant rebels were, for a while, far more intolerant than their orthodox opponents. Often
enough, the oppressors are the ones who present themselves and really think of themselves as liberators. Certainty that
one knows the root cause of evil: isnt that itself often the root cause? We know from Tsar Ivan

the Terribles letters

denouncing Prince Kurbsky, a general who escaped to Poland, that Ivan saw himself as someone who had
been oppressed by noblemen as a child and pictured himself as the great rebel against traditional
authority when he killed masses of people or destroyed whole towns. There is something in the nature of
maximal rebellion against authority that produces ever greater intolerance, unless one is
very careful. 323 For the skills of fighting or refuting an oppressive power are not those of openness, selfskepticism, or real dialogue. In preparing for my course, I remember my dismay at reading Hitlers Mein Kampf and
discovering that his self-consciousness was precisely that of the rebel speaking in the name of oppressed Germans, and
that much of his amazing appeal otherwise so inexplicable was to the German sense that they

were rebelling
victims. In our time, the Serbian Communist and nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic exploited much the
same appeal. Bakhtin surely knew that Communist totalitarianism, the Gulag, and the
unprecedented censorship were constructed by rebels who had come to power . His favorite
writer, Dostoevsky, used to emphasize that the worst oppression comes from those who, with the rebellious psychology of
the insulted and humiliated, have seized power unless they have somehow cultivated the value of dialogue, as Lenin
surely had not, but which Eva, in the essay by Knoeller about teaching The Autobiography of Malcolm X, surely had.

Rebels often make the worst tyrants because their word, the voice they hear in their consciousness, has
borrowed something crucial from the authoritative word it opposed, and perhaps

exaggerated it: the aura of righteous authority. If ones ideological becoming is understood
as a struggle in which one has at last achieved the truth , one is likely to want to impose
that truth with maximal authority; and rebels of the next generation may proceed in much
the same way, in an ongoing spiral of intolerance. By contrast, if ones rebellion against an
authoritative word is truly dialogic, that is unlikely to happen, or to be subject to more of a
self-check if it does. Then one questions ones own certainties and invites skepticism, lest one become what one has
opposed. One may even step back and laugh at oneself. Laughter at oneself invites the perspective of the other. Laughter
is implicitly pluralist. Instead of looking at ones opponents as the unconditionally wrong, one imagines how one sounds to
them. Regarding earlier authorities, one thinks: that voice of authority, it is not my voice, but perhaps it has something to
say, however wrongly put. It comes from a specific experience, which I must understand. I will correct it, but to do that I
must measure it, test it, against my own experience. Dialogue

is a process of real testing, and one of the

characteristics of a genuine test is that the result is not guaranteed . It may turn out that
sometimes the voice of earlier authority turns out to be right on some point. Well, we will incorporate that much into our
own innerly persuasive voice. Once one has done this, once one has allowed ones own evolving convictions to be tested
by experience and by other convictions

AT Creativity
Not at the expense of limits the result is a pedagogically
bankrupt discussion.
We can incorporate their offense but they cant incorporate
ours.
Steinberg, University of Miami, and Freeley, John Caroll University, 8
[Austin L. and David L., 2/13/2008, Argumentation and Debate: Critical
Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, 12th edition,
http://teddykw2.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/argumentation-anddebate.pdf, p. 45]
To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and
placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly
defined. If we merely talk about homelessness or abortion or crime or global
warming we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable
basis for argument. For example, the statement Resolved: That the pen is mightier than
the sword is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear argumentation. If we
take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force
for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of
writing or physical force for a specific purpose.
Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too
broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are
we concerned withpoems, novels, government documents, website development,
advertising, or what? What does effectiveness mean in this context? What kind of
physical force is being comparedfists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or
what? A more specific question might be, Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by
our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our support in a certain crisis? The
basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as Resolved: That
the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania. Negative
advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a
better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative
interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over
competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very
engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on
a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.

AT K of Fairness
Conflicts are inevitable our attempt to establish procedural
fairness is necessary to the decision-making process EVEN IF
substantive fairness cannot be achieved.
Menkel-Meadow, 4 (Carrie, Georgetown University Law Center, 2004, From
Legal Disputes to Conflict Resolution and Human Problem Solving: Legal Dispute
Resolution in a Multidisciplinary Context)

If recent world events have taught us anything, it is that conflict and conflicting notions
of the good are inevitable for human beings. So, while many of us seek ways to establish
more universal notions of the good toward which to direct our human efforts, it has,
sadly, become, in the early years of the twenty-first century, more common for us to
assume there will be basic value differences among us. We should, then, spend our time
thinking about how we can at least develop fair and considerate processes for
communicating enough with each other so that we may act with the most benefit and the
least harm. Some offer hopes that "the rule of law" can be universalized as a principled
way to resolve conflicts, domestically and internationally. Others of us see law as often
conflictual, indeterminate, and politically contested or manipulable, or so focused on the
need for regulation of the aggregate that it cannot always do 'Justice" in particular cases.
Legal justice is not always actual justice. The social philosopher Stuart Hampshire has
recently concluded, in his book Justice Is Conflict, that while we may never agree about
what the content of universal justice is "because there never will be such a harmony,
either in the soul or in the city," we might instead come closer to recognizing that
"fairness in procedures for resolving conflicts is the fundamental kind of fairness, and
that it is acknowledged as a value in most cultures, places, and times: fairness in
procedure is an invariable value, a constant in human nature."2 Hampshire goes on to
say-in words eloquent enough to make one feel proud of what has constituted at least
half of a lifetime's work of theorizing and practice 10 conflict resolution-that [b]ecause
there will always be conflicts between conceptions of the good, moral conflicts, both in
the soul and in the city, there is everywhere a well- recognized need for procedures of
conflict resolution, which can replace brute force and domination and tyranny.3 The
existence of such an institution [for conflict resolution], and the particular form of its
rules and conventions of procedure are matters of historical contingency. There is no
rational necessity about the more specific rules and conventions determining the criteria
for success in argument in any particular institution, except the overriding necessity that
each side in the conflict should be heard putting its case ("audi alteram par/em '].4 [T]he
skillful management of conflicts [is] among the highest of human skills. 5 Hampshire
identifies several principles which are crucial to understanding the importance of
procedural justice. 1. Conflict is human and ubiquitous. Conflict is actually necessary for
defining what is important about oneself and the polity to which individuals belong, and
for instigating important social change (e.g., the elimination of slavery, the movements
toward racial and gender equality, as well as increased democratic participation in many
nations). Agreement on all human values is unlikely given human diversity, deep-seated

cultural norms, and the variation of human needs and desires. 2. Even if we cannot all
agree on substantive norms and goals, we can probably agree on some processes for
making decisions that will enable us to go forward and act. We might have some virtually
universal ideas about procedural fairness, like the ability to "make a case" and "be heard"
and to have impartiality and fairness govern any decision-making process. Some might
go further and suggest that some participation in the process by which decisions are
made is essential to the legitimacy of a process (with or without commitments to
democratic political regimes).

Agonistic rhetoric is more than succeed-at-all-costs

adversarial debate is key to testing ideas and tolerating
difference.
Crosswhite 2 (James Crosswhite, Professor, Department of English, University of
Oregon, Ph.D. Philosophy, UC San Diego, B.A. Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz, Conflict in
Concert: Fighting Hannah Arendt's Good Fight, JAC, 22(4), Fall 2002, pp.948-959,
http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol22.4/crosswhite-conflict.pdf)

Early in her essay, and again at the end, Roberts-Miller shakes hands with her opponent and acknowledges that there is a
legitimate grievance against agonistic rhetoric. The basic problem with valuing agonistic rhetoric is that one seems at the

One
needs a way to distinguish between agonistic rhetoric that is merely succeed-at-all-costs and-never-give-in combat and agonistic rhetoric that uses competition and struggle to
accomplish something greater than simple conquest. She is not sure that she has a satisfying way of addressing
same time to be promoting mere wrangling. The opponents ofagonistic rhetoric have opposed it on these grounds.

