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... ... @@ -1,6 +1,67 @@ 1 -And, an infinite regard for the other is the source of our consciousness as ethical subjects; to be and ethical subject is to be for the other. Young summarizes Levinas: Bruce Young: “An introduction to Levinas” http://english.byu.edu/faculty/youngb/levinas/levinas3int.pdf 2 -If it were not for the face of the other person, I might indeed maintain the illusion that everything I experience and enjoy (food, landscapes, things) is indeed mine. But once I encounter the Other, I realize that there is something absolutely and irreducibly other than myself and that the world that I enjoy and seem to possess also belongs to the Other; my possession and sovereignty are contested. But this does not limit my freedom, for freedom would have no meaning in a world that belonged entirely to me. The Other "invests" my freedom, gives it meaning, makes it possible for me to make moral choices. I become "responsible," for the Other invites me (simply by his or her presence) to respond. The Other, through hnis or her neediness and vulnerability, invites me to offer myself and what I have in service and sustenance. At the same time, the Other commands, not by words but simply by the vulnerability of his or her face, "Thou shalt not kill." Besides introducing me to moral responsibility, the Other also makes the world "real." That is, I know the world is not just an illusion because I have it in common with the Other. Reality thus becomes genuinely "exterior"—and at the same time, I become genuinely "interior," because I am now truly differentiated from the external world and because I have been called upon to turn to my resources (what belongs to me and is in some sense a part of my "interior" world) so as to respond to and serve the Other. This "calling upon" and "responding" is the basis of language or conversation; and through language (discourse, conversation) the world becomes "communicable," something that can be shared. The Other is identified with "infinity" (hence the title Totality and Infinity): because I cannot contain or possess the Other or reduce the Other to a finite concept or image, the Other is, in that sense, without bounds. The Other thus produces in me "the idea of Infinity": the idea of something more than I can contain. Since I can never fully satisfy my obligation to the Other, my responsibility for the Other is also "infinite." Ethics is thus not first of all a matter of "reciprocity": I do not owe certain things to the Other only in return for what has been don e for me. The obligation toward the Other comes with the relationship itself, which precedes any actions performed or even any thoughts by which I would be able to measure my own and the other's relative obligations. Furthermore, I can never get out of myself in such a way as to "objectively" (from the outside) compare the relative obligations of myself and the other. My unique position as a self depends on my responsibility to the other, which (as far as I am concerned) always precedes and exceeds any obligation the other may have toward me. 3 -Additionally, moral realism fails because it is impossible for a condition to be presently just or moral because prior to the decision nothing allows us to call the decision just, and after, the decision has followed a rule that isn’t guaranteed. Derrida: Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, p. 24 4 -A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. It might be legal; it would not be just. But in the moment of suspense of the undecidable, it is not just either, for only a decision is just. And once the ordeal of the undecidable is past, the decision has again followed a rule or given itself a rule, invented it or reinvented, reaffirmed it, it is no longer presently just, fully just. There is apparently no moment in which a decision can be called presently and fully just: either it has not yet been made according to a rule, and nothing allows us to call it just, or it has already followed a rule, whether received, confirmed, conserved or reinvented, which in its turn is not absolutely guaranteed by anything; and, moreover, even if it were guaranteed, the decision would be reduced to a calculation, and we couldn’t call it just. 5 -Affirming is paramount under the standard because free, non-dominating speech is how the gap between I and the Other is bridged. Trey Trey, George. "Solidarity and Difference." Google Books. SUNY Press, 1998. Web. 15 Dec. 2016. https://books.google.com/books?id=5TtkYnilTAICandpg=PA136andlpg=PA136anddq=levinas2B22free2Bspeech22andsource=blandots=cV6nXpIz5iandsig=1d6uFj2jwE7W8pRFkTva-H45IXQandhl=enandsa=Xandved=0ahUKEwjB0Iuv_PTQAhWEAxoKHdsZAqMQ6AEILjAI#v=onepageandqandf=false. 6 -On what grounds, then, can this be called a relationship at all? Levinas's curious response is that the relationship is linguistic. In fact, one might even say that radical alterity "establishes" a speech situation (although here situation must be purged of any conceptual connotations and be thought only in terms of proximity). "Speech proceeds from absolute difference." Language is the relational medium that enables contact with the other. But it is not language in the sense of common ground, means for communicating, or point of intervention. To intervene or establish common territory would be to conceptualize alterity, which is tantamount to enacting its violation. Language, for Levinas, is not a source of unity, but rather the impossibility of unification. "Language accomplishes a relation between terms that breaks up the unity of a genus." It is this interlocutionary relationship, prior to thematic unity, that annotates the ethical. "The formal structure of language thereby announces that ethical inviolability of the Other and without any odor of the 'numinous,' his 'holiness.'" In other words, the ethical relation-ship is one that is utterly independent of any active force. As such, ethics is situated in terms of domination-free speech (TI, 194-98). 1 +1ac – structural violence 2 +Contention 3 +Contention One is global oppression 4 + 5 +Free speech worldwide is under attack, and censorship is enforced through arrest, murder, and torture 6 +Economist 16 Economist; 6-4-2016; "Under attack"; http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21699909-curbs-free-speech-are-growing-tighter-it-time-speak-out-under-attack JC 7 +However, watchdogs report that speaking out is becoming more dangerous—and they are right. As our report shows, curbs on free speech have grown tighter. Without the contest of ideas, the world is timid and ignorant. Free speech is under attack in three ways. First, repression by governments has increased. Several countries have reimposed cold-war controls or introduced new ones. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia enjoyed a free-for-all of vigorous debate. Under Vladimir Putin, the muzzle has tightened again. All the main television-news outlets are now controlled by the state or by Mr Putin’s cronies. Journalists who ask awkward questions are no longer likely to be sent to labour camps, but several have been murdered. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ordered a crackdown after he took over in 2012, toughening up censorship of social media, arresting hundreds of dissidents and replacing liberal debate in universities with extra Marxism. In the Middle East the overthrow of despots during the Arab spring let people speak freely for the first time in generations. This has lasted in Tunisia, but Syria and Libya are more dangerous for journalists than they were before the uprisings; and Egypt is ruled by a man who says, with a straight face: “Don’t listen to anyone but me.” Words, sticks and stones Second, a worrying number of non-state actors are enforcing censorship by assassination. Reporters in Mexico who investigate crime or corruption are often murdered, and sometimes tortured first. Jihadists slaughter those they think have insulted their faith. When authors and artists say anything that might be deemed disrespectful of Islam, they take risks. Secular bloggers in Bangladesh are hacked to death in the street (see article); French cartoonists are gunned down in their offices. The jihadists hurt Muslims more than any others, not least by making it harder for them to have an honest discussion about how to organise their societies. 8 + 9 +Restrictions of free speech on campus spill over – over-censorship is inevitable, and authoritarian regimes worldwide use speech restrictions as an excuse to carry out widespread oppression 10 +Economist 16 Economist; 6-4-2016; "Under attack"; http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21699909-curbs-free-speech-are-growing-tighter-it-time-speak-out-under-attack JC 11 +Third, the idea has spread that people and groups have a right not to be offended. This may sound innocuous. Politeness is a virtue, after all. But if I have a right not to be offended, that means someone must police what you say about me, or about the things I hold dear, such as my ethnic group, religion, or even political beliefs. Since offence is subjective, the power to police it is both vast and arbitrary. Nevertheless, many students in America and Europe believe that someone should exercise it. Some retreat into the absolutism of identity politics, arguing that men have no right to speak about feminism nor whites to speak about slavery. Others have blocked thoughtful, well-known speakers, such as Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from being heard on campus (see article). Concern for the victims of discrimination is laudable. And student protest is often, in itself, an act of free speech. But university is a place where students are supposed to learn how to think. That mission is impossible if uncomfortable ideas are off-limits. And protest can easily stray into preciousness: the University of California, for example, suggests that it is a racist “micro-aggression” to say that “America is a land of opportunity”, because it could be taken to imply that those who do not succeed have only themselves to blame. The inconvenient truth Intolerance among Western liberals also has wholly unintended consequences. Even despots know that locking up mouthy but non-violent dissidents is disreputable. Nearly all countries have laws that protect freedom of speech. So authoritarians are always looking out for respectable-sounding excuses to trample on it. National security is one. Russia recently sentenced Vadim Tyumentsev, a blogger, to five years in prison for promoting “extremism”, after he criticised Russian policy in Ukraine. “Hate speech” is another. China locks up campaigners for Tibetan independence for “inciting ethnic hatred”; Saudi Arabia flogs blasphemers; Indians can be jailed for up to three years for promoting disharmony “on grounds of religion, race...caste...or any other ground whatsoever”. The threat to free speech on Western campuses is very different from that faced by atheists in Afghanistan or democrats in China. But when progressive thinkers agree that offensive words should be censored, it helps authoritarian regimes to justify their own much harsher restrictions and intolerant religious groups their violence. When human-rights campaigners object to what is happening under oppressive regimes, despots can point out that liberal democracies such as France and Spain also criminalise those who “glorify” or “defend” terrorism, and that many Western countries make it a crime to insult a religion or to incite racial hatred. One strongman who has enjoyed tweaking the West for hypocrisy is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey. At home, he will tolerate no insults to his person, faith or policies. Abroad, he demands the same courtesy—and in Germany he has found it. In March a German comedian recited a satirical poem about him “shagging goats and oppressing minorities” (only the more serious charge is true). Mr Erdogan invoked an old, neglected German law against insulting foreign heads of state. Amazingly, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has let the prosecution proceed. Even more amazingly, nine other European countries still have similar laws, and 13 bar insults against their own head of state. 12 + 13 +The freedom of speech is a prerequisite to other rights. Any restriction will snowball and empirically causes war, genocide, poverty, and terrorism. 14 +D’Souza 96 - Frances D'Souza, Executive Director of Article 19, the International Centre Against Censorship. Public Hearing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defence Policy Subcommittee on Human Rights Brussels, 25 April 1996. “Freedom of Expression: The First Freedom?” Article 19, International Centre Against Censorship. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/hearings/19960425/droi/freedom_en.htm 15 +1. Introduction In the absence of freedom of expression which in-cludes a free and independent media, it is impossible to protect other rights, including the right to life. Once governments are able to draw a cloak of secrecy over their actions and to remain unaccountable for their actions then massive human rights violations can, and do, take place. For this reason alone the right to freedom of expression, specifically protected in the major international human rights treaties, must be considered to be a primary right. It is significant that one of the first indications of a government's intention to depart from democratic principles is the ever increasing control of information by means of gagging the media, and preventing the freeflow of information from abroad. At one end of the spectrum there are supposedly minor infringements of this fundamental right which occur daily in Western democracies and would include abuse of national security laws to prevent the publication of information which might be embarrassing to a given government: at the other end of the scale are the regimes of terror which employ the most brutal moves to suppress opposition, information and even the freedom to exercise religious beliefs. It has been argued, and will undoubtedly be discussed at this Hearing, that in the absence of free speech and an independent media, it is relatively easy for governments to capture, as it were, the media and to fashion them into instruments of propaganda, for the promotion of ethnic conflict, war and genocide. 2. Enshrining the right to freedom of expression The right to freedom of expression is formally protected in the major international treaties including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In addition, it is enshrined in many national constitutions throughout the world, although this does not always guarantee its protection. Furthermore, freedom of expression is, amongst other human rights, upheld, even for those countries which are not signatories to the above international treaties through the concept of customary law which essentially requires that all states respect the human rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by virtue of the widespread or customary respect which has been built up in the post World War II years. 3. Is free speech absolute? While it is generally accepted that freedom of expression is, and remains the cornerstone of democracy, there are permitted restrictions encoded within the international treaties which in turn allow for a degree of interpretation of how free free speech should be. Thus, unlike the American First Amendment Rights which allow few, if any, checks on free speech or on the independence of the media, the international treaties are concerned that there should be a balance between competing rights: for example, limiting free speech or media freedom where it impinges on the individual's right to privacy; where free speech causes insult or injury to the rights and reputation of another; where speech is construed as incitement to violence or hatred, or where free speech would create a public disturbance. Given that these permitted restrictions are necessarily broad, the limits of free speech are consistently tested in national law courts and, perhaps even more importantly, in the regional courts such as the European Commission and Court of Human Rights. In recent years several landmark cases have helped to define more closely what restrictions may be imposed by government and under what circumstances. In particular, it has been emphasised by the European Court that any restriction must comply with a three-part test which requires that any such restriction should first of all be prescribed by law, and thus not arbitrarily imposed: proportionate to the legitimate aims pursued, and demonstrably necessary in a democratic society in order to protect the individual and/or the state. 4. Who censors what? Despite the rather strict rules which apply to restrictions on free speech that governments may wish to impose, many justifications are nevertheless sought by governments to suppress information which is inimical to their policies or their interests. These justifications include arguments in defence of national and/or state security, the public interst, including the need to protect public morals and public order and perfectly understandable attempts to prevent racism, violence, sexism, religious intolerance and damage to the indi-vidual's reputation or privacy. The mechanisms employed by governments to restrict the freeflow of information are almost endless and range from subtle economic pressures and devious methods of undermining political opponents and the independent media to the enactment of restrictive press laws and an insist-ence on licensing journalists and eventually to the illegal detention, torture and disappearances of journalists and others associated with the expression of independent views. 