this problem, but she cites a passage from John Locke in which the essence of wrangling is that the wranglers are
incapable of changing their minds, of being convinced by opposing arguments. Later in her essay, in her gloss on a passage
from Arendt, she develops this important feature of agonistic discourse: "It is not asymmetric manipula- tion ofothers ... it
must be a world into which one enters and by which one can be changed" (593). This is a familiar condition by which
argumentation theorists attempt to delineate just what argumentation is. If

the interlocutors are not willing

to change their minds, then they are not engaged in argumentation. Near the end of her
article, she regrets that Arendt did not do more to distinguish polemical agonism from wrangling, and then she drops the
discussion. It would of course be very interesting to hear more about this. The agonistic/collaborative distinction is made
in large part, according to Roberts-Miller herself, because one cannot distinguish the valuable kind of rhetoric from the
destructive kind. If neither Arendt nor Roberts-Miller can address this, then something is seriously amiss. At this point, it
is just impossible not to regret that the last half-century's resurgence of argu- mentation theory is not more broadly
acknowledged by those who make a profession of rhetoric, writing, and literacy. Chaim Perelman and Lucie OlbrechtsTyteca labor carefully in The New Rhetoric to describe what makes possible the "contact of minds" that is a condition for
the possibil- ity of genuine argumentation. Franz van Eemeren and the late Rob Grootendorst worked for years on their
"pragma-dialectical" rules for argumentative discourse. And more recently, in The New Dialectic, Douglas Walton has
systematized his thinking on the rules for argumen- tative dialogues and distinguished the rules for eristic dialogues from
the rules for inquiry dialogues, deliberative dialogues, and other kinds of argumentative discourse. It would be interesting
to know whether Rob- erts-Miller would find in this work a way to elaborate the concept of polemical agonism and save it
from its indistinguishability from wran- gling. However the threat of agonism's logical indistinguishability from
wrangling is only part of the problem. There is also a psychological dimension to the objection to agonistic argumentation.
Some people are just psychologically defeated by it. Their experience-in childhood, in a bad marriage, in the course of life

It
has not been a way for them to gain a hearing, or a way to negotiate, or a way to resolve
conflict, or a way to learn, or a way to gain self-knowledge. They have succumbed to the
threat that Socrates feared for his own interlocutors-misology , the hatred of arguments-because of the
experience of being constantly defeated by them and by those who wield them with
virtuosity. This is not a problem that can be directly addressed by theorizing and argumentation, although the theory
in general, or even in court and with lawyers, and perhaps in education-is to have been outdone by argumentation.

of argumentation is quite an important part of it. It requires rather a practical kind of wisdom and virtuous action. When
Socrates breaks off the argument with young Theaetetus in Plato's dialogue of that name, it is because he understands
Theaetetus and his condition, the stage of his formation, and the threat of misology, and because he has the virtue to act
on the younger man's behalf, to keep a space open for his individual development. One of the less noted objections to
agonistic rhetoric is that it damages those who are defeated by it, that it creates an association between reason and failure,
reason and psychological pain. It would be interesting to hear Roberts-Miller address this objection. What would it take
not only to theorize a logical distinction between agonistic rhetoric and wrangling but also to make use ofthe distinction in
our practice and teaching? The central move in Roberts-Miller's deployment of Arendt's think- ing is to accept the
distinction between agonistic and collaborative rhetoric but to present arguments that reverse the value hierarchy that the
split sets up: to replace "much ofour dislike ofconflict with a dislike of consensus." Here she gives us Arendt at her most
Heideggerian. Human

beings are beset by a powerful drift toward conformity that is an

evasion of individual responsibility. This drift is not simply a superficial, external conformity but a deep one
in which our thinking becomes the thinking of no one in particular and in which our individual identities meld in an
anonymous social self. Ironically, this conformity is so deep that we can be most social even while most isolated; in fact,
conformity depends in part on a certain kind of isolation, an unwillingness to express our disagreements and test them by
arguments in some public way. Instead, one's

social and institutional identities pretty much

determine how one should think and act on almost all occasions. This conformist
sociality is the absolutization of bureaucracy and the apotheosis of collaborationism . In
Arendt's and Roberts-Miller's hands, the idea of the collaborative takes on all the resonance the word had when it was
used of those who capitulated to the Nazis. One can almost see and hear scenes from The Sorrow and the Pity as one
ponders these Arendtian ideas. And, of course, Arendt's prime exhibit of "collaborative man" is the desk- murderer Adolph
Eichmann, the perfect administrator who, even after recognizing his complicity in the murder of millions, could under-
stand his guilt only as the guilt ofobedience to his superiors, the guilt of doing his official duties. Eichmann is the
thoroughly historicist, perfectly formed social constructionist. To the challenge that he should have spoken out against
what was going on, he replied: "Under the circumstances then prevailing such an attitude was not possible. Nor did
anyone behave in this fashion. From my experience I know that the possibility, which was alleged only after the War, of
opposing orders is a self-protective fairy tale." Arendt's argument depends on Eichmann's words never losing their power
to chill us. And so Roberts-Miller looks to Arendt for help in " replacing

our mistrust of conflict with a

mistrust of consensus." What Eichmann and collaborationism both lack is a capacity for being hospitable to a
conflict of ideas. True individuality (and not the passive isolation ofthe "personal"; even Eichmann was not "personally" in
favor ofthe persecution ofthe Jews) requires active political interac- tion that involves conflict and competition and the
struggle and testing of competing perspectives in argumentation. True

individuality requires risk-the

exposure of our individual thoughts to the sometimes painful experience of their public
examination. This is the heroism of thinking. One always risks losing and having to
change. However, as Stanley Cavell would point out, this is also the joy and adventure of individuality: to change, to
imagine one self as on some kind of path, to think of change as (sometimes painful) transformation. This conflict,
says Roberts- Miller, need not be forced. It is the form taken by open acknowledgment of difference.
We find identities in the course of these conflicts; we set out on paths toward ourselves. And this can all take
place only when there is some kind of social space for it and when there are individuals
capable of it. And so, says Roberts-Miller, we should trust collaborationism less and look to the
agonism that allows for individuality and openness to difference.

Excusing fairness as unimportant facilitates bad debates that are

dialogically useless and inherently exclusionary.
Galloway, Samford University communications professor, 07 [Ryan Galloway,
professor of communications at Samford University (Dinner And Conversation At The
Argumentative Table: Reconceptualizing Debate As An Argumentative Dialogue,
Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)]

Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively
fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have

their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The
affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams
have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous,
taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure.
Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to
the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages,
counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows
for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively
balanced argumentative table.
When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also
undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side
excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant
(Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a
fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that
takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links
to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that
a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical
thinking not be silenced.
Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular
negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to
meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to understand what went on
and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan
furthers this line of reasoning:
Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they
enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition
is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument,
discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any
kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us
to a common causeIf we are to be equalrelationships among equals must find
expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197).
Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that
maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).
For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither
state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the
topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is
oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically
suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the
affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role
to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective counter-word and
undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other
substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.

AT Roleplaying
No link defending policy does not necessitate pretending to be
the USfg fiat is merely an intellectual heuristic for imagining
the enactment and consequences of a plan does not kill
agency.
Michael Eber 5, former Director of Debate at Michigan State University, Everyone
Uses Fiat, April 8th,
http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/edebate@ndtceda.com/1077700.html

It is shocking to me how, after literally a DECADE of debates, no one seems to

understand what the hell fiat is. Policy teams foolishly defend "role playing" even
though they do not role play. And critique teams reject fiat even though almost every
single K alternative relies on a utopian imaginary that necessitates a greater degree of
fiat than the reformist Aff. Debate is about opinion formation, not roleplaying. Affirmative policy teams do not pretend to BE the federal government. They
merely IMAGINE the consequences of the government enacting the plan as a means of
determining whether it SHOULD be done. All fiat represents is the step of imagining
hypothetical enactment of the plan as an intellectual tool for deciding whether WE
should endorse it."How should we determine whether or not to ENDORSE lifting
sanctions on Cuba?" "Well, what would happen if the government did that?"
"Let's IMAGINE a world where sanctions are lifted. What would that world look like?
Would it be better than the status quo?" "Is that world better than competitive
alternatives?"This conversation does NOT posit the discussants AS the federal
government. They do not switch identities and act like Condaleeza and Rummy. They do
not give up the agency to decide something for themselves - the whole point is simply to
use the imagination of fiat to determine OUR OPINION.

AT Agency
Policy debates are empowering.
Zwarensteyn, Grand Valley State Masters student, 12 [Ellen C., 8-1-2012 High
School Policy Debate as an Enduring Pathway to Political Education: Evaluating
Possibilities for Political Learning http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1034&context=theses]

A debate education becomes a way for students to think of themselves as activists and
critics of society. This is a practice of empowerment. Warner and Brushke (2001)
continue to highlight how practicing public speaking itself may be vitally empowering.
Speaking in a highly engaged academic environment where the goal is analytical victory
would put many on edge. Taking academic risks in a debate round, however, yields
additional benefits. The process of debating allows students to practice listening and
conceiving and re-conceiving ideas based on in-round cooperation. This cooperation,
even between competing teams, establishes respect for the process of deliberation. This
practice may in turn empower students to use speaking and listening skills outside the
debate round and in their local communities skills making students more comfortable
talking to people who are different from them (Warner and Brushke, 2001, p. 4-7).
Moreover, there is inherent value in turning the traditional tables of learning around.
Reversing the traditional classroom demonstrates students taking control of their own
learning through the praxis of argumentation. Students learn to depend on themselves
and their colleagues for information and knowledge and must cooperate through the
debate process. Taken together, policy debate aids academic achievement, student
behavior, critical thinking, and empowers students to view themselves as qualified
agents for social change.

AT Privilege DA
Forcing confessions out of individuals fails to collectivize action
that can change broader structures of domination Instead it
bestows cultural capital to those least privileged creating a
perverse game to be the most oppressed.
Andrea Smith, Ph.D., co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, UC
Riverside Associate Professor, 2013, Geographies of Privilege, Unsettling the Privilege of
Self-Reflexivity, Kindle

In my experience working with a multitude of anti-racist organizing projects over the years, I frequently found myself
participating in various workshops in which participants were asked to reflect on their gender/race/sexuality/class/etc.
privilege. These workshops had a bit of a self-help orientation to them: I am so and so, and I have x privilege. It was
never quite clear what the point of these confessions were. It was not as if other participants did not know the confessor in
question had her/his proclaimed privilege. It

did not appear that these individual confessions actually led

to any political projects to dismantle the structures of domination that enabled their
privilege. Rather, the confessions became the political project themselves. The benefits of
these confessions seemed to be ephemeral. For the instant the confession took place, those who do not have that
privilege in daily life would have a temporary position of power as the hearer of the confession who could grant absolution
and forgiveness. The sayer of the confession could then be granted temporary forgiveness for
her/his abuses of power and relief from white/male/heterosexual/etc guilt. Because of the perceived benefits of this ritual,
there was generally little critique of the fact that in the end, it

primarily served to reinstantiate the

structures of domination it was supposed to resist. One of the reasons there was little critique of this
practice is that it bestowed cultural capital to those who seemed to be the most oppressed.
Those who had little privilege did not have to confess and were in the position to be the judge of those who did have
privilege. Consequently, people aspired to be oppressed. Inevitably, those with more privilege would develop
new heretofore unknown forms of oppression from which they suffered. I may be white, but my best friend was a person
of color, which caused me to be oppressed when we played together. Consequently, the

goal became not to

actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as possible. These rituals often
substituted confession for political movement-building. And despite the cultural capital that was, at
least temporarily, bestowed to those who seemed to be the most oppressed, these rituals ultimately reinstantiated the
white majority subject as the subject capable of self-reflexivity and the colonized/racialized subject as the occasion for selfreflexivity. These rituals around self-reflexivity in the academy and in activist circles are not without merit. They are
informed by key insights into how the logics of domination that structure the world also constitute who we are as subjects.
Political projects of transformation necessarily involve a fundamental reconstitution of ourselves as well. However, for this
process to work, individual

transformation must occur concurrently with social and political

transformation. That is, the undoing of privilege occurs not by individuals confessing their
privileges or trying to think themselves into a new subject position, but through the creation of collective
structures that dismantle the systems that enable these privileges. The activist genealogies that
produced this response to racism and settler colonialism were not initially focused on racism as a problem of individual
prejudice. Rather, the purpose was for individuals to recognize how they were shaped by structural forms of oppression.
However, the response to structural racism became an individual one individual confession at the expense of collective
action. Thus the question becomes, how would one collectivize individual transformation? Many organizing projects
attempt and have attempted to do precisely this, such Sisters in Action for Power, Sista II Sista, Incite! Women of Color
Against Violence, and Communities Against Rape and Abuse, among many others. Rather than focus simply on ones
individual privilege, they address privilege on an organizational level. For instance, they might assess is everyone who is
invited to speak a college graduate? Are certain peoples always in the limelight? Based on this assessment, they develop
structures to address how privilege is exercised collectively. For instance, anytime a person with a college degree is invited
to speak, they bring with them a co-speaker who does not have that education level. They might develop mentoring and
skills-sharing programs within the group. To quote one of my activist mentors, Judy Vaughn, You dont think your way
into a different way of acting; you act your way into a different way of thinking. Essentially, the current social structure

conditions us to exercise what privileges we may have. If

we want to undermine those privileges, we

must change the structures within which we live so that we become different peoples in
the process.

AT Discourse/Reps
Placing representations and discourse first trades off with
concrete political change
Taft-Kaufman, 95 (Jill, professor, Department of Speech Communication And
Dramatic Arts, at Central Michigan University, Southern Communication Journal,
Spring, proquest)

Clarke's assessment of the postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua non" of
critical discussion is an even stronger indictment against the trend. Clarke examines
Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all
social relations are linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens
speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion,
Clarke replies: I can think of few more striking indicators of the political and intellectual
impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the discursive. If the worst
terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are appallingly
ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's
conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its projection onto the rest of
the world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the discursive is derived from
the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in a world of
ideas or symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that
require collective activity for their fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on the discursive
without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from material
circumstances hides the complex task of envisioning and working towards concrete
social goals (Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that create the situation of
marginality escape the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences
are not overlooked by scholars from marginalized groups. Robinson (1990) for example,
argues that "the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just textual" (p.
571). Lopez (1992) states that "the starting point for organizing the program content of
education or political action must be the present existential, concrete situation" (p. 299).
West (1988) asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist discourses about
"Otherness" blinds us to realities of American difference going on in front of us (p. 170).
Unlike postmodern "textual radicals" who Rabinow (1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy
about power and the realities of socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from
marginalized groups are clear about how discourse interweaves with the concrete
circumstances that create lived experience. People whose lives form the material for
postmodern counter-hegemonic discourse do not share the optimism over the new
recognition of their discursive subjectivities, because such an acknowledgment does not
address sufficiently their collective historical and current struggles against racism,
sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not appreciate being told they are
living in a world in which there are no more real subjects. Ideas have consequences.
Emphasizing the discursive self when a person is hungry and homeless represents both a
cultural and humane failure. The need to look beyond texts to the perception and
attainment of concrete social goals keeps writers from marginalized groups ever-mindful

of the specifics of how power works through political agendas, institutions, agencies, and
the budgets that fuel them.

AT: Ontology/Epistemology
No prior questions
Owen 2 David Owen, Reader of Political Theory at the Univ. of Southampton,

Millennium Vol 31 No 3 2002 p.

655-7
Commenting on the philosophical turn in IR, Wver remarks that [a] frenzy for words like epistemology and ontology often
signals this philosophical turn, although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed
or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one
respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that periods of disciplinary disorientation involve
recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such
reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical
positions. Yet, such a philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a
confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger

with the philosophical

turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of

ontology and epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the
latter two were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory
and/or interpretive power of a theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological
and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not be a criticism that had any
value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these philosophical commitments.
Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theory to recognise that it can provide powerful
accounts of certain kinds of problems, such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action
are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good
account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant
actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory)
and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weaknessbut this does not undermine the point that, for a certain class
of problems, rational

choice theory may provide the best account available to us. In

other words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their
ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is not
the only or even necessarily the most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical turn is
that because prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from
philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than problemdriven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this: since it is the case that there
is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the
challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action,
event or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, theory-driven
work is part of a reductionist program in that it dictates always opting for the description that calls
for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory.5 The justification offered for this strategy rests
on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to
characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to
misunderstand the enterprise of science since whether there are general explanations for classes of phenomena is a
question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry.6 Moreover, this

strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of
empirical validity. The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a
particular image of disciplinary debate in IRwhat might be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) the Highlander
viewnamely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical
alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view
because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulates the idea that there can only be one
theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and
epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially
vicious circle arises.

State Good

AT: State Bad Generic

Not always policy can be affirmed within contingent, specific,
and contextualized formulations abstract demonization of
power obfuscates the benefits of political engagement.
Zanotti, 13 (Laura, Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at
Virginia Tech, 12/30/13, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Governmentality,
Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World)

By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the

possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects
relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context
of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to
rejection, revolution, or dispossession to regain a pristine freedom from all
constraints or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and
contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities
and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions
oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their
interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about
identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems.
International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within
these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with.
Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It
invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than
overarching demonizations of power, romanticizations of the rebel or the the local.
More broadly, theoretical formula- tions that conceive the subject in non-substantialist
terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses,
and on hybridization as the terrain for political transforma- tion, open ways for
reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These
alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously
taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to
what happens instead of fixations on what ought to be.83 Such ethics of engagement
would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine freedom to be regained.
Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with
whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the
consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault
my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not
exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to
do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.84

This is descriptive NOT absolute- we should use the state as a

heuristic to imagine possible political actions.