5. Examples of censorship To some the right to free speech may appear to be one of the fringe human rights, especially when compared to such violations as torture and extra-judicial killings. It is also sometimes difficult to dissuade the general public that censorship, generally assumed to be something to do with banning obscene books or magazines, is no bad thing! It requires a recognition of some of the fundamental principles of democracy to understand why censorship is so immensely dangerous. The conditon of democracy is that people are able to make choices about a wide variety of issues which affect their lives, including what they wish to see, read, hear or discuss. While this may seem a somewhat luxurious distinction preoccupying, perhaps, wealthy Western democracies, it is a comparatively short distance between government censorship of an offensive book to the silencing of political dissidents. And the distance between such silencing and the use of violence to suppress a growing political philosophy which a government finds inconvenient is even shorter. Censorship tends to have small beginnings and to grow rapidly. Allowing a government to have the power to deny people information, however trivial, not only sets in place laws and procedures which can and will be used by those in authority against those with less authority, but it also denies people the information which they must have in order to monitor their governments actions and to ensure accountability. There have been dramatic and terrible examples of the role that censorship has played in international politics in the last few years: to name but a few, the extent to which the media in the republics of former Yugoslavia were manipulated by government for purposes of propaganda; the violent role played by the government associated radio in Rwanda which incited citizens to kill each other in the name of ethnic purity and the continuing threat of murder issued by the Islamic Republic of Iran against a citizen of another country for having written a book which displeased them. 6. The link between poverty, war and denial of free speech There are undoubted connections between access to information, or rather the lack of it, and war, as indeed there are between poverty, the right to and freedom of expression and development. One can argue that democracy aims to increase participation in political and other decision-making at all levels. In this sense democracy empowers people. The poor are denied access to information on decisions which deeply affect their lives, are thus powerless and have no voice; the poor are not able to have influence over their own lives, let alone other aspect of society. Because of this essential powerlessness, the poor are unable to influence the ruling elite in whose interests it may be to initiate conflict and wars in order to consolidate their own power and position. Of the 126 developing countries listed in the 1993 Human Development Report, war was ongoing in 30 countries and severe civil conflict in a further 33 countries. Of the total 63 countries in conflict, 55 are towards the bottom scale of the human development index which is an indicator of poverty. There seems to be no doubt that there is a clear association between poverty and war. It is reasonably safe to assume that the vast majority of people do not ever welcome war. They are normally coerced, more often than not by propaganda, into fear, extreme nationalist sentiments and war by their governments. If the majority of people had a democratic voice they would undoubtedly object to war. But voices are silenced. Thus, the freedom to express one's views and to challenge government decisions and to insist upon political rather than violent solutions, are necessary aspects of democracy which can, and do, avert war. Government sponsored propaganda in Rwanda, as in former Yugoslavia, succeeded because there weren't the means to challenge it. One has therefore to conclude that it is impossible for a particular government to wage war in the absence of a compliant media willing to indulge in government propaganda. This is because the government needs civilians to fight wars for them and also because the media is needed to re-inforce government policies and intentions at every turn. In a totalitarian state where the expression of political views, let alone the possibility of political organis-ation, is strenuously suppressed, one has to ask what other options are open to a genuine political movement intent on introducing justice. All too often the only perceived option is terrorist attack and violence because it is, quite literally, the only method available to communicate the need for change. 16 + 17 +Contention Two is income inequality 18 + 19 +Restrictions of speech are enforced by hiring administrators to police students – explodes tuition and trades off with education 20 +Lukianoff 12 Greg; 2012; “Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate” JC 21 +In August 2010, the Goldwater Institute published a report titled Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education, which found that spending on administration per student grew by 61 percent between 1993 and 2007, a rate that far exceeded the growth in cost for instruction. Among the universities examined, two dozen had “more than doubled their spending on administration for each student enrolled, adjusted for inflation. For example, at Wake Forest University, administrative spending per student has increased by more than 600 percent in real terms.”#* Illustrating how this bureaucratic expansion has come at the expense of instruction, the report points to Arizona State University, where the number of administrators per one hundred students grew by 94 percent, even while the university was “reducing the number of employees engaged in instruction, research and service by 2 percent.”#+ Students are not paying for an exponential increase in the quality of their education, but rather for a massive increase in campus bureaucracy. This includes an expansion in the number of residence life officials (who are in charge of dormitories), student judicial affairs personnel (who administer campus discipline), and university attorneys. The administrative class is largely responsible for the hyperregulation of students’ lives, the lowering of due process standards for students accused of offenses, the extension of administrative jurisdiction far off campus, the proliferation of speech codes, and outright attempts to impose ideological conformity (like the ones you will see in Chapter 5). Parents and students are paying tens—even hundreds—of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being censored! 22 + 23 +Increased tuitions wrecks education – decreased enrollment, slower graduation, lowered grades, and dropping out 24 +Thompson no date Van Thompson; "How Tuition Increases Affect College Students"; http://oureverydaylife.com/tuition-increases-affect-college-students-7007.html JC 25 +Decreased Enrollment Although college enrollment has increased significantly over the past 30 years, tuition hikes can decrease the number of students who choose to enroll. The New York Times reported in 2013 that many colleges are projecting lower enrollment rates for the coming years, and Time reported in 2012 that college enrollment has slipped slightly over the past few years. A 2011 study published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis predicted a 0.25-percent decline in college enrollment for every $100 added to tuition. In a world where a college degree is increasingly necessary, higher tuition rates can limit people's access to good jobs. 26 +Slower Graduation Times Many colleges charge students per course hour they take. When students can't afford the cost of a full course load, they may choose to take fewer classes, which can have a snowball effect. For example, a student who doesn't take a required prerequisite for other classes could see her graduation date pushed back significantly. 27 +Academic Effects Students who choose to stay in school may have to work longer hours at more demanding jobs to cover their expenses. This can interfere with academic performance. A 2002 study by the State Public Interest Research Group's Higher Education Project found that working full-time can harm grades. Forty-two percent of survey respondents reported that working hurt their academic progress, and 53 percent reported that work limited the classes they could take. 28 +Dropping Out If students can't make enough money to cover the cost of tuition hikes and can't get more money in loans or scholarships, they may have no choice but to drop out. The Los Angeles Times reports that tuition hikes can contribute to increased dropout rates. A student whose graduation date has been delayed by rate increases or who is having academic trouble due to working full-time might be particularly likely to decide to give up on college. 29 + 30 +***find better card*** Inaccessibility of higher education because of high tuition exacerbates income inequality 31 +Hill 15 Catharine Bond Hill; ; 6-10-2015; "Income Inequality and Higher Education"; http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/Income-Inequality-and-Higher-Education.aspx JC 32 +At the same time, access to higher education is still important to both individuals and our society, and rising income inequality is making it more difficult for the higher education sector to address the access issue. Currently in America, getting a postsecondary degree—in particular a bachelor’s degree—generally results in higher incomes, greater job choice, satisfaction, and security, as well as other outcomes considered good for our society, such as voting and community service. But access to higher education depends to a large extent on family income and race as well as merit. Higher education is not currently supporting equal opportunity and social mobility as much as it should. Despite claiming to be the land of opportunity, in fact our intergenerational income mobility is low by international standards and when compared to America’s past. Parents’ income is a good predictor of their children’s future income. Getting access to higher education increases income mobility for lower-income students, but access to higher education is difficult for low-income families, and the gap between rich and poor is increasing. Students from low-income families are less likely to go to college and less likely to graduate. 33 + 34 +Poverty is the equivalent of a thermonuclear war against the poor 35 +Abu-Jamal 98 Mumia Abu-Jamal 1998 (fmr journalist and Death Row inmate) “Mumia’s Words” 36 +We live, equally immersed, and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging "structural' violence, of a kind that destroys human life with a breathtaking ruthlessness. Former Massachusetts prison official and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes; By "structural violence" I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of the class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting "structural" with "behavioral violence" by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. ~-~-(Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1996), 192.) This form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it~-~-really? Gilligan notes: Every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Gilligan, p. 196 37 + 38 +I defend the whole resolution, CX clarifies any ambiguities in the advocacy – I’ll grant you stable links. 39 + 40 +Framing 41 +The standard is mitigating structural violence. 42 +1 Structural violence is based in moral exclusion, it pervades our cognitive processes and encourages us to ignore differences in identity. 43 +Winter and Leighton 99 Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Pg 4-5 44 +She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. 45 + 46 +2 Debate should surround material consequences—ideal theories ignore the concrete nature of the world and legitimize oppression. 47 +Curry 14 Dr. Tommy J; “The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century”, Victory Briefs, 2014 48 +Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, it is set against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. ¶ This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. 49 + 50 +3 Global justice requires a reduction in inequality and a focus on material rights. 51 +Okereke 07 Chukwumerije Okereke (Senior Research Associate at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia). Global Justice and Neoliberal Environmental Governance. Routledge 2007 52 +Notwithstanding these drawbacks, these scholars provide very compelling arguments against mainstream conceptions of justice. In this approach, the obli- gation of justice is derived from the moral equality of human beings irrespective of their race, creed and nationality (O'Neill 1991; Brown 1992: 169; Beitz 1979; Sen 1999). The emphasis is on the positive rights of citizens - that is the kinds of rights that require state authorities to do something in order to provide citizens with the opportunities and abilities to act to fulfil their own potential - as opposed to negative rights/liberty, which refers to freedom from coercion and non-interfer- ence. The notion of justice as meeting needs, as seen in Chapter 2, figures very prominently in quite a number of the influencing materials that form the starting point for the discourse on global sustainable development. It has been suggested, in general, that this idea of justice is 'in~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~--creasingly influential on non-governmen- tal organizations and the community of international policy makers' (Brighouse 2004: 67). In general, proponents of justice as need criticize liberal ideas of justice for concentrating on political equality (equal right to speech, vote, etc.) without addressing the problem of material equality - especially in the form of equal access to resources. They also claim that the ability to own property as well as the ability to exercise political rights (say the right to vote) depends first and foremost on the ability of citizens to function effectively. When the basic human needs of citizens, for example food, are not being met, other rights become merely 'hypothetical and empty' (Sen 1999: 75). Following on from this basic reasoning, the rights approach to justice is rejected and, in its place, human basic need is seen as the correct basis of political morality and the right benchmark for the determination of political judgment (Plant 1991: 185). In previous sections we saw that libertarian notions of justice sanction unlimited material inequality between citizens, provided that each person has obtained their possessions through legitimate means. All that matters is that the state should ensure fair rules of transitions and equality before the law. We saw also that liberal accounts of justice, especially Rawls' liberal egalitarianism, reject this formula- tion of justice because it does not secure the welfare of the less able in society. On the contrary, Rawls recommends that political institutions should be structured in ways that protect the interests of the least advantaged individuals in society. Accordingly, he sanctions societal inequities provided that such inequities work to the advantage of the least well-off. On closer reading, however, it turns out that Rawls difference principle (that inequities should work in favour of the least well- off) does not contain any explicit demand relating to the basic needs of the poor. As such, it is possible for Rawls' proviso to be met even when the least well-off in the society are denied their basic needs. For example, a distribution that changes from 20:10:2 to 100:30:4 satisfies Rawls difference principle but tells us noth- ing about the actual well-being of the least well-off. So, whereas some (mainly libertarians) criticize Rawls for not specifying the extent to which other people's liberty can be sacrificed for the sake of the least well-off, others (proponents of justice as meeting need) criticize Rawls for leaving the fate of the least well-off unprotected. Many scholars in the latter group sometimes argue along Marxian lines that as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the 'haves' there is no guarantee that inequities will benefit the least well-off. Maslow (1968), Bradshaw (1972) and Forder (1974) have all consequently argued that only the theory of need provides, as Maslow (1968: 4) puts it, 'the ultimate appeal for the determination of the good, bad, right and wrong' in a po- litical community. Without the theory of need, they say, it would be impossible to justify the welfare state in capitalist Western democracies. On the other hand, the co-existence of welfare and capitalism confirms the place of need as the criterion of moral political judgment. O'Neill (1991), Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000) have all extended versions of this argument to the international domain. O'Neill (1980, 1991) argues that adherence to the Kantian categorical imperative entails that the global community must act to remove the aching poverty and famine that threaten the existence of millions of people in developing countries. Sen (1999), for his part, calls for the strengthening of international institutions to make them able to assist the least well in the global society to achieve the measure of actual living that is required for the basic function and well-being of citizens. For Sen, as for O'Neill, all forms of liberty and rights are meaningful only when people have the substantive 'freedom to achieve actual living' (Sen 1999: 73; cf. O'Neill 1989: 288; 1986). Thomas Pogge also places emphasis on human basic need and starts his well-known book World Poverty and Human Rights with the rhetorical ques- tion: 'How can severe poverty of half of humankind continue despite enormous economic and technological progress and despite the enlightened moral norms and values of our heavily dominant Western civilization?' (Pogge 2002: 3). 53 + 54 +4 Resisting inequality is key in educational spaces. 55 +Trifonas 03, Peter. PEDAGOGIES OF DIFFERENCE: RETHINKING EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE. New York, London. 2003. 