Zanotti, 13 (Laura, Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at

Virginia Tech, 12/30/13, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Governmentality,
Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World)

While there are important variations in the way international relations scholars use governmen- tality theory, for the
purpose of my argument I identify two broad trajectories.2 One body of scholar- ship uses governmentality as a heuristic
tool to explore modalities of local and international government and to assess their effects in the contexts where they are
deployed; the other adopts this notion as a descriptive tool to theorize the globally oppressive features of international

Scholars who use governmentality as a heuristic tool tend to conduct inquiries

based upon analyses of practices of government and resistance. These scholars rely on ethnographic
inquiries, empha- sizes the multifarious ways government works in practice (to include its
oppressive trajectories) and the ways uneven interactions of governmental strategies and resistance are
contingently enacted. As examples, Didier Bigo, building upon Pierre Bourdieu, has encouraged a research
liberalism.

methodology that privileges a relational approach and focuses on practice;3 William Walters has advocated consider- ing
governmentality as a research program rather than as a depiction of discrete systems of power;4 and Michael Merlingen
has criticized the downplaying of resistance and the use of governmentality as interchangeable with liberalism.5 Many
other scholars have engaged in con- textualized analyses of governmental tactics and resistance. Oded Lowenheim has
shown how responsibilization has become an instrument for governing individual travelers through travel warnings as
well as for developing states through performance indicators;6 Wendy Larner and William Walters have questioned
accounts of globalization as an ontological dimension of the present and advocated less substantialized accounts that focus
on studying the discourses, processes and practices through which globalization is made as a space and a political
economy;7 Ronnie D. Lipschutz and James K. Rowe have looked at how localized practices of resistance may engage and
transform power relations;8 and in my own work, I have studied the deployment of disciplinary and governmental tools
for reforming governments in peacekeeping operations and how these practices 9 were hijacked and resisted and by their
targets. Scholars

who use governmentality as a descriptive tool focus instead on one

particular trajectory of global liberalism, that is on the convergence of knowledge and scrutiny of life
processes (or bio- politics) and violence and theorize global liberalism as an extremely effective formation, a coherent and
powerful Leviathan, where biopolitical tools and violence come together to serve dominant classes or states political
agendas. As I will show, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Sergei Prozorov tend to embrace this
position.10 The

distinction between governmentality as a heuristic and governmentality as

a descriptive tool is central for debating political agency. I argue that, notwithstanding their critique
of liberalism, scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool rely on the same
ontological assumptions as the liberal order they criticize and do move away from Foucaults focus
on historical practices in order to privilege abstract theorizations. By using governmentality as a description of liberalism or capitalism instead of as a methodology of inquiry on powers contingent modalities and technologies, these
scholars tend to reify a substantialist ontology that ultimately reinforces a liberal conceptualization of subjects and power
as standing in a relation of externality and

stifles the pos- sibility of reimagining political agency on

different grounds. Descriptive governmentality con- structs a critique of the liberal international order based
upon an ontological framework that presupposes that power and subjects are entities possessing qualities that preexist
relations. Power is imagined as a mighty totality, and subjects as monads endowed with potentia. As a result, the
problematique of political agency is portrayed as a quest for the liberation of a subject ontologi- cally gifted with a
freedom that power inevitably oppresses. In this way, the conceptualization of political agency remains confined within
the liberal struggle of freedom and oppression. Even researchers who adopt a Foucauldian vocabulary end up falling
into what Bigo has identified as traps of political science and international relations theorizing, specifically
essentialization and ahistoricism.11 I argue here that in order to reimagine political agency an ontological and
epistemological turn is necessary, one that relies upon a relational ontology. Relational ontological positions question
adopting abstract stable entities, such as structures, power, or subjects, as explanations for what happens. Instead,
they explore how these pillar concepts of the Western political thought came to being, what kind of practices they
facilitate, consolidate and result from, what ambiguities and aporias they contain, and how they are transformed.12
Relational ontologies nurture modest con- ceptualizations of political agency and also question the overwhelming
stability of mighty total- ities, such as for instance the international liberal order or the state. In this framework,

political action has more to do with playing with the cards that are dealt to us to produce
practical effects in specific contexts than with building idealized new totalities where
perfect conditions might exist. The political ethics that results from non-substantialist ontological positions is
one that privi- leges modest engagements and weights political choices with regard to the consequences and dis-

tributive effects they may produce in the context where they are made rather than based upon their universal normative
aspirations.13

Their interpretation of the state is reductionist, totalizing, and

destroys the very possibility of political agency.
Zanotti, 13 (Laura, Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at
Virginia Tech, 12/30/13, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Governmentality,
Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World)

In summary, in non-substantialist frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and

multifar- ious agonic interactions, localized tactics, hybridized engagement and
redescriptions, a series of uncertain and situated responses to ambiguous discourses and
practices of power aimed at the con- struction of new openings, possibilities and
different distributive processes, the outcomes of which are always to an extent
unpredictable. Political agency here is not imagined as a quest for individual authenticity
in opposition to a unitary nefarious oppressive Leviathan aimed at the creation of a
better totality where subjects can float freed of oppression, or a multitude made into
a unified subject will reverse the might of Empire and bring about a condition of
immanent social justice. By not reifying power as a script and subject as monads
endowed with freedom non-substantialist positions open the way for conceptualizing
political agency as an engagement imbricated in praxis. The ethical virtue that is called
for is pragmatist humility, that is the patience of playing with the cards that are dealt
to us, enacting redescriptions and devising tactics for tinkering82 with what exists in
specific contexts. Conclusion In this article, I have argued that, notwithstanding their
critical stance, scholars who use governmen- tality as a descriptive tool remain rooted in
substantialist ontologies that see power and subjects as standing in a relation of
externality. They also downplay processes of coconstitution and the impor- tance of
indeterminacy and ambiguity as the very space where political agency can thrive. In this
way, they drastically limit the possibility for imagining political agency outside the
liberal straight- jacket. They represent international liberal biopolitical and
governmental power as a homogenous and totalizing formation whose scripts effectively
oppress subjects, that are in turn imagined as free by nature. Transformations of
power modalities through multifarious tactics of hybridiza- tion and redescriptions are
not considered as options. The complexity of politics is reduced to homo- genizing
and/or romanticizing narratives and political engagements are reduced to total heroic
rejections or to revolutionary moments.

AT: Nothing Leaves the Room

This cements the notion change is out of our reach - deliberative
dialogue over specific state policies can change this.
McCoy 2 (Martha L. Executive director of the Study Circles Resource Center, the
primary project of The Paul J. Aicher Foundation, of which she is President and
Patrick L. Scully president of Clearview Consulting LLC, a firm that conducts public
policy research and analysis, designs and leads public participation and engagement
initiatives, develops and evaluates programs, and provides leadership and management
support; Before forming Clearview Consulting, Pat was Executive Vice President of The
Paul J. Aicher Foundation where he served as deputy director of its flagship program,
Everyday Democracy "Deliberative Dialogue to Expand Civic Engagement: What Kind
of Talk Does Democracy Need?," NATIONALCIVIC REVIEW, vol. 91, no. 2, Summer
2002, http://ncdd.org/rc/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/McCoy-DD_Expand_CE.pdf)

8. Provide a way for people to see themselves as actors and to be actors. Our

everyday public discourse

reinforces the idea that real change happens out there, beyond most peoples reach or influence. In
part, this reflects the all- too-common disconnects between citizens and elected officials and between
126 McCoy, Scully community members and
the institutions and resources of the community. It also reflects the difficulty in seeing how individuals efforts to create
change connect to the larger issues or the larger community. Effective deliberative dialogue processes address
this in two ways. First, whole-community organizing creates opportunities for people from various neighborhoods,
institutions, and agencies to work through problems, consider solutions, and share a variety of resources to solve them.32

bring us and them together in the conversation, so that the conversation is

about all of us making a difference in the community. This takes the focus away from this is what we
hope they will do. Second, the content of the deliberative dialogue process is also critical. It
helps create a sense of agency for each person by leading participants in a nat- ural progression
from analysis of the issue to an exploration of specific action steps. When participants have the chance to
In essence, the process should

consider a range of actions that different actors (such as individuals, small groups, nonprofits, businesses, schools, and
government) can take, they are more likely to see that solutions to public problems can come in many and varied ways.

They are also more likely to see themselves as actors. When a public conversation ends with analy- sis of the
issue and does not progress to an intentional conversation about action steps, it reinforces the idea that the possibilities
for addressing the issue are entirely outside the room. The final session of a study circle gives participants a chance to
follow this natural progression, consider a range of possible actions, and decide which action steps they see as most
important. Then they present those action prior- ities at a large-group meeting (often referred to as an action forum) that
gives all the small groups a chance to pool their ideas and move forward on a range of actions. It is also important to keep
the results of the deliberative dialogue process in the public eye. This helps people see the value of their participa- tion.33
Some communities have developed benchmarks for change to help par- ticipants and the larger community measure the
progress they are making. This recognition of change encourages sustained efforts and also inspires broader
participation. We have found that the marriage of community organizing to deliberative dialogue is essential for bringing
this principle to life. While it is possible for people in small-scale engagement processes to consider possible action steps, a
diverse, large-scale process opens up many more avenues for action that can address institutional, community-wide, and
policy dimensions of issues.34 9. Connect to government, policymaking, and governance. A common prac- tice in public
talk processes is to ask participants to report the results of their deliberation to elected officials. Yet if the process does not
include a way to establish trust and mutuality between citizens and government, it will fall short of helping them work
together more effectively. Some engagement processes include ways to capture themes and convey them to public officials.
Identify- ing areas of common ground among members of the public can be especially
Deliberative Dialogue to Expand Civic Engagement 127 useful
to legislators who are looking for ways to reframe adversarial public pol- icy debates. But the more effective input
processes go one step further: they involve the policymakers as participants on an equal basis in the dialogue. Democratic

conversation between citizens and government has always been central to the ideal (if not practice) of
democracy. A current-day example is Benjamin Barbers call for horizontal conversations among citizens rather than

the more usual vertical conversation typical of communication between citizens and elites.35 This type of process

makes it more likely that the input will be meaningful to officials, and thus acted on. It creates a
context of reci- procity and relationship building that makes for a nonthreatening way for pub- lic officials to reevaluate
their own perspectives on policy issues, and

for citizens to have their voices heard in a more

meaningful way. In Oklahoma, the League of Women Voters and several other organizations organized a statewide
study circle program on criminal justice and corrections. The study circles occurred in thirteen communities across the
state and included state legislators. The involvement of legislators in the deliberative dialogue helped break a longstanding deadlock on corrections policy and helped create a rad- ical revision of the criminal justice system.36

Political Engagement Good

Anti-state politics lock in unaccountable policymaking the
result is individualized ethics reliant on wishful thinking rather
than true political engagement.
Chandler 7
(David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and
International Relations, University of Westminster "The Attraction of Post-Territorial
Politics: Ethics and Activism in the International Sphere" Inaugural Lecture May
available at: http://www.davidchandler.org/pdf/short_articles/Inaugural20lecture.pdf)

The practice of doing politics as a form of religiosity is a highly conservative one. As Marx argued, religion was the opium
of the people - this

is politics as a sedative or pacifier: it feeds an illusory view of change at

the expense of genuine social engagement and transformation . I want to argue that global
ethical politics reflects and institutionalises our sense of disconnection and social
atomisation and results in irrational and unaccountable government policy making . I want
to illustrate my points by briefly looking at the practices of global ethics in three spheres, those of radical political
activism, government policy making and academia. Radical activism People often argue that there is nothing passive or
conservative about radical political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and
anti- globalisation protests, the huge march to Make Poverty History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social
Forums or the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I disagree; these new forms of protest are

highly individualised and

personal ones - there is no attempt to build a social or collective movement . It appears that
theatrical suicide, demonstrating, badge and bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of
awareness, rather than attempts to engage politically with society. This is illustrated by the celebration of differences at
marches, protests and social forums. It is as if people

are more concerned with the creation of a sense of

community through differences than with any political debate, shared agreement or collective purpose. It
seems to me that if someone was really concerned with ending war or with ending poverty or with overthrowing
capitalism, that political views and political differences would be quite important. Is war caused by capitalism, by human
nature, or by the existence of guns and other weapons? It

would seem important to debate reasons,

causes and solutions, it would also seem necessary to give those 3 political differences an
organisational expression if there was a serious project of social change . Rather than a
political engagement with the world, it seems that radical political activism today is a
form of social disengagement expressed in the anti-war marchers slogan of Not in My Name, or the
assumption that wearing a plastic bracelet or setting up an internet blog diary is the same as engaging in political debate.
In fact, it seems that political activism is a practice which isolates individuals who think that demonstrating a personal
commitment or awareness of problems is preferable to engaging with other people who are often dismissed as uncaring or
brain-washed by consumerism. The narcissistic aspects of the practice of this type of global politics are expressed clearly
by individuals who are obsessed with reducing their carbon footprint, deriving their idealised sense of social connection
from an ever increasing awareness of themselves and by giving political meaning to every personal action. Global ethics
appear to be in demand because they offer us a sense of social connection and meaning while at the same time giving us
the freedom to construct the meaning for ourselves, to pick our causes of concern, and enabling us to be free of
responsibilities for acting as part of a collective association, for winning an argument or for success at the ballot-box.

While the appeal of global ethical politics is an individualistic one, the lack of success or
impact of radical activism is also reflected in its rejection of any form of social movement
or organisation. Governments Strange as it may seem, the only people who are keener on global
ethics than radical activists are political elites. Since the end of the Cold War, global ethics have formed
the core of foreign policy and foreign policy has tended to dominate domestic politics. Global ethics are at the centre of
debates and discussion over humanitarian intervention, healing the scar of Africa, the war on terror and the war against
climate insecurity. Tony Blair argued in the Guardian last week that foreign policy is no longer foreign policy (Timothy

Garten Ash, Like it or Loath it, after 10 years Blair knows exactly what he stands for, 26 April 2007), this is certainly
true. 4 Traditional foreign policy, based on strategic geo-political interests with a clear framework for policy-making,

no longer seems so important. The government is down-sizing the old Foreign and Commonwealth Office where
people were regional experts, spoke the languages and were engaged for the long-term, and provides more resources to the
Department for International Development where its staff are experts in good causes. This shift was clear in the UKs
attempt to develop an Ethical Foreign Policy in the 1990s an approach which openly claimed to have rejected strategic
interests for values and the promotion of Britains caring and sharing identity. Clearly, the projection of foreign policy on
the basis of demonstrations of values and identity, rather than an understanding of the needs and interests of people on
the ground, leads to ill thought-through and short-termist policy-making, as was seen in the value-based interventions
from Bosnia to Iraq (see Blairs recent Foreign Affairs article, A Battle for Global Values, 86:1 (2007), pp.7990).

Governments have been more than happy to put global ethics at the top of the political
agenda for - the same reasons that radical activists have been eager to shift to the global sphere the freedom
from political responsibility that it affords them. Every government and international institution
has shifted from strategic and instrumental policy-making based on a clear political programme to
the ambitious assertion of global causes saving the planet, ending poverty, saving Africa, not just ending
war but solving the causes of conflict etc of course, the more ambitious the aim the less anyone can be held to account
for success and failure. In fact, the more global the problem is, the more responsibility can be shifted to blame the US or
the UN for the failure to translate ethical claims into concrete results. Ethical global questions, where the alleged values of
the UN, the UK, the civilised world, NATO or the EU are on the line in wars of choice from the war on terror to the war
on global warming lack traditional instrumentality because they are driven less by the traditional interests of Realpolitik
than the narcissistic search for meaning or identity. Governments feel the consequences of their lack of social connection,
even more than we do as individuals; it undermines any attempt to represent shared interests or cohere political
programmes. As Baudrillard suggests, without a connection to the represented masses, political leaders are as open to
ridicule and exposure as the 5 Emperor with no clothes (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York:
Semiotext(e), 1983, for example). It

is this lack of shared social goals which makes instrumental

policy-making increasingly problematic. As Donald Rumsfeld stated about the war on terror, there are no
metrics to help assess whether the war is being won or lost. These wars and campaigns, often alleged to be based on the
altruistic claim of the needs and interests of others, are demonstrations and performances, based on ethical claims rather
than responsible practices and policies. Max Weber once counterposed this type of politics the ethics of conviction to
the ethics of responsibility in his lecture on Politics as a Vocation. The

desire to act on the international

scene without a clear strategy or purpose has led to highly destabilising interventions from
the Balkans to Iraq and to the moralisation of a wide range of issues from war crimes to EU membership requirements.
Academia Today more and more people are doing politics in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in
International Relations study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the
attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practice global ethics. The boom in the IR
discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests and the
sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical
engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of Realisms ontological focus. It seems that our ideas and our
theories say much more about us than the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the
global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with what is as with the potential for the emergence of
global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites espouse
rather than the practices of power. But the

most dangerous trends in the discipline today are those

frameworks which have taken up Critical theory and argue that focusing on the world as
it exists is conservative problem-solving while the task for critical theorists is to focus
on emancipatory alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then
becomes a process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement , 6 with its advocates
arguing that we need to focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality before thinking about
or teaching on world affairs; in the process this becomes me-search rather than research. We have
moved a long way from Hedley Bulls perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values
to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead. The inward-looking and narcissistic trends in academia,
where we

are more concerned with our reflectivity the awareness of our own ethics and
values - than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR students which
theoretical frameworks they agreed with most and they replied mostly Critical theory and Constructivism despite the fact
that they thought that states operated on the basis of power and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical
preferences were based more on what their choices said about them as ethical individuals than about how theory might be
used to understand and engage with the world.