56 +Domination and subordination, I imply that they are relations of power. In an educational context, the exercise of power is accomplished in interactions (i.e., in a social organization), manifesting itself as acts of exclusion, marginalization, silencing, and so forth. Thus, paying attention to how power operates along axes of gender, race, class, and ability (that is, recognizing that social differences are not given, but are accomplished in and through educational settings) is a step toward educational equity. What does the above discussion mean in the educational context? It means that in the interactions of teachers with students in the classroom, or in other contexts, attention needs to be directed toward how dominant and subordinate relations (be they based on race, gender, class, or ability) permeate these contexts and intersect in complicated ways to produce inequality and marginalization. The frequently used and well-meaning phrase, “I treat everyone the same, ” often used by teachers and administrators to indicate their lack of bias in a diverse educational setting, in fact masks unequal power relations. Similarly, educational policies that assume that people are the same or equal may serve to entrench existing inequality precisely because people enter into the educational process with different and unequal experiences. These attempts, well meaning though they may be, tend to render inequality invisible, and thus work against equity in education. In her exploration of white privilege in higher education in the United States, Frances Rains (1998), an aboriginal-Japanese American woman, states emphatically that these benign acts are disempowering for the minority person because they erase his or her racial identity. The denial of racism in this case is in fact a form of racism. Thus, in moving toward equity in education that allows us to address multiple and intersecting axes of difference and inequality, I recommend that we try to think and act “against the grain” in developing educational policies and handling various kinds of pedagogical situations. 5 To work against the grain is to recognize that education is not neutral; it is contested. Mohanty puts it as such: … Education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. It is a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political positions. (Mohanty 1990:184) We need to develop a critical awareness of the power dynamics operative in institutional relations-and of the fact that people participate in institutions as unequal subjects. Working against the grain is to take a proactive approach to understanding and acting upon institutional relations, whether in the classroom, in other interactions with students, or in policy development. Rather than overlooking the embeddedness of gender, race, class, ability, and other forms of inequality that shape our interactions, working against the grain makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process. In her exploration of feminist pedagogy, Linda Briskin (1990) makes a clear distinction between nonsexist and antisexist education critical to our understanding here. She asserts that nonsexism is an approach that attempts to neutralize sexual inequality by pretending that gender can be made irrelevant in the classroom. Thus, for instance, merely asserting that male and female students should have equal time to speak-and indeed giving them equal time-cannot adequately rectify the endemic problem of sexism in the classroom. One of Briskin's students reported that in her political science tutorials that when the male students spoke, everyone paid attention. When a female student spoke, however, the class acted as if no one was speaking (13). Neutrality is an attempt to conceal the unequal distribution of power. An against the grain approach would acknowledge explicitly that we are all gendered, racialized, and differently constructed subjects who do not participate in interactional relations as equals. This goes beyond formulating sexism, racism, abilism, and class privilege in individualist terms and treating them as if they were personal attitudes. Terry Wolverton (1983) discovered the difference between nonracism and antiracism in her consciousness-raising attempt: I had confused the act of trying to appear not to be racist with actively working to eliminate racism. Trying to appear not racist had made me deny my racism, and therefore exclude the possibility of change. (191) Being against the grain means seeing inequality as systemic and interpersonal (rather than individual), and combatting oppression as a collective responsibility, not just as a personal attribute (so that somehow a person can cleanse herself or himself of sexism, racism, abilism, or class bias). It is to pay attention to oppression as an interactional property that can be altered (see Manners 1998). Roger Simon (1993) suggests, in his development of a philosophical basis for teaching against the grain, which shares many commonalities in how I think about an integrative approach to equity in education, that teaching against the grain is fundamentally a moral practice. By this he does not mean that teachers simply fulfill the mandate and guidelines of school authorities. He believes that teachers must expose the partial and imperfect nature of existing knowledge, which is constructed on the basis of asymmetrical power relations (for instance, who has the power to speak and whose voices are suppressed?). It is the responsibility of the teacher or educator to show how dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing constrict human capacities. In exposing the power relations integral to the knowledge construction process, the educator, by extension, must treat teaching and learning as a mutual and collaborative act between teachers and students. What may this ideal look like in practice? Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) also explores the notion of teaching against the grain in her research on how teachers and students worked together in a preservice program in the Philadelphia area. Borrowing from Gramsci's formulation that action is everyone's responsibility, she asserts that teaching is fundamentally a political activity. In practical terms, she outlines what it may mean to teach against the grain in an actual teaching and learning situation. Her succinct articulation is worth quoting at length: To teach against the grain, teachers have to understand and work both within and around the culture of teaching and the politics of schooling at their particular schools and within their larger school system and communities. They cannot simply announce better ways of doing things, as outsiders are likely to do. They have to teach differently without judging the ways other teach or dismissing the ideas others espouse…. They are not at liberty to publicly announce brilliant but excoriating critiques of their colleagues and the bureaucracies in which they labor. Their ultimate commitment is to the school lives and futures of the children with whom they live and work. Without condescension or defensiveness, they have to work with parents and other teachers on different ways of seeing and measuring development, connecting and dividing knowledge, and knowing about teaching and schooling. They have to be astute observers of individual learners with the ability to pose and explore questions that transcend cultural attribution, institutional habit, and the alleged certainty of outside experts. They have to see beyond and through the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising unanswerable and often uncomfortable questions. Perhaps most importantly, teachers who work against the grain must name and wrestle with their own doubts, must fend off the fatigue of reform and depend on the strength of their individual and collaborative convictions that their work ultimately makes a difference in the fabric of social responsibility. (Cochran-Smith 1991:284-85) For me, to be against the grain is therefore to recognize that the routinized courses of action and interactions in all educational contexts are imbued with unequal distribution of power that produce and reinforce various forms of marginalization and exclusion. Thus, a commitment to redress these power relations (i.e., equity in education) involves interventions and actions that may appear “counter-intuitive.” 6 Undoing inequality and achieving equity in education is a risky and uncomfortable act because we need to disrupt the ways things are “normally” done. This involves a serious (and frequently threatening) effort to interrogate our privilege as well as our powerlessness. It obliges us to examine our own privilege relative though it may be, to move out of our internalized positions as victims, to take control over our lives, and to take responsibilities for change. It requires us to question what we take for granted, and a commitment to a vision of society built on reflection, reform, mutuality, and respect in theory and in practice. Teaching and learning against the grain is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It is protracted, difficult, uncomfortable, painful, and risky. It involves struggles with our colleagues, our students, as well as struggles within ourselves against our internalized beliefs and normalized behaviors. In other words, it is a lifelong challenge. However, as Simon (1993) puts it, teaching against the grain is also a project of hope. We engage in it with the knowledge and conviction that we are in a long-term collaborative project with like-minded people whose goal is to make the world a better place for us and for our childre 57 + 58 +UV 59 +Evaluate arguments using particularity – no “root cause” or sweeping take-outs to our specific claims. 60 +Price 98 (RICHARD PRICE is a former prof in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Later, he moved to Johns Hopkins University to found the Department of Anthropology, where he served three terms as chair. A decade of freelance teaching (University of Minnesota, Stanford University, Princeton University, University of Florida, Universidade Federal da Bahia), ensued. This article is co-authored with CHRISTIAN REUS-SMIT – Monash University – European Journal of International Relations Copyright © 1998 via SAGE Publications – http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~courses/PoliticalScience/661B1/documents/PriceReusSmithCriticalInternatlTheoryConstructivism.pdf) 61 +One of the central departures of critical international theory from positivism is the view that we cannot escape the interpretive moment. As George (1994: 24) argues, ‘the world is always an interpreted “thing”, and it is always interpreted in conditions of disagreement and conflict, to one degree or another’. For this reason, ‘there can be no common body of observational or tested data that we can turn to for a neutral, objective knowledge of the world. There can be no ultimate knowledge, for example, that actually corresponds to reality per se.’ This proposition has been endorsed wholeheartedly by constructivists, who are at pains to deny the possibility of making ‘Big-T’ Truth claims about the world and studiously avoid attributing such status to their findings. This having been said, after undertaking sustained empirical analyses of aspects of world politics constructivists do make ‘small-t’ truth claims about the subjects they have investigated. That is, they claim to have arrived at logical and empirically plausible interpretations of actions, events or processes, and they appeal to the weight of evidence to sustain such claims. While admitting that their claims are always contingent and partial interpretations of a complex world, Price (1995, 1997) claims that his genealogy provides the best account to date to make sense of anomalies surrounding the use of chemical weapons, and Reus-Smit (1997) claims that a culturalist perspective offers the best explanation of institutional differences between historical societies of states. Do such claims contradict the interpretive ethos of critical international theory? For two reasons, we argue that they do not. First, the interpretive ethos of critical international theory is driven, in large measure, by a normative rejection of totalizing discourses, of general theoretical frameworks that privilege certain perspectives over others. One searches constructivist scholarship in vain, though, for such discourses. With the possible exception of Wendt’s problematic flirtation with general systemic theory and professed commitment to ‘science’, constructivist research is at its best when and because it is question driven, with self-consciously contingent claims made specifically in relation to particular phenomena, at a particular time, based on particular evidence, and always open to alternative interpretations. Second, the rejection of totalizing discourses based on ‘big-T’ Truth claims does not foreclose the possibility, or even the inevitability, of making ‘small-t’ truth claims. In fact, we would argue that as soon as one observes and interacts in the world such claims are unavoidable, either as a person engaged in everyday life or as a scholar. As Nietzsche pointed out long ago, we cannot help putting forth truth claims about the world. The individual who does not cannot act, and the genuinely unhypocritical relativist who cannot struggles for something to say and write. In short, if constructivists are not advancing totalizing discourses, and if making ‘small-t’ truth claims is inevitable if one is to talk about how the world works, then it is no more likely that constructivism per se violates the interpretive ethos of critical international theory than does critical theory itself. 62 + 63 +Exclusive focus on representations erodes meaningful reversal of structures of exploitation~-~--discursive focus must supplement discussion of reform. Preserving higher education means analyzing concrete solutions. 64 +Henry Giroux 06, prof of edu and cultural studies at Penn State, 6 (Comparative Studies of South Asia) 65 +Abstracted from the ideal of public commitment, the new authoritarianism represents a political and economic practice and form of militarism that loosens the connections among substantive democracy, critical agency, and critical education. In opposition to the rising tide of authoritarianism, educators across the globe must make a case for linking learning to progressive social change while struggling to pluralize and critically engage the diverse sites where public pedagogy takes place. In part, this suggests forming alliances that can make sure every sphere of social life is recognized as an important site of the political, social, and cultural struggle that is so crucial to any attempt to forge the knowledge, identifications, effective investments, and social relations that constitute political subjects and social agents capable of energizing and spreading the basis for a substantive global democracy. Such circumstances require that pedagogy be embraced as a moral and political practice, one that is directive and not dogmatic, an outgrowth of struggles designed to resist the increasing depoliticization of political culture that is the hallmark of the current Bush revolution. Education is the terrain where consciousness is shaped, needs are constructed, and the capacity for individual self-reflection and broad social change is nurtured and produced. Education has assumed an unparalleled significance in shaping the language, values, and ideologies that legitimize the structures and organizations that support the imperatives of global capitalism. Efforts to reduce it to a technique or methodology set aside, education remains a crucial site for the production and struggle over those pedagogical and political conditions that provide the possibilities for people to develop forms of agency that enable them individually and collectively to intervene in the processes through which the material relations of power shape the meaning and practices of their everyday lives. Within the current historical context, struggles over power take on a symbolic and discursive as well as a material and institutional form. The struggle over education is about more than the struggle over meaning and identity; it is also about how meaning, knowledge, and values are produced, authorized, and made operational within economic and structural relations of power. Education is not at odds with politics; it is an important and crucial element in any definition of the political and offers not only the theoretical tools for a systematic critique of authoritarianism but also a language of possibility for creating actual movements for democratic social change and a new biopolitics that affirms life rather than death, shared responsibility rather than shared fears, and engaged citizenship rather than the stripped-down values of consumerism. At stake here is combining symbolic forms and processes conducive to democratization with broader social contexts and the institutional formations of power itself. The key point here is to understand and engage educational and pedagogical practices from the point of view of how they are bound up with larger relations of power. Educators, students, and parents need to be clearer about how power works through and in texts, representations, and discourses, while at the same time recognizing that power cannot be limited to the study of representations and discourses, even at the level of public policy. Changing consciousness is not the same as altering the institutional basis of oppression; at the same time, institutional reform cannot take place without a change in consciousness capable of recognizing not only injustice but also the very possibility for reform, the capacity to reinvent the conditions End Page 176 and practices that make a more just future possible. In addition, it is crucial to raise questions about the relationship between pedagogy and civic culture, on the one hand, and what it takes for individuals and social groups to believe that they have any responsibility whatsoever even to address the realities of class, race, gender, and other specific forms of domination, on the other hand. For too long, the progressives have ignored that the strategic dimension of politics is inextricably connected to questions of critical education and pedagogy, to what it means to acknowledge that education is always tangled up with power, ideologies, values, and the acquisition