AT: Exclusive
The state is not innately exclusionary invoking nationhood can
vitalize and sustain civic engagement as well as relativize
internal differences.
Brubaker 4
Rogers Brubaker, Department of Sociology, UCLA, 2004, In the Name of the Nation:
Reflectionson Nationalism and Patriotism, Citizenship Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2,
www.sailorstraining.eu/admin/download/b28.pdf

In the United States and other relatively settled, longstanding nation-states, nation can
work in this exclusionary way, as in nativist movements in America or in the rhetoric of
the contemporary European far right (la France oux Francais, Deutschland den
Deutshchen). Yet it can also work in a very different and fundamentally inclusive way.3
It can work to mobilize mutual solidarity among members of the nation, inclusively
defined to include all citizensand perhaps all long-term residentsof the state. To
invoke nationhood, in this sense, is to attempt to transcend or at least relativize internal
differences and distinctions. It is an attempt to get people to think of themselves to
formulate their identities and their interestsas members of that nation, rather than as
members of some other collectivity. To appeal to the nation can be a powerful rhetorical
resource, though it is not automatically so. Academics in the social sciences and
humanities in the United States are generally skeptical of or even hostile to such
invocations of nationhood. They are often seen as depasse, parochial, naive, regressive,
or even dangerous. For many scholars in the social sciences and humanities, nation is a
suspect category.
Few American scholars wave flags, and many of us are suspicious of those who do. And
often with good reason, since flag-waving has been associated with intolerance,
xenophobia, and militarism, with exaggerated national pride and aggressive foreign
policy. Unspeakable horrorsand a wide range of lesser evilshave been perpetrated in
the name of the nation, and not just in the name of ethnic nations, but in the name of
putatively civic nations as well (Mann, 2004). But this is not sufficient to account for
the prevailingly negative stance towards the nation. Unspeakable horrors, and an equally
wide range of lesser evils, have been committed in the name of many other sorts of
imagined communities as wellin the name of the state, the race, the ethnic group, the class, the party, the faith.
In addition to the sense that nationalism is dangerous, and closely connected to some of the great evils of our timethe sense that, as John Dunn (1979, p. 55) put
it, nationalism is the starkest political shame of the 20th-century there is a much broader suspicion of invocations of nationhood. This derives from the
widespread diagnosis that we live in a post-national age. It comes from the sense that, however well fitted the category nation was to economic, political, and
cultural realities in the nineteenth century, it is increasingly ill-fitted to those realities today. On this account, nation is fundamentally an anachronistic category,
and invocations of nationhood, even if not dangerous, are out of sync with the basic principles that structure social life today.4
The post-nationalist stance combines an empirical claim, a methodological critique, and a normative argument. I will say a few words about each in turn. The
empirical claim asserts the declining capacity and diminishing relevance of the nation-state. Buffeted by the unprecedented circulation of people, goods, messages,
images, ideas, and cultural products, the nation-state is said to have progressively lost its ability to cage (Mann, 1993, p. 61), frame, and govern social, economic,
cultural, and political life. It is said to have lost its ability to control its borders, regulate its economy, shape its culture, address a variety of border-spanning
problems, and engage the hearts and minds of its citizens. I believe this thesis is greatly overstated, and not just because the September 11 attacks have prompted
an aggressively resurgent statism.5 Even the European Union, central to a good deal of writing on post-nationalism, does not represent a linear or unambiguous
move beyond the nation-state. As Milward (1992) has argued, the initially limited moves toward supranational authority in Europe workedand were intended

to restore and strengthen the authority of the nation-state. And the massive reconfiguration of political space along national lines in Central and Eastern Europe at
the end of the Cold War suggests that far from moving beyond the nation-state, large parts of Europe were moving back to the nation-state.6 The short twentieth
century concluded much as it had begun, with Central and Eastern Europe entering not a post-national but a post-multinational era through the large-scale
nationalization of previously multinational political space. Certainly nationhood remains the universal formula for legitimating statehood.
Can one speak of an unprecedented porosity of borders, as one recent book has put it (Sheffer, 2003, p. 22)? In some respects, perhaps; but in other respects
especially with regard to the movement of peoplesocial technologies of border control have continued to develop. One cannot speak of a generalized loss of
control by states over their borders; in fact, during the last century, the opposite trend has prevailed, as states have deployed increasingly sophisticated
technologies of identification, surveillance, and control, from passports and visas through integrated databases and biometric devices. The worlds poor who seek
to better their estate through international migration face a tighter mesh of state regulation than they did a century ago (Hirst and Thompson, 1999, pp. 301,
267). Is migration today unprecedented in volume and velocity, as is often asserted? Actually, it is not: on a per capita basis, the overseas flows of a century ago to
the United States were considerably larger than those of recent decades, while global migration flows are today on balance slightly less intensive than those of the
later nineteenth and early twentieth century (Held et al., 1999, p. 326). Do migrants today sustain ties with their countries of origin? Of course they do; but they
managed to do so without e-mail and inexpensive telephone connections a century ago, and it is not clearcontrary to what theorists of post-nationalism suggest
that the manner in which they do so today represents a basic transcendence of the nation-state.7 Has a globalizing capitalism reduced the capacity of the state to
regulate the economy? Undoubtedly. Yet in other domainssuch as the regulation of what had previously been considered private behaviorthe regulatory grip of
the state has become tighter rather than looser (Mann, 1997, pp. 4912).
The methodological critique is that the social sciences have long suffered from methodological nationalism (Centre for the Study of Global Governance, 2002;
Wimmer and Glick-Schiller, 2002)the tendency to take the nation-state as equivalent to society, and to focus on internal structures and processes at the
expense of global or otherwise border-transcending processes and structures. There is obviously a good deal of truth in this critique, even if it tends to be
overstated, and neglects the work that some historians and social scientists have long been doing on border-spanning flows and networks.
But what follows from this critique? If it serves to encourage the study of social processes organized on multiple levels in addition to the level of the nation-state, so
much the better. But if the methodological critique is coupled as it often iswith the empirical claim about the diminishing relevance of the nation-state, and if it
serves therefore to channel attention away from state-level processes and structures, there is a risk that academic fashion will lead us to neglect what remains, for
better or worse, a fundamental level of organization and fundamental locus of power.
The normative critique of the nation-state comes from two directions. From above, the cosmopolitan argument is that humanity as a whole, not the nation- state,
should define the primary horizon of our moral imagination and political engagement (Nussbaum, 1996). From below, muticulturalism and identity politics
celebrate group identities and privilege them over wider, more encompassing affiliations.
One can distinguish stronger and weaker versions of the cosmopolitan argument. The strong cosmopolitan argument is that there is no good reason to privilege the
nation-state as a focus of solidarity, a domain of mutual responsibility, and a locus of citizenship.8 The nation-state is a morally arbitrary community, since
membership in it is determined, for the most part, by the lottery of birth, by morally arbitrary facts of birthplace or parentage. The weaker version of the
cosmopolitan argument is that the boundaries of the nation-state should not set limits to our moral responsibility and political commitments. It is hard to disagree
with this point. No matter how open and joinable a nation isa point to which I will return belowit is always imagined, as Benedict Anderson (1991) observed,
as a limited community. It is intrinsically parochial and irredeemably particular. Even the most adamant critics of universalism will surely agree that those beyond
the boundaries of the nation-state have some claim, as fellow human beings, on our moral imagination, our political energy, even perhaps our economic
resources.9
The second strand of the normative critique of the nation-statethe multiculturalist critiqueitself takes various forms. Some criticize the nation-state for a
homogenizing logic that inexorably suppresses cultural differences. Others claim that most putative nation-states (including the United States) are not in fact
nation-states at all, but multinational states whose citizens may share a common loyalty to the state, but not a common national identity (Kymlicka, 1995, p. 11).
But the main challenge to the nation-state from multiculturalism and identity politics comes less from specific arguments than from a general disposition to
cultivate and celebrate group identities and loyalties at the expense of state-wide identities and loyalties.
In the face of this twofold cosmopolitan and multiculturalist critique, I would like to sketch a qualified defense of nationalism and patriotism in the contemporary
American context.10 Observers have long noted the Janus-faced character of nationalism and patriotism, and I am well aware of their dark side. As someone who
has studied nationalism in Eastern Europe, I am perhaps especially aware of that dark side, and I am aware that nationalism and patriotism have a dark side not
only there but here. Yet the prevailing anti-national, post-national, and trans-national stances in the social sciences and humanities risk obscuring the good
reasonsat least in the American contextfor cultivating solidarity, mutual responsibility, and citizenship at the level of the nation-state. Some of those who
defend patriotism do so by distinguishing it from nationalism.11 I do not want to take this tack, for I think that attempts to distinguish good patriotism from bad

nationalism are not things with fixed

natures; they are highly flexible political languages, ways of framing political arguments
by appealing to the patria, the fatherland, the country, the nation. These terms have
somewhat different connotations and resonances, and the political languages of
patriotism and nationalism are therefore not fully overlapping. But they do overlap a
great deal, and an enormous variety of work can be done with both languages. I therefore
want to consider them together here.
nationalism neglect the intrinsic ambivalence and polymorphism of both. Patriotism and