of both particular forms of agency and specific visions of the future. The primacy of critical pedagogy to politics, social change, and the radical imagination in such dark times is dramatically captured by the internationally renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. He writes, Adverse odds may be overwhelming, and yet a democratic (or, as Cornelius Castoriadis would say, an autonomous) society knows of no substitute for education and self-education as a means to influence the turn of events that can be squared with its own nature, while that nature cannot be preserved for long without "critical pedagogy"—an education sharpening its critical edge, "making society feel guilty" and "stirring things up" through stirring human consciences. The fates of freedom, of democracy that makes it possible while being made possible by it, and of education that breeds dissatisfaction with the level of both freedom and democracy achieved thus far, are inextricably connected and not to be detached from one another. One may view that intimate connection as another specimen of a vicious circle—but it is within that circle that human hopes and the chances of humanity are inscribed, and can be nowhere else.59 66 + 67 +\ - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,24 @@ 1 +And, an infinite regard for the other is the source of our consciousness as ethical subjects; to be and ethical subject is to be for the other. Young summarizes Levinas: Bruce Young: “An introduction to Levinas” http://english.byu.edu/faculty/youngb/levinas/levinas3int.pdf 2 +If it were not for the face of the other person, I might indeed maintain the illusion that everything I experience and enjoy (food, landscapes, things) is indeed mine. But once I encounter the Other, I realize that there is something absolutely and irreducibly other than myself and that the world that I enjoy and seem to possess also belongs to the Other; my possession and sovereignty are contested. But this does not limit my freedom, for freedom would have no meaning in a world that belonged entirely to me. The Other "invests" my freedom, gives it meaning, makes it possible for me to make moral choices. I become "responsible," for the Other invites me (simply by his or her presence) to respond. The Other, through hnis or her neediness and vulnerability, invites me to offer myself and what I have in service and sustenance. At the same time, the Other commands, not by words but simply by the vulnerability of his or her face, "Thou shalt not kill." Besides introducing me to moral responsibility, the Other also makes the world "real." That is, I know the world is not just an illusion because I have it in common with the Other. Reality thus becomes genuinely "exterior"—and at the same time, I become genuinely "interior," because I am now truly differentiated from the external world and because I have been called upon to turn to my resources (what belongs to me and is in some sense a part of my "interior" world) so as to respond to and serve the Other. This "calling upon" and "responding" is the basis of language or conversation; and through language (discourse, conversation) the world becomes "communicable," something that can be shared. The Other is identified with "infinity" (hence the title Totality and Infinity): because I cannot contain or possess the Other or reduce the Other to a finite concept or image, the Other is, in that sense, without bounds. The Other thus produces in me "the idea of Infinity": the idea of something more than I can contain. Since I can never fully satisfy my obligation to the Other, my responsibility for the Other is also "infinite." Ethics is thus not first of all a matter of "reciprocity": I do not owe certain things to the Other only in return for what has been don e for me. The obligation toward the Other comes with the relationship itself, which precedes any actions performed or even any thoughts by which I would be able to measure my own and the other's relative obligations. Furthermore, I can never get out of myself in such a way as to "objectively" (from the outside) compare the relative obligations of myself and the other. My unique position as a self depends on my responsibility to the other, which (as far as I am concerned) always precedes and exceeds any obligation the other may have toward me. 3 +This means that ethics precludes ontology, and this response to the other reveals that we are not autonomous, but heteronomous subjects. Indicts of the AC framework result in a performative contradiction because the mere act of making ethical arguments concedes the fact that you have an ethical obligation towards the other that comes first. 4 + 5 + 6 +Additionally, moral realism fails because it is impossible for a condition to be presently just or moral because prior to the decision nothing allows us to call the decision just, and after, the decision has followed a rule that isn’t guaranteed. Derrida: Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, p. 24 7 +A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. It might be legal; it would not be just. But in the moment of suspense of the undecidable, it is not just either, for only a decision is just. And once the ordeal of the undecidable is past, the decision has again followed a rule or given itself a rule, invented it or reinvented, reaffirmed it, it is no longer presently just, fully just. There is apparently no moment in which a decision can be called presently and fully just: either it has not yet been made according to a rule, and nothing allows us to call it just, or it has already followed a rule, whether received, confirmed, conserved or reinvented, which in its turn is not absolutely guaranteed by anything; and, moreover, even if it were guaranteed, the decision would be reduced to a calculation, and we couldn’t call it just. 8 + 9 +This means: a) we can’t base ethics on hard-lined rules describing moral facts; only the pre-ontological ethic of the AC solves, and b) if the AC framework is false, then no rule can be called just. 10 +Next, traditional ethics prescribe rules and maxims that face a problem by both demanding that we transcend our current self and limiting what we can or cannot do. We need to transcend finitude, for limitation is the negative of obligation, and only the AC ethic escapes this by identifying the other with infinity,. Houlgate summarizes Hegel: Stephen Houlgate. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity. Purdue University Press, 2006 (p. 392-94) 11 +Hegel's complaint against Kant and Fichte-who both accord a central place in their philosophies to the ideas of limitation and of obligation-is not that they value the sense of "ought" at all but that they do not allow us to progress any further than that sense of "ought." In Hegel's view, neither Kant nor Fichte acknowledges sufficiently the extent to which human beings can fulfil their determination to be free, rational, and ethical beings and thereby actually be what they ought to be (see EL 150/200 §94 Add.). Yet, why should finite beings, such as ourselves, seek to be anything more than beings who should, but never actually do, transcend their moral, epistemological, and ontological limitations? Why not just be content with remaining beings who are finite and flawed but who feel a strong obligation to better them- selves? The reason, in Hegel's view, is that being confined to what we should be is itself a fundamental limitation, and by the logic of all limitation, it should itself be transcended. Finite things not only bear within them what they should be, as well as their intrinsic limitation; they also carry the obligation and drive to become more than merely finite beings forever spanned between their limitations and their "ought." The "ought," or "should," in things constitutes a limitation in its own right in two senses. First, the specific character that something should have limits the thing because it prevents it from being anything else and so restricts its possibilities. (This only counts as a genuine limitation of a thing, however, if one accepts that everything is born not just to change but to become a wholly different thing-a point that as yet has not been established)" Second, what something should be is limited precisely to the extent that it lacks real being. The thing has certain limitations insofar as it fails to live up to what it should be. At the same time, the very fact that what the thing should be can only ever be what it should be is itself a fundamental limitation because it prevents the thing from ever being what it should. If human beings, for example, are confined to being obligated to be free and rational but can never fulfil that obligation, that restricts them just as much as their actual unfreedom and irrationality do. So even though something points beyond its limitation by virtue of the fact that it should be this or that, the fact that it only should be this or that limits it anew. "As the ought, something is raised above its limitation," Hegel writes, "but conversely, it is The finite thing thus suffers a limitation in both aspects of its being: in being the limited thing it actually is and insofar as it should-but only should-be more than a merely limited thing. "The limitation of the finite is not something external to it," Hegel comments; "on the contrary, its own determination is also its limitation; and this latter is both itself and also the ought-to-be" (SL 133/: I44 237). Yet every finite thing points beyond its limitation insofar as it should not just fail to be what it intrinsically is. This means, however, that every finite thing should not be restricted to merely "oughting to be" what it is intrinsically. Every finite thing-by virtue of its own logical structure-should be more than just a limited thing that should be unambiguously what it is but never is. In other words, finite things should be more than just finite. That does not imply that they should leave their finitude behind altogether. As we have seen, to be is to be irreducibly and irreversibly finite; finitude is no illusion for Hegel but hard, inescapable real- ity. At the same time, however, in being irreducibly finite, things should not be merely finite. They should participate in, and be moments of, nonfinite or infinite being. In 2.B.c.y, indeed, Hegel argues that finite things not only should share in infinite being, but do actually constitute infinity in their very finitude. 12 +Chapter Twenty-one 13 +Through Finitude to Infinity 14 +Finitude ad Infinitum 15 +Every finite thing has its intrinsic character: it is this pen or this book, and so on. Yet it is in the contradictory position of failing in many ways to be what it is intrinsically because of its various limitations and imperfections. These imperfections, however, constitute what the thing actually is. What something is intrinsically, therefore, can only be what it should be. Indeed, what something should be is simply what it is intrinsically aside from the various limitations that mar it. Most things do not confront any conscious obligation to become anything other than they actually are. Yet a certain "should-be" is immanent in all things as the internal standard that they set for themselves and that they cannot but fail to live up to. For Hegel, then, both the ought and its corresponding limitation belong to the thing: "their relation to each other is the finite itself which contains them both in its being-within-self (Insichsein)" (SL 136/1: 148 237). Yet Hegel re- minds us that these two moments are also "qualitatively opposed." As limited, something is not as it should be, and what it should be is not subject to limitation. Accordingly, "limitation is determined as the negative of the ought and the ought likewise as the negative of the limitation." Insofar as it is finite, therefore, the thing is "the negative of the negative"; its being consists in not just being its own non-being or failure to be what it should be. 16 +Three implications: a) The AC ethic functions on a different level than any framework that assumes a limiting notion of the “ought,” so I always preclude, b) this is an independent justification for the framework, and c) since the negative of the ought is limitation as per the Houlgate evidence, no argument negates unless it justifies a limiting notion of obligation. 17 + 18 + 19 +Thus, the standard is rejecting totalization and fulfilling our infinite obligation towards the other, defined as reorienting ourselves to form a good will towards those that ethics relate to. To clarify, this means I do not defend a state of affairs. 20 + 21 +THUS 22 + 23 +Affirming is paramount under the standard because free, non-dominating speech is how the gap between I and the Other is bridged. Trey Trey, George. "Solidarity and Difference." Google Books. SUNY Press, 1998. Web. 15 Dec. 2016. https://books.google.com/books?id=5TtkYnilTAICandpg=PA136andlpg=PA136anddq=levinas2B22free2Bspeech22andsource=blandots=cV6nXpIz5iandsig=1d6uFj2jwE7W8pRFkTva-H45IXQandhl=enandsa=Xandved=0ahUKEwjB0Iuv_PTQAhWEAxoKHdsZAqMQ6AEILjAI#v=onepageandqandf=false. 24 +On what grounds, then, can this be called a relationship at all? Levinas's curious response is that the relationship is linguistic. In fact, one might even say that radical alterity "establishes" a speech situation (although here situation must be purged of any conceptual connotations and be thought only in terms of proximity). "Speech proceeds from absolute difference." Language is the relational medium that enables contact with the other. But it is not language in the sense of common ground, means for communicating, or point of intervention. To intervene or establish common territory would be to conceptualize alterity, which is tantamount to enacting its violation. Language, for Levinas, is not a source of unity, but rather the impossibility of unification. "Language accomplishes a relation between terms that breaks up the unity of a genus." It is this interlocutionary relationship, prior to thematic unity, that annotates the ethical. "The formal structure of language thereby announces that ethical inviolability of the Other and without any odor of the 'numinous,' his 'holiness.'" In other words, the ethical relation-ship is one that is utterly independent of any active force. As such, ethics is situated in terms of domination-free speech (TI, 194-98). - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,76 @@ 1 +Neolib AC 2 +Part One is Framing 3 + 4 +The role of the judge is to vote for the debater who best resists neoliberalism. 5 + 6 +We have reached a tipping point - legalistic solutions are no longer able to stop the symptoms of neoliberalism. Massive structural violence and extinction are inevitable without a fundamental rethinking of the current system. Farbod 15 7 + ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2) 8 +Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system ~-~- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return. 9 + 10 +Neoliberal violence is a constitutive feature, not an aberration, of modern liberal society and the root cause of dehumanization. Esposito and Finley 14 11 + 12 +(Luigi, Prof Sociology @Barry, Laura, Asst. Prof Sociology and Criminology @Barry, Beyond Gun Control: Examining Neoliberalism, Pro-gun Politics and Gun Violence in the United States, Theory in Action, Vol. 7, No. 2, April ) 13 + 14 +While recent mass shootings in the U.S., particularly in Newtown, have captured the attention of the nation and the world, it is important to remember that gun violence is not anomalous but rather a normative feature of American life. According to data published by the Centers for Disease Control, guns were used in 11,422 homicides in 2011—that is over 30 people in the U.S. being murdered with a gun every day (CDC 2012). And while it is undeniable that gun violence is related to weak gun controls and a lack of mental health services, what is too often missing from these discussions is a critical understanding of the institutional and ideological forces that create a context in which so many people are willing and ready to kill or harm one another. As this paper has made clear, since the early 1980s, neoliberalism has been a central factor in creating such a context. By encouraging attitudes and behavioral tendencies related to extreme individualism, hypermasculinity, competition, and self-gain, neoliberalism has promoted what Charles Derber (2004, p. 27) has described as a “sociopathic society”— one that is “marked by a collapse of moral order that results from the breakdown of community and the failure of institutions responsible for inspiring moral vision and enforcing robust moral codes.” It is precisely this breakdown of community that has also led to declining levels of empathy (particularly among young people) in the United States for the past 30 years (Zaki, 2012). Indeed, by emphasizing de-regulation and the pursuit of profit/personal gain as the linchpin of freedom, and by normalizing and rewarding self-centered behavior, neoliberalism breeds a society of alienated persons who (perhaps outside the few individuals closest to them) see others as little more than objects. Under these conditions, people become largely “incapable of loving” (Choi and Semm, 2011). As famously described by Erich Fromm (2005, pp. 15-31), when human beings are reduced to “things,” they lose the basic connection and sense of caring that sustains human communities. Furthermore, because materialism is exalted under neoliberalism, people living in a neoliberal market society are encouraged—through a host of institutions including the advertising industry and the entertainment industry—to embrace a hyper-consumer culture that, to a large extent, associates personal success, happiness, and well-being with the purchasing of material possessions. Thus, for example, driving a certain type of car, living in a certain type of house, or wearing a certain brand of clothes are commonly seen as indicators of a person’s worth and status. As discussed by Pérez and Esposito (2010, p. 89) “these things are supposed to tell others, as well as ourselves, whether or not we are successful, respectable, and desirable.” Attaining material things, moreover, involves a constant struggle whereby persons must “outdo’ one another to get the things that they want or need. Others, therefore, are either an impediment to one’s self-serving ends or a means towards fulfilling those ends. The point, however, is that largely because of this cut-throat materialization of social life, anything outside the material realm—including human life itself—is devalued. As discussed by Henry Giroux (2004), outside the most powerful/privileged individuals, human life under neoliberalism becomes largely disposable. It is within this sort of social context that various forms of gun related homicides—including mass shootings—and other forms of violence become predictable outcomes. Another issue to consider that is too often ignored in mainstream discussions of gun violence is how this violence might have a lot to do with a sense of powerlessness that many people feel in a neoliberal market society. 