I want to suggest that patriotism and nationalism can be valuable in four respects. They
can help develop more robust forms of citizenship, provide support for redistributive
social policies, foster the integration of immigrants, and even serve as a check on the
development of an aggressively unilateralist foreign policy.
First, nationalism and patriotism can motivate and sustain civic engagement. It is
sometimes argued that liberal democratic states need committed and active citizens, and
therefore need patriotism to generate and motivate such citizens. This argument shares
the general weakness of functionalist arguments about what states or societies allegedly
need; in fact, liberal democratic states seem to be able to muddle through with largely
passive and uncommitted citizenries. But the argument need not be cast in functionalist

form. A committed and engaged citizenry may not be necessary, but that does not make
it any less desirable. And patriotism can help nourish civic engagement. It can help
generate feelings of solidarity and mutual responsibility across the boundaries of identity
groups. As Benedict Anderson (1991, p. 7) put it, the nation is conceived as a deep
horizontal comradeship. Identification with fellow members of this imagined
community can nourish the sense that their problems are on some level my problems, for
which I have a special responsibility.12
Patriotic identification with ones countrythe feeling that this is my country, and my
governmentcan help ground a sense of responsibility for, rather than disengagement
from, actions taken by the national government. A feeling of responsibility for such
actions does not, of course, imply agreement with them; it may even generate powerful
emotions such as shame, outrage, and anger that underlie and motivate opposition to
government policies. Patriotic commitments are likely to intensify rather than attenuate
such emotions. As Richard Rorty (1994) observed, you can feel shame over your
countrys behavior only to the extent to which you feel it is your country.13 Patriotic
commitments can furnish the energies and passions that motivate and sustain civic
engagement

They Make State Worse

The place of power turns their offense the state will merely
perpetuate itself in revolution.
Newman, 7 (Saul, Professor of Political Theory, PhD, University of Godsmiths
London, SubStance, Issue 113 (Volume 36, No. 2), 2007, Anarchism, Poststructuralism,
and the Future of Radical Politics, Project Muse)

The state remains one of the central and most persistent problems of radical politics.
Revolutions in the past have attempted to seize state power with the view to its eventual
withering away; however, the result has often been a strengthening and expansion of
the state, and with it a repression of the very revolutionary forces that sought to
control it. This is the problem that I have termed the place of powerthe structural
imperative of the state to perpetuate itself even in moments of revolutionary upheaval
(see Newman 2001). Alain Badiou also sees this problem as being of fundamental
importance: More precisely, we must ask the question that, without a doubt, constitutes
the great enigma of the century: why does the subsumption of politics, either through
the form of the immediate bond (the masses), or the mediate bond (the party) ultimately
give rise to bureaucratic submission and the cult of the State? (2005: 70) In other
words, perhaps there is something in the political forms that revolutions have taken in
the past that led to the perpetuation of the state. We might recall that this was the same
problem that classical anarchists during the nineteenth century confronted in their
debates with Marx. Anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin warned of the dangers of a workers
revolution that sought not to dismantle the state, but to seize control of it and use it to
complete the revolution. He predicted that this would end up in the emergence of a new
bureaucratic class of technocrats who would exploit and oppress workers and peasants,
much in the same way as the old class system did (Bakunin 1973: 266). Moreover, the
end of the Cold War and the collapse of the political and ideological conflict between
liberal-democracy and totalitarianism, has allowed us to confront, for the first time, the
specific problem of state power. In other words, liberal-democracy and Communism
merely served as the ideological masks of the state. These fictions have now fallen away
and the true face of sovereignty has been laid bare. This dull visage is merely one of
naked power: a power that no longer tries to justify itself legally or normatively; a power
that now operates more or less with total impunity in the name of guaranteeing our
securityor, to be more, precise, creating a permanent state of insecurity in order to
legitimize its existence. Indeed, we might say that the war on terrorismwith its
permanent state of emergency and warmerely operates as the states latest and
flimsiest ideological fiction, a desperate attempt by the state to disguise its absence of
legitimate foundation. In its new security mode, the liberal-democratic state is
becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the authoritarian police state. As Giorgio
Agamben argues, the modern state now has the provision of securityor some illusion
of securityas its sole purpose. The guarantee of security has become, in other words,
the ultimate standard of the states political legitimacy.

Topic Specific

Policy Debate K2 Effective Ocean Policy

Knowledge about the oceans is key to better informing
environmental policy.
Steel et al, 5 (Brent S. Steela, , Court Smithb, Laura Opsommerc, Sara Curiela, Ryan
Warner-Steeld a Department of Political Science, Oregon State University b Department
of Anthropology, Oregon State University, c Master of Public Policy Program, Oregon
State University, Corvallis d Department of Biology, University of Oregon, 3/3/5, Ocean
and Coastal Management, Public ocean literacy in the United States,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0964569105000190)

On April 20, 2004, the 16 member Oceans Commission, appointed by President Bush,
issued a report detailing the deteriorating condition of the nation's coastal waters. The
Commission's chairman, Adm. James Watkins, commented at the release of the report:
Our oceans and coasts are in serious trouble [1, p. A-15]. The Commission's report,
along with numerous other studies including the recently released Pew Oceans
Commission report America's Living Oceans: Charting a Course for Sea Change, argue
for new approaches and actions to mitigate and correct these deteriorating conditions.
Along these lines, the Pew Oceans Commission called for a new era of ocean literacy
that links people to the marine environment [2, p. 91]. The Commission further argues
that there is a need to provide the public with understandable information about the
structure and functioning of coastal and marine ecosystems, how ecosystems affect daily
lives, and how we affect ecosystems [2, p. 11]. Similarly, the Report of the US
Commission on Ocean Policy states: To successfully address complex ocean- and
coastal-related issues, balance the use and conservation of marine resources, and realize
future benefits of the ocean, an interested, engaged public is essential [3, p. 85]. Doug
Daigle echoes this call for greater public involvement in coastal conservation, the only
hope for further progress on environmental protection and sustainable development lies
with a public that is not only informed but also engaged [4, p. 230]. Knowledge is vital
in developing an individual's perception of the oceans and the resources they provide.
Additionally, knowledge is a key component in accomplishing effective environmental
policies [5], [6] and [7]. As Janicke comments, without a doubt, environmental
knowledge and public awareness are important factors influencing environmental policy
and management [8, p. 11]. Because citizens are either directly or indirectly involved in
activities and behaviors that may place our ocean and coastal areas at risk, it is indeed
important to assess the scope and depth of policy-relevant knowledge among the public
and to learn where people tend to acquire their information about ocean and coastal
conditions.

Understanding ocean policy options through debate is the first

step to an effective ocean policy.

Steel et al, 5 (Brent S. Steela, , Court Smithb, Laura Opsommerc, Sara Curiela, Ryan
Warner-Steeld a Department of Political Science, Oregon State University b Department
of Anthropology, Oregon State University, c Master of Public Policy Program, Oregon
State University, Corvallis d Department of Biology, University of Oregon, 3/3/5, Ocean
and Coastal Management, Public ocean literacy in the United States,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0964569105000190)

Increasingly the scientific and technical complexity of many public policy issuessuch as
environmental issues concerning coastal areas and the oceansposes serious challenges
for the effective participation of citizens in the democratic process [6], [9] and [10]. In
order for citizens to effectively monitor policy-makers in democratic societies, they need
to be informed consumers of relevant scientific research and the policy options suggested
by those findings [11] and [12]. As Beierle and Cayford have argued, Increasing public
understanding of environmental problems builds capacity for solving those problems
[5, p. 15]. However, the critical gap between the need for policy-relevant knowledge and
the generally poor level of public understanding of many public policy issues has led
some commentators to proclaim the existence of a legitimacy crisis [13]. As Mondak
points out, popular input into government will be vacuous if citizens fail to
comprehend the intricacies of policy debates [14, p. 513]. Many scholars suggest that
knowledge is central to the policy-making process and that improving the knowledge
base of citizens should be the first step in establishing a nation-wide effort to preserve
the oceans. Eagly and Kulesa have argued communications directed to the general
public are important not only because they may influence public opinion, and therefore
have an impact on public policy, but also because they are potentially effective in
inducing individuals to engage in behavior that can lessen the destructive impact of
humans on the environment [15, p. 123]. In fact, McKenzie-Mohr [16] has identified the
lack of knowledge as a major reason for public non-involvement in environmental
activities.