15 + 16 +Education is increasingly driven by neoliberal forces – student activism is key to retake the political sphere and democratize elite education against market-driven logic 17 +Williams 15 Jo Williams (Lecturer, College of Education at Victoria University), "Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy," Australian Journal of Adult Learning, November 2015 AZ 18 +More than ever the crisis of schooling represents, at large, the crisis of democracy itself and any attempt to understand the attack on public schooling and higher education cannot be separated from the wider assault on all forms of public life not driven by the logic of the market (Giroux, 2003:7) “Fin al lucro en educación, nuestros sueños no les pertenecen” (end profit making in education, nobody owns our dreams 1 ) (slogan of the Chilean student movement, inspired by the French student uprisings of May-June 1968) Over the past four decades, as the economic and ideological depravity of neoliberal policy and its market-driven logic (D. W. Hursh and Henderson, 2011) has been brought to bear on every aspect of education, the very concept of ‘public’ has been negated. Characteristics such as user-pays, competition, assaults on teachers, and mass standardised-testing and rankings, are among the features of a schooling, which is now very much seen as a private rather than public good (Giroux, 2003). The question of public education as a democratic force for the radical transformation of a violently unjust society seems rarely if ever asked, and a dangerous co-option and weakening of the language and practice of progressive pedagogy has occurred to the extent that notions of inclusion and success are increasingly limited to narrowly conceived individualist and competitive measures of market advantage. As Giroux notes “the forces of neo-liberalism dissolve public issues into utterly privatised and individualistic concerns (2004:62), and despite ongoing official rhetoric “the only form of citizenship increasingly being offered to young people is consumerism” (2003:7). Neoliberal education sees students and young people as passive consumers, the emphasis of schooling on learning how to be governed rather than how to govern (Giroux, 2003:7). In such a context the space for a public pedagogy, based on challenging the hegemony of neoliberal ideology and aligned with collective resistance, appears limited at best. And yet, every day people, teachers, students and communities do engage in political struggle, enacting pedagogies that seek to unveil rather than continue to mask the political structures and organisation that ensures power remains in the hands of the few, and at the service of the few, at the expense of the rest of us. Giroux characterises public pedagogies as defined by hope, struggle and a politicisation of the education process. He argues for …a politics of resistance that extends beyond the classroom as part of a broader struggle to challenge those forces of neo-liberalism that currently wage war against all collective structures capable of defending vital social institutions as a public good (Giroux, 2003:14). Central to Giroux’s argument is the need for critical educators to look to, value, and engage in and with social movements as they emerge and develop as sites of resistance. To …take sides, speak out, and engage in the hard work of debunking corporate culture’s assault on teaching and learning, orient their teaching for social change, connect learning to public life and link knowledge to the operations of power (Giroux, 2004:77). He argues that “progressive education in an age of rampant neoliberalism requires an expanded notion of the public, pedagogy, solidarity, and democratic struggle” (Giroux, 2003:13), and that moreover, educators need to work against a “politics of certainty” and instead develop and engage in pedagogical practice that problematises the world and fosters a sense of collective resistance and hope (2003:14). A neoliberal vision of the ‘good citizen’ and ‘good student’ presumes passivity, acceptance of the status quo and an individualistic disposition. Critical pedagogues must seek out and embrace opportunities to support and celebrate collective political action, not only because it develops a sense of social and political agency but also because it constitutes a powerful basis for authentic learning and active and critical citizenship in an unjust world (Freire, 1970). The Chilean student movement stands as one such example of challenging and inspiring counter-practice and a reclaiming of pedagogy as political and public. For ten years students have filled Chile’s streets, occupied their schools and universities, and organised conferences, public Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy 499 meetings, political stunts, creative actions and protests. Students and young people have been at the centre of the largest and most sustained political action seen in Chile since the democratic movement of the 80s, which eventually forced out the Pinochet dictatorship. Despite global trends in the opposite direction, the Chilean students have fundamentally influenced a nationwide education reform program constituting significant changes to the existing system which has been described as an extreme example of market-driven policy (Valenzuela, Bellei, and Ríos, 2014:220). Most importantly, they have forced and led a nationwide dialogue on the question of education and social justice in Chile and an interrogation of the current, grossly inequitable and elitist model (Falabella, 2008). This article begins by reviewing the experiences of the Chilean student movement to date and offering a brief explanation of the historical development of the education system it seeks to dismantle. It then considers the movement as an example of public pedagogies, concluding with a discussion of how it might inform notions of radical educational practice and a return of the student and pedagogue as authentic and critical subjects. 19 +Neoliberalism is violent and uses normativity as a shield to hide their lies of oppression. Refuse that ethical criteria and embrace higher education’s true calling. 20 +Giroux 13 (Henry, American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University,” 29 October 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university)//ghs-VA 21 +Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's intentions, can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research undertakings. Hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political neutrality and its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to come, that is, a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself."33 Within this project of possibility and impossibility, critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should also gain part of its momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adults live. This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of the academy. It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education, politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue and thought to have real effects, they must advocate that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. This is a commitment we heard articulated by the brave students who fought tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals, they need to listen to young people who are producing a new language in order to talk about inequality and power relations, attempting to create alternative democratic public spaces, rethinking the very nature of politics, and asking serious questions about what democracy is and why it no longer exists in many neoliberal societies. These young people who are protesting the 1 recognize that they have been written out of the discourses of justice, equality and democracy and are not only resisting how neoliberalism has made them expendable, they are arguing for a collective future very different from the one that is on display in the current political and economic systems in which they feel trapped. These brave youth are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them. 22 +Neoliberalism rips apart communal bonds to maintain the illusion that structural inequalities are individual problems – the impact is systemic victim-blaming, poverty, and violence. 23 +Smith 12 (Candace, author for Societpages, cites Bruno Amable, Associate Professor of Economics at Paris School of Economics) “Neoliberalism and Individualism: Ego Leads to Interpersonal Violence?” Sociology Lens is the associated site for Sociology Compass, Wiley-Blackwell’s review journal on all fields sociological AT 24 +There appears to be a link between neoliberalism, individualism, and violence. In reference to the association between neoliberalism and individualism, consider neoliberalism’s insistence that we do not need society since we are all solely responsible for our personal well-being (Peters 2001; Brown 2003). From a criminological standpoint, it is not hard to understand how this focus on the individual can lead to violence. According to Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory, for instance, broken or weak social bonds free a person to engage in deviancy. Since, according to this theory, individuals are naturally self-interested, they can use the opportunity of individualization to overcome the restraining powers of society. Bearing in mind neoliberalism’s tendency to value the individual over society, it could be argued that this ideology is hazardous as it acts to tear apart important social bonds and to thereby contribute to the occurrence of ego-driven crimes, including violent interpersonal crimes. Such a thought suggests that as neoliberalism becomes more prominent in a country, it can be expected that individualism and, as a result, interpersonal violence within that country will increase. When it comes to individualization, this idea is one of the fundamental aspects of neoliberalism. In fact, Bauman (2000:34) argues that in neoliberal states “individualization is a fate, not a choice.” As Amable (2011) explains, neoliberals have realized that in order for their ideology to be successful, a state’s populace must internalize the belief that individuals are only to be rewarded based on their personal effort. With such an ego-driven focus, Scharff (2011) explains that the process of individualization engenders a climate where structural inequalities are converted into individual problems. 25 + 26 + 27 +Part Two is the Method 28 + 29 + 30 +The Left’s resistance to free speech is exactly what neoliberal elites want: a divided working class with internal strife and intelligible goals that can be easily shut down. The 1AC is a criticism of the liberal left’s approach to free speech in favor of a method of historical materialism. Halberstam 16 31 +Jack Halberstam, You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma, Bully Bloggers, 5/7/16. 32 +What does it mean when younger people who are benefitting from several generations now of queer social activism by people in their 40s and 50s (who in their childhoods had no recourse to anti-bullying campaigns or social services or multiple representations of other queer people building lives) feel abused, traumatized, abandoned, misrecognized, beaten, bashed and damaged? These younger folks, with their gay-straight alliances, their supportive parents and their new right to marry regularly issue calls for “safe space.” However, as Christina Hanhardt’s Lambda Literary award winning book, Safe Space: Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, shows, the safe space agenda has worked in tandem with urban initiatives to increase the policing of poor neighborhoods and the gentrification of others. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence traces the development of LGBT politics in the US from 1965-2005 and explains how LGBT activism was transformed from a multi-racial coalitional grassroots movement with strong ties to anti-poverty groups and anti-racism organizations to a mainstream, anti-violence movement with aspirations for state recognition. And, as LGBT communities make “safety” into a top priority (and that during an era of militaristic investment in security regimes) and ground their quest for safety in competitive narratives about trauma, the fight against aggressive new forms of exploitation, global capitalism and corrupt political systems falls by the way side. Is this the way the world ends? When groups that share common cause, utopian dreams and a joined mission find fault with each other instead of tearing down the banks and the bankers, the politicians and the parliaments, the university presidents and the CEOs? Instead of realizing, as Moten and Hearny put it in The Undercommons, that “we owe each other everything,” we enact punishments on one another and stalk away from projects that should unite us, and huddle in small groups feeling erotically bonded through our self-righteousness. I want to call for a time of accountability and specificity: not all LGBT youth are suicidal, not all LGBT people are subject to violence and bullying, and indeed class and race remain much more vital factors in accounting for vulnerability to violence, police brutality, social baiting and reduced access to education and career opportunities. Let’s call an end to the finger snapping moralism, let’s question contemporary desires for immediately consumable messages of progress, development and access; let’s all take a hard long look at the privileges that often prop up public performances of grief and outrage; let’s acknowledge that being queer no longer automatically means being brutalized and let’s argue for much more situated claims to marginalization, trauma and violence. Let’s not fiddle while Rome (or Paris) burns, trigger while the water rises, weep while trash piles up; let’s recognize these internal wars for the distraction they have become. Once upon a time, the appellation “queer” named an opposition to identity politics, a commitment to coalition, a vision of alternative worlds. Now it has become a weak umbrella term for a confederation of identitarian concerns. It is time to move on, to confuse the enemy, to become illegible, invisible, anonymous (see Preciado’s Bully Bloggers post on anonymity in relation to the Zapatistas). In the words of José Muñoz, “we have never been queer.” In the words of a great knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “we are now no longer the Knights who say Ni, we are now the Knights who say “Ekki-ekki-ekki-ekki-PTANG. Zoom-Boing, z’nourrwringmm.” 33 + 34 +Our socialist criticism of the anti free-speech left is key to broader socialist pedagogy and sparking radical resistance to capitalism – multiple warrants. Worker’s Liberty 15 35 + 36 +Worker’s Liberty, Universities, capitalism and free speech, 3/18/15, http://www.workersliberty.org/node/24864. 37 + 38 +For centuries, university campuses have been, relatively speaking, a haven within capitalist society for free debate and criticism. A high point, for much of the 20th century, was the right which universities in Latin America won to keep the police off their campuses and have university officials elected by staff and students. That began with the University Reform Movement in Córdoba, in northern Argentina, which opposed a focus on learning by rote, inadequate libraries, poor instruction, and restrictive admission criteria, and spread across the subcontinent. The student radicalism which spread across much of the world in 1968 started, in 1964-5, with a Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. The central avenues through campus had become a lively scene, with street stalls and political gatherings; the university authorities tried to clamp down, and were eventually defeated. Today free debate and criticism on campus is under threat from several angles. The government wants universities to ban speakers from their campuses who would be quite legal elsewhere. University administrations ban meetings, even without government prompting, when they think they might cause trouble or uproar. Campus space is increasingly commercialised and franchised-out, and university bosses try to stop student postering, leafleting, and campaigning affecting the “commercial space”. Student unions are increasingly run by people who think that a spell as student union president will look good on their CV when they apply for a managerial job. University lecturers’ careers depend on how many articles they get published in “leading” (i.e., in almost all fields, orthodox) journals. Over generations of academic turnover, this produces university departments filled with staff who have been selected by capacity to get wordage into those journals, and who in turn will go on to run those journals, oblivious to critiques or alternative approaches. This narrows the range of teaching and debate on courses. Finally, and paradoxically, the shutting-down of debate is sometimes promoted by student activists who consider themselves left-wing. A chief example is the bans on the Socialist Workers Party imposed by Goldsmiths and Edinburgh University student unions, and attempted elsewhere. 39 +Student protests oppose neoliberalism in higher education, translating theory into praxis 40 +Delgado and Ross 16 Sandra Delgado (doctoral student in curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) and E. Wayne Ross (Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada), "Students in Revolt: The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the Corporate University" 2016 (published on Academia.edu) AZ 41 +As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas. 42 + 43 +Our method defies neoclassical assumptions and introduces alternate economic perspectives to liberate marginalized groups. Worker’s Liberty 15-solvency 44 + 45 +Worker’s Liberty, Universities, capitalism and free speech, 3/18/15, http://www.workersliberty.org/node/24864. 46 + 47 +The process of narrowing This excerpt is taken from a report published in 2014 by critical economics students at Manchester University, and sums up how thought has been narrowed within the lecture halls and seminar rooms. "As little as 15 years ago the Economics Department at Manchester had a considerably wider range of professors who self-identified with different economic paradigms and had very different research agendas. This led to a far more eclectic undergraduate syllabus with modules such as comparative economic theory, comparative economic systems and alternative perspectives on developing economies being available for students to study. The Economics Department has radically changed in composition in the last 15 years and it is these changes that are the root cause of many of the problems we outlined. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) and academic journals have the power to define what is and isn’t economics and within that, what is good economics and bad economics. REF determines how much research funding each university gets and is a label of research prowess. Every four years a panel of leading academic economists grade departments on the basis of individual publications whose academic quality is inferred from the status and ranking of economics journals. The problem is that there are no recognisably heterodox economists on this panel and that the grading is done behind closed doors with only departmental ratings published. The outcome of the REF rating process is to elevate the neoclassical framework to the standard by which all economics research is judged. Departments and individual lecturers are forced to respond to the definitions of economics set by these bodies... Academic economists must work with neoclassical assumptions and methodology if they wish to secure academic tenure and advance within the leading economics departments... As nonmainstream Manchester professors have retired from expanding departments they have been replaced by young recruits who represent a narrow range of mainstream economists who had been published, or were more likely to be published, in the mainstream American journals (Big 5: AER, Chicago etc). This homogeneity puts the Department in the position of not having the capability to teach other schools of thought or history of economic thought. This narrowing process reinforces itself; now many young lecturers and teaching assistants aren’t able to facilitate critical discussions including alternative economic perspectives in tutorials because their economics education has lacked those elements. This monoculture also makes it easier for professors to believe that their way is the only way to do economics or at least that it is the only valid way, which in turn justifies its status as the only kind of economics taught at our university... Non-mainstream economists at Manchester have been stripped of their titles as economists and pushed out to peripheral positions in development studies and suchlike while various kinds of heterodox political economy have taken root in the business school, politics, geography and history departments." UCL votes for free speech By Omar Raii In mid-March University College London students’ union students voted (by a close margin) to support freedom of speech and organisation on campus. The arguments against came not from the right, but from self-defined leftists who argued that it may be necessary from time to time to stop speakers with objectionable views (for example misogynists, supporters of UKIP etc.) from coming on to campus, in order to protect oppressed groups. We replied that freedom of speech is especially important for oppressed groups, who are the most vulnerable when it comes to government censorship. Already the state and university managements are determined to clamp down on any debate that may lead to rowdiness or controversy. Student unions should not add to the censorious atmosphere by banning speakers or societies. The motion noted that “there has been a rise in instances of meetings, debates and publications being suppressed on university campuses, whether by campus authorities, the Home Office/police or sometimes by student unions themselves.... “That for freedom of expression to be genuinely established on campus, it must extend to those whose views may be regarded as objectionable.... “That student unions should generally champion free speech and organisation, and advocate their curtailment only in extreme circumstances, such as when speakers incite violence. “That fascist organising and presence on campus must be opposed and stopped, not because it leads to offensive speech, but because it contributes to violent, organised attacks on students, especially oppressed groups...” 48 + 49 + 50 +The 1AC’s method works on and against power to break down the system – it allows for disidentification with the institutions of power that solves structural problems. Muñoz 99 51 + José Esteban Munoz Published: 1999 Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics (Cultural Studies of the Americas) 52 + 53 +The theory of disidentification that I am offering is meant to contribute to an understanding of the ways in which queers of color identify with ethnos or queerness despite the phobic charges in both fields. The French linguist Michael Pecheux extrapolated a theory of disidentification from Marxist theorist Louis Althusser’s influential theory of subject formation and interpellation. Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” was among the first articulations of the role of ideology in theorizing subject formation. For althusser, ideology is an inescapable realm in which subjects are called into being or “hailed” a process he calls interpellation. Ideology is the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. The location of ideology is always within an apparatus and its practice or practices, such as the state apparatus. Pecheux built on this theory by describing the three modes in which a subject is constructed by ideological practices. In this schema, the first mode is understood as “identification” where a “good Subject” chooses the path of identification with discursive and ideological forms. “Bad Subjects” resist and attempt to reject the images and identificatory sites offered by dominant ideology and proceed to rebel, to “counteridentify” and turn against this symbolic system. The danger that Pecheux sees in such an operation would be the counterdetermination that such a system installs, a structure that validates the dominant ideology by reinforcing its dominance through the controlled symmetry of “counterdetermination.” Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this “working on and against” is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance. Judith Butler gestures towards the uses of disidentifcation when discussing the failure of identification. She parries with Slavoj Zizek, who understands disidentification as a break down of political possibility, a “fictionalization to the point of political immobilization.” She counters Zizek by asking the following question of his formulations: “What are the possibilities of politicizing disidentification, this experience of misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?” Butler answers: “it may be that the affirmation of that slippage, that the failure of identification, is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference.” Both Butler’s and Pecheux’s accounts of disidentification put forward an understanding of identification as never being as seamless or unilateral as the Freudian account would suggest. Both theories construct the subject as inside ideology. Their models permit one to examine theories of a subject who is neither the “Good Subject,” who has an easy or magical identification with dominant culture, or the “Bad Subject,” who imagines herself outside of ideology. Instead, they pave the way to an understanding of an “disidentificatory subject” who tactically and simultaneously works on, which, and against a cultural form. As a practice, disidentification does not dispel those ideological contradictory elements; rather, like a melancholic subject holding on to a lost object, a disidentifying subject works to hold on to this object and invest it with new life. Sedwick, in her work on the affect, shame, and its role in queer performativity, has explained: The forms taken by shame are not distinct “toxic” parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual in the process in which identity is formed. They are available for the work of metamorphosis, reframing, refiguration, transfiguration, affective and symbolic loading and deformation; but unavailable for effecting the work of purgation and deontological closure. To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to “connect” with the disidentifying subject. It is not to pick and choose what one takes out of an identification. It is not to willfully evacuate the politically dubious or shameful components within an identifactory locus. Rather, it is the reworking of those energies that do not elide that “harmful” or contradictory components of any identity. It is an acceptance of the necessary interjection that has occurred in such situations. Disidentification is, to some degree, an argument with psychoanalytic orthodoxies within cultural studies. It does not represent a wholesale rejection of psychoanalysis. Indeed, one’s own relationship with psychoanalysis can be disidentifactory. Rather than reject psychoanalytic accounts of identification, the next section engages work on identification and desire being done in the psychoanalytic wing of queer theory. 54 +Reshaping the way we teach young people is key. 55 +Giroux 11: Henry, Professor and founding theorist of critical pedagogy and he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period. “Left Behind? American Youth and the Global Fight for Democracy” Truthout. February 28, 2011. 56 +At the heart of such public spaces is a formative culture that creates citizens who are critical thinkers capable of "putting existing institutions into question so that democracy again becomes society's movement ... that is to say, a new type of regime in the full sense of the term."(43) Young people need to be educated both as a condition of autonomy and for the sustainability of democratization as an ongoing movement. Not only does a substantive democracy demand citizens capable of self- and social criticism, but it also, once again, requires a critical formative culture in which people are provided with the knowledge and skills to be able to participate in such a society. What we see in the struggle for educational reforms in Europe and the Middle East is a larger struggle for the economic, political and social conditions that give meaning and substance to what it means to make democracy possible. When we see 15 year olds battle the established oppressive orders in the streets of Paris, Cairo, London and Athens for a more just society, they offer a glimpse of what it means for youth to enter "modernist narratives as trouble."(44) But trouble here exceeds dominant society's eagerness to view them as a pathology, as monsters and a drain on the market-driven order. Instead, trouble speaks to something more suggestive of a "productive unsettling of dominant epistemic regimes under the heat of desire, frustration or anger."(45) The expectations that frame market-driven societies are losing their grip on young people, who can no longer be completely seduced or controlled by the tawdry promises and failed returns of corporate dominated and authoritarian regimes. 57 + 58 +The 1AC’s emancipatory critique is a pre requisite to policy action – alternatives cause serial policy failure – without pure critique neoliberal solutions reproduce the same bad results. Dillon 2k 59 +Assumption-neoclassicla ecnomoics are the correct way 60 + 61 +Dillon and Reid 2K — (Michael, Professor of Politics – University of Lancaster, and Julian, Lecturer in International Relations – King’s College, “Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, January / March, 25(1)) 62 +More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure~-~-the fate and the fuel of all policy~-~-compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed. 35 Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy~-~-and policy science~-~-will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it. 63 + 64 +Part Three is the Underview 65 + 66 +Evaluate T through reasonability with a brightline of structural abuse. 67 +1. Brightline solves judge intervention- I have a clear metric to determine abuse and it’s non arbitrary 68 +2. Competing interps leads to a race to the bottom- debaters can always nitpick some minor flaw with an interpretation or suggest a marginal advantage even in the absence of actual abuse. Outweighs: 69 +A. Ensures theory functions as check on abuse- my brightline is key to making sure theory is only run in face of insurmountable abuse, instead of just a strategic tool to win rounds 70 + 71 +Academic discourse constructs rules of argumentation that can exclude voices. Prosise 96 72 +T-having a “best” way to engage debate, which excludes voices 73 + 74 + (Prosise, Theodore O Masters Candidate, School of Communications, University of San Diego; Miller, Greg R Assistant Professor, School of Communications, San Diego State University; Mills, Jordan P. Masters Candidate, School of Communications, University of San Diego “Argument fields as arenas of discursive struggle” Argumentation and Advocacy; Winter 1996) 75 + 76 +The importance of the discursive struggles over the standards that distinguish legitimate and illegitimate forms of expression has also eluded thorough analysis. Critical theorists must recognize the practical discursive struggles of social agents.26 The actual symbolic practices of agents must be understood if we are to analyze how logical types become invested with authority. The establishment of authority may preclude participation in the field and marginalize those who could or should have a say. Field theory is better conceptualized by considering argument fields as social arenas of struggle, accounting for the key elements and factors that make fields dynamic. Toulmin, while recognizing the role of argumentative conflict in the establishment of authority, originally employed an evolutionary model in his explanation of the development of disciplinary fields. In Human Understanding, he argues that forums of competition allow the best warrants of a field to become accepted. The dominant warrants, he believes, did not develop from an "arbitrary authority or contest for power."27 His evolutionary perspective embraces the metaphor of change as progress. Condensing this, Robert Rowland explains, "The theories which best meet a discipline's needs will survive."28 The work of Thomas Kuhn, however, amply demonstrates the limits of such an evolutionary perspective of epistemic development.29 And although Toulmin now would not embrace the container model of knowledge accumulation, the original discussion of fields lacked an emphasis on the dynamics of social struggles for symbolic legitimacy, which may explain the current limitations in understanding how authority is produced and articulated in social space.The shared purposes of social agents also has been offered as a useful descriptor of argument fields. Rowland argues a conception of fields based on the shared purpose of the agents operating within the field.30 Zarefsky summarizes this notion, indicating that "two arguers are in the same field if they share a common purpose, and . . . the arguments they produce will differ in important ways from arguments which derive from a different purpose."31 In short, participants argue over what constitute the "best way" to engage in activities within the area of inquiry.:;2 This conception of fields begins to define a social arena based on an agent's participation in a struggle over the instrumental means and terminal states of a social field. It should be recognized that participants also share in the struggle for scarce resources-be they economic, cultural, political or symbolic.These agents argue over the legitimate perspective on what should constitute a claim to know, so they share in a struggle for epistemic legitimacy. The resolution of this struggle determines what types of argumentative proof are legitimated in the field. Extending from Toulmin's work, many scholars recognize that the symbolic negotiation of authority within social fields is ongoing. Such negotiation requires a discursive struggle in which arguments are presented and then accepted or rejected by the community of participants. 33 Charles Kneupper notes that "social fields are strongly influenced by rhetorical practice in both their continuation and change."34 Furthermore, James Klumpp suggests that "when a community encounters an experience there are normally multiple understandings of it. Through communication the community works out its choice of ways to respond (that is, its definition of the situation) and then sanctions ... appropriate action."35 Social actors categorize events in order to respond to those events in appropriate ways. This categorization is based, primarily, on the language practices of the social field. 