Advancing ocean literacy is key to informed decisions about

policy.
Greely, 8 (Teresa, University of South Florida, 2008, Ocean literacy and reasoning
about ocean issues: The influence of content, experience and morality,
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=etd)

Ocean issues with conceptual ties to science and a global society have captured the attention, imagination, and concern
of an international audience. Global climate change, natural disasters, over fishing, marine pollution, freshwater
shortages, groundwater contamination, economic trade and commerce, marine mammal stranding, and decreased
biodiversity are just a few of the ocean issues highlighted in our media and conversations. The ocean shapes our weather,
links us to other nations, and is crucial to our national security. From the life-giving rain that nourishes crops and our
bodies, to life-saving medicines; from the fish that come from the ocean, to the goods that are transported on the seas
surface--- the ocean plays a role in our lives in some way everyday (NOAA, 1998). The American public values the ocean
and considers protecting it to be a fundamental responsibility, but its understanding of why we need the ocean is
superficial (Belden, Russonello & Stewart, 1999). However, a broad disconnect exists between what scientist know and

the public understands about the ocean. The ocean, more than any other single ecosystem, has social and personal
relevance to all persons. In the 21st century we will look increasingly to the ocean to meet our everyday needs and
future sustainability. Thus, there

is a critical need to advance ocean literacy within our nation,

especially among youth and young adults. It has been estimated that less than 2% of all
American adults are environmentally literate (NEETF, 2005). Results from a series of ocean and coastal
literacy surveys 2 (AAAS, 2004; Belden, et al., 1999; Steel, Smith, Opsommer, Curiel & Warner-Steel, 2005) of
American adults reveal similar findings. Surveys demonstrated that in the 1990s the public valued the ocean and
expressed emotional and recreational connections, however, awareness about ocean health was low. A decade later
Americans had an increased sense of urgency about ocean issues and were willing to support actions to protect the
oceans even when the tradeoffs of higher prices at the supermarket, fewer recreational choices, and increased
government spending were presented (AAAS, 2004). While most Americans surveyed agree that humans are impacting
the health of the ocean more than one-third felt that they cannot make a difference. In contrast, a survey of youth reveals
strong feelings about environmental issues and the confidence that they can make a difference (AZA, 2003). Collectively,
these studies

reveal that the public is not well equipped with knowledge about ocean
issues. This implies that the public needs access to better ocean information delivered in the most effective manner.
The component lacking for both adults and youth is a baseline of ocean knowledge--- literacy about the oceans to
balance the emotive factors exhibited through care, concern and connection with the ocean. The

interdependence between humans and the ocean is at the heart of ocean literacy. Cudaback
(2006) believes that given the declining quality of the marine environment (Pew Ocean Commission, 2003), ocean
educators have the responsibility to teach not only the science of the ocean, but also the interdependence with humans.

Ocean literacy is especially significant, as we implement a first-ever national ocean policy to halt
the steady decline of our nations ocean and coasts via the Ocean Blueprint for the 21st Century (U.S. Commission on
Ocean Policy, 2004). The need for ocean education and literacy that goes beyond emotive factors is critical and relevant
towards preparing our students, teachers, and citizens to regularly contribute to ocean decisions and socioscientific
issues that impact their health and well being on Earth. The biggest barriers to increasing commitment to ocean
protection are Americans lack of awareness of the condition of the oceans and of their own role in damaging the oceans,
(Belden, et al., 1999). The challenge for ocean educators is to explicitly state the connections between the ocean and
daily decisions and actions of people. People enjoy the beauty of the ocean and the bounty of its waters, but may not
understand that their everyday actions such as boating, construction, improper waste disposal, or ignoring protected
areas, can impact the ocean and its resources. More than one-half of the US population lives within 200 miles of the
ocean. Long-term planning for growth, development and use of coastal areas is key to the continued productivity of the
ocean (NOAA, 1998). Because

the ocean is inextricably interconnected to students lives it

provides a significant context for socioscientific issues that foster decision making,
human interactions, and environmental stewardship. Ocean literacy encompasses the tenets of
scientific literacy which is defined by national standards, as the ability to make informed decisions regarding scientific
issues of particular social importance (AAAS, 1993; NRC, 1996, 2000). As such, scientific literacy encompasses both
cognitive (e.g. knowledge skills) and affective (e.g., emotions, values, morals, culture) processes. Science standards were
designed to guide our nation toward a scientifically literate society and provide criteria to judge progress toward a
national vision of science literacy (NRC, 1996). Although standards for science teaching and literacy are established, the
fundamental and critical role of the ocean is not emphasized. 4 Recently the definition of scientific literacy has been more
broadly conceptualized to include dealing sensibly with moral reasoning and ethical issues, and understanding
connections inherent in socioscientific issues (Zeidler, 2001; Zeidler & Keefer, 2003). Even more recently, the Centers
for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE) established a definition of ocean literacy as understanding how the
ocean affects you and how you affect the ocean. An

ocean-literate person understands the science of

the ocean, can communicate about the oceans, and can make informed decisions about
ocean policy. Table 1 identifies the seven content principles that guide the scope of ocean literacy. Appendix A
provides a description of the COSEE centers and their contribution to ocean literacy. Now that a definition,
characteristics and essential principles exist to describe ocean literacy, there is a critical need to operationalize the
concepts and assess the success and shortfalls of current ocean education programs using the tenets of ocean literacy.
The present study sought to test the concept of ocean literacy within the context of an ocean education program, the
Oceanography Camp for Girls. Appendix B provides a description of the Oceanography Camp for Girls education
program.

Ocean literacy researching and understanding the ocean is

key to avoiding an oceanic crisis.

West, 5 (Dick, President and CEO

Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education (CORE), Vol 38 No 4, Winter
2005, Marine Technology Society Journal, Ocean Literacy is Key to Preserving Our
Oceans and Coasts)

Of equal concern is the fact that with oceans covering 70% of our planet and play- ing such a critical role in sustaining life,

somehow we have allowed our oceans to degrade to the point where it has become a
crisis. One of the reasons may be that very few people are ocean-literate and thus have
no concern for the state of our oceansnot because they dont care but because they dont know. In a recent
national survey of the American public, results indicated a super- ficial level of knowledge about the impor- tance of our
oceans to human life and to our planets future.1 So what is the solution? The

solution is to improve
awareness of our ocean, coasts and Great Lakes by developing an ocean-literate society
accomplished by simply educating all Americans about our oceans, from school-aged children to se- nior citizens. This
way they

will under- stand its importance to our existence on this planet and the urgency for action and
become advocates for change. With over 200 recommendations put forth in the Ocean Commission (OC) report
to Con- gress, a key item states, strengthening the nations awareness of the importance of the oceans requires a
heightened focus on the marine environment through both formal and informal education efforts. Curricula for
kindergarten through 12th grade should expose students to ocean is- sues throughout their formal education with the next
generation of ocean scien- tists, managers, educators and leaders be- ing prepared through diverse higher edu- cation
opportunities... The report went on to say, the

public should be armed not only with the knowledge

and skills needed to make informed choices, but also with a sense of excitement about the marine environment. Individuals should understand the importance of the ocean to their lives and should realize how individual
actions affect the marine environment. The Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education (CORE), representing 81 of the nations leading ocean research and education universities, aquaria, non- profit institutes, laboratories, and
industry partners, fully supports the recommenda- tions in the OC report. The goals we sup- port in contributing to an
ocean-literate America include: (1) to invest in higher education (both under- graduate and graduate) in science and
technology fields relevant to the oceans, (2) to develop an ocean workforce and train individuals for productive oceanrelated careers, (3) to build a solid framework for goals 1 and 2 by integrating ocean studies into elementary and
secondary school education programs, (4) to establish a nationwide public outreach program and innovative education
programs at museums, aquaria, science centers and other informal education sites. But obtaining the goal of lifelong
ocean education is not an undertaking that can be accomplished by a single federal agency. It will require a coordinated
federal effort ad- vocating for increased federal funding for both formal and informal ocean education. Programs will need
to be creative and en- gaging to spark the interest of young peopleand what better way to teach sci- ence, math, physics,
biology, economics, then by using the ocean as the medium. Keeping ocean science in front of our talented youth is a
challenge. However, we know that formal education is one way to keep talented individuals who are well versed in science,
mathematics and technology moving into the nations workforce. Pro- grams such as the Centers for Ocean Sci- ence
Education Excellence (COSEE), the National Ocean Sciences Bowl (NOSB) and the outreach and education programs
supported by the National Sea Grant Col lege Program are good investments in the educational continuum. Graduate

education in ocean-related fields also needs to flourish in the United States if the nation
is to have the expert sci- entists, teachers, and policy makers, now and in the future. Closely
intertwined with this high quality graduate education is ocean re- searchalso essential if we are to make
the right decisions on how to preserve and man- age our oceans and coasts. But again, gradu- ate education in the ocean
sciences cannot be the concern of a single agency because all agencies with an ocean-related mission must have a welleducated workforce. Informal education, defined by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a life-long learning
process where people ac- quire knowledge and values from daily ex- periences (usually voluntarily and driven by personal
interest), is also necessary to educate our society. We must provide the opportunities that will draw interest from our
society to learn about the oceans, the prerequisite for an ocean literate society. The OC report states it clearly by explaining while most people do not recognize the number of benefits the ocean provides, or its potential for further discovery,
many do feel a positive connection with it, sens- ing perhaps that the vitality of the sea is directly related to human
survival. This connection can be a powerful tool for in- creasing awareness of, interest in, and re- sponsible action toward
the marine envi- ronment, and is critical to building an ocean stewardship ethic, strengthening the nations science
literacy and creating a new generation of ocean leaders. There

is a lot of work to do to get Ameri- cans

up to speed on their oceans. Its a chal- lenge we must meet or face the dangerous
consequences of being too late to preserve this vital resource. This nation must pro- mote the goal of lifelong
ocean education, both formal and informal. The OC report is a wake-up call!! It is also our handbook on how to protect

and preserve our seas. It

will take an ocean-literate society to ensure the recommendations of

the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy are implemented by fed- eral, state, and regional governments.