36 For example, welfare policies frame cultural myths of an "underclass" and may exacerbate the problems of social members of lower economic status. The connotations associated with the term "underclass," such as chronic laziness, stigmatize members of the group. The policies that are formulated, therefore, are based on the perceived "character" of the members of the underclass, rather than the larger social, historical, and economic causes of their economic status. The implication is that action is often based on the successful symbolic struggles which categorize events, rather than on "good reasons."37 Since new ideas are filtered through taken-for-granted social assumptions, there is a general conservative social orientation toward argument. This helps explain how argument fields are maintained. Craig Dudczak, while recognizing that struggles take place within disciplines, claims that overall participants "maintain general disciplinary assumptions."38 Wenzel writes that "argument fields exhibit a persistence over time"39 and for Charles Willard "fields exist … through the ongoing defining activities" and the "recurring themes in a group's practices." In other words, certain symbolic forms of authority are reproduced and others are limited socially. Certain forms of argumentative support are celebrated and other forms are dismissed, based on the social forms of authority previously established by the agents participating in the field. But fields are not always stable. Postmodern scholars remind us that diversity and differences are the norm. Hence, attention must be paid to the diversity of discursive struggles that challenge traditional forms of social authority. Communities of memory, necessary for social negotiation, are partially established through discursive practices. But within the community, conflict is ever-present. So, what is the relationship between the community and the conflict within the field? Furthermore, what are the implications of the struggle? Hanson argues that the forums of field disputes can serve to "exclude" an individual "from further discussions. " 42 He is certainly correct; however, it is more than just a forum that excludes discourse. The successful symbolic struggle to define social authority excludes individuals and perspectives from participation and consideration in social fields. Despite these contributions, there has been insufficient discussion of the pragmatic struggles in which agents are engaged. The community of argument scholars will be served by a general theory of social fields in order to evaluate particular examples. Over a decade ago, Zarefsky contended that "we need an account of the growth and demise of fields against which we can check individual claims."4:1 What the current discussion lacks, specifically, is a consideration of the role that symbolic struggles of categorization of "appropriate" and "inappropriate" forms of authority plays in the stability and change of a social field's assumptions, which serve as the basis for the subsequent social structuring of practices. Current field theory fails to account adequately for social power and the conflict over scarce symbolic resources at the base of that social power. The study of such struggle is important because it relates to the stability and legitimacy of the dominant forms of discourse. Subsequently, there has been little attention to the real world implications of marginalizing alternative arguments within fields. For example, Nancy Fraser argues that the conceptual framing of social welfare policies excludes meaningful interpretation of social needs from a feminist perspective.44 The social forms of authority surrounding the welfare debate are defined by political "professionals." Consequently, the interpretation of a welfare recipient's "needs" and "interests" are considered primarily from the dominant political perspective. Excluded from the political debate are alternative voices and arguments. Lack of attention to the symbolic means of exclusion, such as this, is troubling. Rhetorical scholars need a theory which can help explain how and why certain arbitrary expressions are celebrated, while others are excluded altogether due to discursive struggles within dynamic social fields. Furthermore, scholars should be encouraged to explore the symbolic means agents employ to challenge traditionally dominant forms of argumentative authority. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,45 @@ 1 +1AC 2 +Colleges are silencing people speaking out about campus rape. 3 +Callie Beusman, 14, Colleges Silence and Fire Faculty Who Speak Out About Rape, 6-13-2014, Jezebel, http://jezebel.com/colleges-silence-and-fire-faculty-who-speak-out-about-r-1586169489 4 +In institutions of higher learning nationwide, college administrations are silencing faculty for speaking out about the campus rape crisis. Faculty members from four colleges and universities spoke exclusively to Jezebel about the professional retaliation they've faced due to their support of survivors of sexual assault; according to their accounts, they and their colleagues have been systematically stonewalled, rebuffed, intimidated, slandered and denied tenure for their advocacy. Oftentimes, the so-called "political" or "trouble-making" behavior they engage in is simply doing what Title IX laws require them to in order to keep their students safe. Every professor I spoke to described a remarkably similar pattern of behavior on the administration's part: when faculty object to the desultory, ineffective sexual assault and rape policies offered up by universities, they're ignored; when they persist in their criticism, they're labeled "hysterical" or "troublemakers" who are acting out of a "personal agenda," and they're put under increasing pressure to keep quiet. In some cases that pressure is insidious. In others, it's bafflingly blatant: for instance, I spoke to two women who were denied tenure after helping students report sexual harassment (which, again, is their legal responsibility under Title IX). The crux of the issue here is that colleges see the campus rape crisis primarily as an image problem. They put their illustrious reputations before their students' safety, and, in doing so, they actively harm survivors. Because 1 in 5 women will be raped in college, a spotless sexual assault record simply isn't possible. When college administrations strive to make it seem as though sexual assault and harassment are wildly uncommon, what they're really doing is demanding that sexual assault survivors stay quiet about their experiences. Plainly put, low reporting numbers don't reflect a dearth of sexual violence. They're indicative of the fact that survivors are afraid of coming forward. But many college administrations seem not to care about this distinction. When schools value their good names over the safety of their students, anyone who opens her mouth to argue on survivors' behalf automatically stands in opposition to the administration's best interests. Under this logic, anyone who advocates for sexual assault policy reform — anyone who points out out that the extant policies are deeply inadequate — is automatically part of the problem. And faculty activists, who can remain at an institution for decades once they're tenured, are particularly troubling to administrators. "Faculty have more power in the institution, and we're here for 30 years, so it's not surprising to me that administrations have really hit faculty hard in ways that aren't being talked about yet," says Caroline Heldman, an Occidental professor who has been advocating for sexual assault reform for years. "Institutions have been retaliating against faculty in career-ending ways." She adds, "There are many, many faculty across the nation. We've been starting to talk: we've been denied promotions, denied tenure; there are adjuncts who've been fired because of their work — even minor work — advocating for students." The message that colleges and universities are sending is clear: if you're not with us, then you're against us. Even if you're standing with our students. Kimberly Theidon, a soon-to-be-former professor at Harvard, claims that she was abruptly denied tenure because of she advocated for sexual assault and harassment survivors, some of whom were openly critical of the administration. According to a complaint she filed against the school in March 2014, she was given no indication that she'd be denied tenure until it occurred. In fact, there were several signs of good faith from the university — in 2008, she was promoted to associate professor and then "assigned an endowed designation of John J. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, which a confidential document shared with HuffPost stated was a position for the 'most distinguished tenure-track Harvard faculty.'" Most tellingly, Theidon states that she was invited in the spring of 2013 to "sit and lay out her new tenured faculty offices." Two months later, she was denied tenure. In a phone interview, Theidon mentions two specific incidents she believes Harvard retaliated against her for. Both are astoundingly minor. The first involves a March 2013 Harvard Crimson article written by sexual assault survivors who felt they had been failed by the institution. After the piece went up, the comments section was swamped by men's rights activist trolls attacking the authors and spewing out all sorts of rape apologia. Using her own name, Theidon responded to the trolls. "One of my students said, 'Kimberly, I feel triply violated,'" Theidon says. "First they get raped, then they have to deal with Harvard which grinds them down with callous indifference, and now they're being vilified in the press. And so I don't even think twice and say, 'Oh I'll go start commenting.' ... It never occurred to me that there would be a problem with this." In the second incident, one of Theidon's students came to her in tears, asking for advice about a professor's ongoing sexual harassment of her. "She had reached out to other people asking for help, and everyone had told her 'Oh just be quiet; oh, he's just like that; oh, he'll write you nice letters,'" Theidon says. So she advised the the student report the harassment to administrators. A few weeks later, in an email, the student warned her that both the director of her program and her department chair told her not to talk discuss the issue Theidon further because doing so could "derail her tenure." A few days later, the chairman of Theidon's tenure committee called her into her office and confirmed this. According to Theidon, "She said, 'You can tell no one about this. You must not say one word about this. This is a delicate time for you. You can't be talking.'" On May 28, 2013, Theidon learned that Harvard had denied her tenure and would terminate her employment on June 30, 2014. Senior Vice Provost for Diversity Judith Singer allegedly informed her that the committee reviewing her tenure discussed her "political activity" and concluded it was "the sort of activity scholars postpone until they have tenure." Theidon believes that this line of thinking, the idea that political activity should be postponed until tenure, encourages faculty complicity in tolerating and perpetuating a hostile sexual environment. "People are told over and over, 'Oh, wait 'til you have tenure. Head down, back bowed, and you just be quiet for six years, seven years, eight years,'" she says. "Well, then people get tenure, and I think people are so complicit for so long that they're quiet then too." Moreover, Theidon doesn't see what she did as particularly political. "I was not manning the barricades," she tells me. "I was just doing what seemed the right thing." Of course, this sort of behavior on administrations' part is far from new, nor is it contained to specific campuses. Over email, Simona Sharoni, a professor who used to work at American University, told me that she was denied tenure under nearly identical circumstances 20 years ago. Some of her students came to her and told her that they'd been harassed by a popular faculty member. "The students were scared to report the abuse but felt they could no longer keep the secret. I felt a responsibility to report," she wrote. "I was appalled when I realized that many administrators and fellow colleagues in the program knew about the abuse and chose to look the other way." The next day, her program director called her and said that he was "happy that she was around to work with the faculty member." When she told him that they were breaking the law by not taking the report seriously, he grew angry with her. Eventually, although she was told not to, she filed an informal complaint. When she was first hired as a visiting assistant professor, she was told that there would be a tenure track position opening. It did within days of her filing the complaint. She applied, and — though she was the "insider candidate" and had both "stellar students' evaluations and a published book (not common for a junior faculty member)" — the position eventually went unfilled. The next year, the same position opened; again, it went unfilled. "I know from former colleagues that I was the front-runner for that position as well," wrote Sharoni. "On the third year when they announced the search I chose not to apply. It was too agonizing and I was frustrated." "Regardless of the lip service universities pay to academic freedom, there is a bias on college campuses against faculty who take a stance on any issue, let alone if the issue involves direct criticism on the administration," she added. In the past few years, Occidental College has come under a lot of fire for its sexual assault policy — in April of 2013, a group of students, faculty and alumni filed a federal lawsuit against the college for permitting "a hostile environment for sexual assault victims and their advocates" to persist on campus. In May, after hiring attorneys Gina Smith and Leslie Gomez from law firm Pepper Hamilton to conduct an independent review of the school's sexual assault policies, the administration made a big show of taking action to address the issue. However, student and faculty activists took umbrage with the proposed changes, criticizing them as wholly ineffective and merely cosmetic — more focused with repairing the school's damaged reputation than with actually helping students and keeping them safe. In March of 2014, reports surfaced showing that the faculty members who were openly critical of the administration were subject to blatant retaliation, including office break-ins, laptop seizures, phone taps and the monitoring of work emails. It also seems that administrations are trying to minimize the extent of the sexual assault problem: in a recording of a recent faculty meeting obtained by Jezebel, Occidental President Jonathan Veitch publicly denied the university had an abysmal record at handling sexual violence cases — which, considering the fact that the administration paid an undisclosed settlement sum to 10 current and former students in 2013, is a pretty laughable claim. "They're in now denial, and they've gone after faculty in an attempt to discredit them," says Caroline Heldman. "It's not just that they're not making real changes: it's that they're spending all their time, energy and effort going after the faculty and survivors who brought it up. It's beyond inactivity. They're actively dedicating time and resources to shooting messengers." In March, Occidental faculty who believe the school retaliated against them for their sexual assault advocacy filed a confidential Title IX complaint with the Department of Education. Documents obtained by Jessica Testa at Buzzfeed reveal allegations that Occidental administration actively and aggressively attempted to silence critics in the faculty and staff: Current and former Occidental students, faculty, and staff allege that they were verbally reprimanded or even lost jobs at the college after speaking up about the school's sexual misconduct policies or supporting those who did. The complaint alleges that the school downsized the responsibilities of the director of the school's sexual assault prevention and education program after he showed support to those critical of the administration. A staff member wrote that he believed his job was terminated while on medical leave because he criticized the administration for how it reported sexual assaults. According to Heldman, those whom the administration cannot fire or scold into silence are branded as "difficult to work with" or "trouble-makers." The reputational hit isn't minor: "They can just run smear campaigns," says Heldman of her experience with the administration. "It's the reputational assassination that takes place behind the scenes if you're involved in this — the idea that you're just a hysterical woman — and I find that to be just as damaging as the office break-ins, or perhaps more so in terms of reputation." This seems to have been the impetus behind a campus-wide email that Occidental President Jonathan Veitch sent out last year, in which he decried the faculty who vocally supported rape victims and called for effective policy reform as "a number of well-intentioned people who vilify dedicated, hard-working members of Student Affairs; question the sincerity of our response; and actively seek to embarrass the College on the evening news." "If we don't play nice, if we don't just accept the bullshit that is coming out of the mouths of administrators… then somehow we are the problem," says Heldman. "Because get angry about the continuing lies and defensiveness and inability to actually bring about real change." She tells me that President Veitch dismisses faculty activism by referring to her and her colleagues who want to improve the school's sexual assault policy as "mean girls" and "whiny women" to other Occidental staff. To wit: when Heldman spoke up at a faculty meeting in March, some of her colleagues whom she describes as "the President's dear friends" sent a letter to all of Occidental's faculty decrying her arguments as "personal animosities, anger and accusation." "They literally are saying, 'No, you can't be angry about this,'" says Heldman. And then they're not listening. Earlier this month, three University of Oregon students — all basketball players — were accused of gang raping a female student in multiple locations; according to the police report she filed on May 13 (warning: graphic content), she was far too drunk to consent and repeatedly said no as all three men took turns forcibly penetrating her. UO acknowledges that it first received a report of the alleged assault on March 9; on March 12, the three men were allowed to play in the NCAA tournament. On March 13, UO Vice President for Student Affairs Robin Holmes sent a memo to the university senate president noting that the university's sexual assault conduct policies were "out of step with federal laws." And the UO community didn't learn of the assault until May, when police released the report to the Oregonian, even though one of the alleged assailants had a history of sexual assault at his former university. This prompted student protests and a Clery Act complaint. Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of this completely, grotesquely mishandled case is the fact that UO faculty had been speaking out about the "woeful state" of the administration's sexual assault response for years, and for years they'd been rebuffed, silenced and ignored. "This case brought a lot of media attention, but we've been sitting in meetings with administrators for two years now saying the sexual assault and harassment policies are a problem," says Carol Stabile, a University of Oregon professor. "I wrote a letter to the president in December 2012 clearly laying out my concerns and saying that I was very worried that bad things were going to continue to happen to women on my campus." According to Stabile, she and her colleagues were "rebuffed at every step." She adds, "We were told constantly that everything was fine, we were just kind of whiny faculty members." Cheyney Ryan, another UO professor, had a similar experience. In September of 2012, he sent a letter to administrators cautioning them about UO's failure to comply with federal sex discrimination laws. Among his worries: students were "almost completely unaware of what constitutes sexual harassment and of what to do about it if they are harassed"; there was absolutely no training for faculty on how to identify and report sexual harassment; the administration was utterly indifferent and unresponsive to concerns about their deficient policy. "We cannot wait until a Penn State-type incident occurs before we take these issues seriously," Ryan concluded. After that, no serious effort was made to reform the policy until 3 days after the alleged March 2014 gang rape. "It's like gaslighting," Ryan says. "They make you feel like you're crazy: 'What's wrong with you that you think there's an issue here?'" This gaslighting effect, of course, has a serious negative impact on professor's professional credibility. "When I first started talking to people about sexual assault and sexual harassment problems, they would say things about Cheyney like, 'Oh, well, he's just a difficult personality. It's not like there's a problem here, he's just got an axe to grind.'" says Stabile. "That's one of the ways universities retaliate." "Retaliation can be really subtle," adds Stabile. "The thing that they do is that they try to make it as uncomfortable for sexual assault faculty activists so that if you can, you leave. Or else you just shut up." UO administrators have publicly castigated faculty for speaking out — at a recent university senate meeting, for instance, UO President Michael Gottfredson described the recent sexual assault activism as "very, very inappropriate," according to Stabile. Sometimes, vocal faculty members will be moved out of their departments. But often they're just intimidated into silence: "Someone said to me the other day... because I'd complained about the silence among feminists — they said, 'Look, there are people who've tried to do this for years, they've gotten beaten up, and they just don't want to open their mouths any more,'" says Stabile. Like Theidon, Stabile doesn't see herself as having a political agenda. "When I came here, I really wanted things to be okay. I didn't want to look for these problems... but, you know, the cases come to you, and if you're ethical and care about your students, you just can't turn your back on them, and you can't close your eyes." "I look at my entire career, entire education, and I just see the body count," says Stabile. "I see the faculty members who quit 10 years into the job. I see the women who didn't finish... and it's not even that they just leave the university and don't finish their education. It's students who wind up killing themselves. It's students who don't survive." This is the price of valuing a college's reputation over the well-being of the people who actually work and live there — failing rape survivors becomes an unspoken part of university policy. The collateral damage of this is simply unconscionable: denied proper accommodations, denied the right to not have to live on a campus with their rapists, survivors suffer academically and struggle with mental health issues. Some drop out. Some attempt suicide. It's not an overstatement in any way to say that ignoring the campus rape epidemic literally ruins lives. And colleges expect their faculty members to silently accept this — to passively let it happen — if they want to keep their jobs and their professional reputations intact. However, there is hope for reform — college and university faculty members across the country have banded together to create a new organization, Faculty Against Rape (FAR), which hopes to help faculty respond to campus rape and institutional betrayal. According to Caroline Heldman, who is helping to launch the organization, FAR's three main focuses will be developing resources for faculty to better serve survivors, helping faculty who want to be part of the anti-rape movement organize on campus, and providing strategy and legal resources for faculty who are retaliated against by administrations. Although many faculty have been advocating against sexual assault for years, the increased media attention on the issue now may help them affect meaningful change. "This conversation is happening nationally," says Stabile. "'I've never seen this conversation before. It's a moment where we can move to change things. When I can't sleep at night or I wake up in the morning thinking about the students I've lost, I try to think about that, too." Theidon agrees with this sentiment. "I think ten years from now, twenty years from now, people are going to look back and say this is one of the most important social movements on college campuses," she says. "And I know that if 10 years from now someone asks me, 'What were you doing back then, Kimberly?' I want to be able to answer, 'I was standing up, speaking out, and supporting these women. What were you doing?'" 5 + 6 +Student and faculty activism is key to ending campus rape. 7 +Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, 15, The Hunting Ground : Stop Victim Blaming and End Campus Rape, 3-26-2015, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-dr-susan-brooks-thistlethwaite/the-hunting-ground-stop-victim-blaming-and-end-campus-rape_b_6943488.html 8 + “One in five women in college will be sexually assaulted.” That is only one of the horrifying statistics in the new documentary The Hunting Ground on the “epidemic” of campus sexual assault. It is the work of Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, whose previous documentary, The Invisible War, about sexual assault in the military, was nominated for an Academy Award. The film is premiering starting this week and will be shown on CNN later this year. It is horrifying and inspiriting in turn. I just saw it, and I can tell you there were gasps from the audience at several points. The power of this documentary is not due to horrifying statistics, however, but to so much searing personal testimony of those, women and men, who have been sexually assaulted on college campuses and who have been blamed and shamed, and who have not seen justice. Perhaps even more heartbreaking is the voices of parents of students who have committed suicide following an assault. But the gasps were telling, because they often came at the blatant contradictions between the halting voices of the ones victimized not only by campus sexual assault, but also by their schools’ failure to support them, and the high-sounding, even pious rhetoric of especially college and university presidents extolling the virtues of their institutions. Now I have been a seminary president, and I know that making your school sound like a paradise of virtue and opportunity is often expected. But it is blatantly immoral for an institution to fail to live up to those very virtues when it comes to sexual assault. And the truth is: the failure to live up to those virtues is not accidental. It is all about money. One crucial point made over and over in the film is that these sexual assaults are not a few “bad apples” on campuses, but a systematic pattern of enabling that results when colleges and universities prefer to dismiss, defer, and finally hide the extent of campus sexual assault because they are in the business of getting tuition, donor dollars, and the revenues from sports teams. This is the hidden financial motive that makes this a systemic issue and not just a matter of individual cases of sexual assault. Rape on campus statistics could deter students from attending, make schools look bad to donors, and if the assailant is ultimately proved to be an athlete, hurt the revenue from college sports. Even the culture of impunity around certain fraternities that are known to be places where sexual assaults occur has a financial motive for schools. Fraternities provide housing stock that overcrowded schools need. The film is not just horrifying. It is also inspiring because it is the students themselves who are working to change this culture and force schools to confront this epidemic of sexual assault. The central narrative is the journey of two women, Andrea Pino and Annie E. Clark, who go from being victims, to becoming survivors and then powerful national activists on campus rape. Pino and Clark were students at the University of North Carolina when they were each raped. But it was the lack of action by administrators, and what must be seen as a culture of complicity at the school, that led them to file a Title IX complaint against UNC. Through their networking efforts and the courageous work of other campus activists, now 95 schools are under investigation under Title IX for the ‘hostile and intimidating environment’ created by campus rapes. These young people researched the law on their own, with no one to help them, and taught themselves and then others how to use the law to force their schools to do what the schools should have been willing to do all along. “I learned you could be 20 and take on a 200-year-old university.” Administrators are very often doing the exact opposite of justice for students who have been victimized by rape. The attitude of some administrators to students when they attempt to report rape has to be heard to be believed, as the film makes clear. “When I went to an administrator to report my assault, I was told that rape is like a football game,” Clark remembers. “The administrator asked me if, looking back, there was anything I would have done differently.” Victim-blaming. There it is. This is the consistent pattern behind the testimonies, the statements over and over that the rape was terrible, but the experience of trying to report, trying to get their schools to hear them, believe them and then act with fairness was sometimes worse. That’s why “88 percent of victims don’t report,” as another statistic in the film reveals. I waited through the whole film for someone to talk about going to a campus chaplain for help. There is no mention of that, and if chaplains had been victim-advocates, I think one of the many survivors would have noted it. I found that absence a huge indictment of the religious chaplaincy system. The failure to deal adequately with campus rape is not just due to uninformed administration or chaplaincy, but as the film makes unrelentingly clear, is the result of a systematic effort to silence victims because colleges and universities have a huge financial investment in the status quo. The victim-blaming is part of the enabling culture as sexual assault is still not seen as a crime of violence, and an exercise of power of one (or more than one) over another. Instead, sexual assault is still considered shameful for the victim, and accusations of rape are met with disbelief and silencing. But you can see the positive changes in Andrea Pino and Annie E. Clark and many others in the film as they go from being victims to becoming survivors and then activists. This is a hard journey, and as they open themselves to support other victims, they feel their own pain again. There is no doubt, however, that their work is making a difference. The documentary is being requested by campuses nationwide. There have been more than 1,600 inquiries and 150 campuses are booked so far. I believe the two most basic religious questions are: “What can I trust?” and “Am I alone?” The immoral failure of schools of higher learning to be a place students can trust is, in the broadest sense, a betrayal of this religious value. The moral high ground of this film is this reality: “You are not alone.” Sign up to take action on the film’s website and #EndCampusRape. 9 +Campus rape is increasing in the status quo and becomes a form of structural violence. The affs identification and education on the issue is uniquely key to preventing it. 10 +Kelly Wallace, Cnn, 15, Study: 23 of women sexually assaulted in college, 9-23-2015, CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/22/health/campus-sexual-assault-new-large-survey/ (CNN) **brackets for clarity** 11 +A new survey of college students, one of the largest ever focusing on sexual assault and sexual misconduct, has reignited the debate over just how big a problem sexual assault on campus really is. Among female college students, 23 said they experienced some form of unwanted sexual contact ~-~- ranging from kissing to touching to rape, carried out by force or threat of force, or while they were incapacitated because of alcohol and drugs, according to the new survey by the Association of American Universities (AAU). Nearly 11 said the unwanted contact included penetration or oral sex. "I think one takeaway is that this problem is a broad problem within society as well as on campus, so I think it's something all of us have to be concerned about," said AAU President Hunter Rawlings in an interview. Study: Look beyond the serial rapist on campuses While the survey's findings are fairly consistent with those of other recent studies, the significance of this latest effort is its size: More than 150,000 students participated from 27 universities, including some of the most prominent schools across the country. All the members of the Ivy League took part with the exception of Princeton, along with schools such as Iowa State University, the University of Florida and the California Institute of Technology. For college women seniors, the number reporting nonconsensual sexual contact of any kind carried out by force or while incapacitated was even higher than the 23 for all female college students: 26 of female seniors said they had experienced it at some point during their four years in college. At some of the country's most elite schools, that number climbed even higher: 34 for University of Michigan female seniors, 32 at Yale and 29 at Harvard. "The results warrant the attention and concern of everybody in our community," Drew Faust, president of Harvard, said in a statement. "Sexual assault is intolerable, and we owe it to one another to confront it openly, purposefully and effectively. This is our problem." Faust said Harvard has doubled its staff for its Office of Sexual Assault and Prevention, expanded orientation and training on sexual assault and created an office charged with investigating reports of misconduct. She has also requested a task force to come up with recommendations by January 2016. "We must commit ourselves to being a better community than the one the survey portrays," she said. Critics: 'Unwanted sexual contact' too broad For many years, the "one in five" statistic ~-~- that one in five women are sexually assaulted on college campuses ~-~- has been widely cited by advocates and policymakers. The number stems from a 2007 Department of Justice study, which faced some criticism for being limited in scope since the survey involved only two colleges. Study has more disturbing findings about campus rape of freshmen women The 2007 study, along with the newer survey by AAU, incorporated a broad definition of sexual assault to include activities such as unwanted kissing and fondling, along with rape and attempted rape. Read the study (.PDF) That is a problem, said John Foubert, national president of One in Four, an organization that is dedicated to the prevention of rape through education and research. "Many of the statistics that are widely cited in the public about sexual violence are of 'rape or attempted rape' ~-~- I believe rightfully so," wrote Foubert, who is also professor of higher education and student affairs at Oklahoma State University, on the One in Four Facebook page. "Those are the most serious types of sexual violence, and also, based on my experience, those most likely to result in PTSD post traumatic stress disorder. When we throw 'unwanted sexual contact' into the mix, we risk equating a forced kiss (which is a bad thing obviously) with rape (which is a fundamentally different act)." Why women don't come forward The survey, developed by a group of researchers, program administrators and methodologists, was emailed to nearly 780,000 students. More than 150,000 completed the online questionnaire, which is a response rate of just over 19, lower than several other surveys on sexual assault and misconduct, which Foubert said was another issue with the survey. Ending rape on campus: Activism takes several forms It is possible that the results could be slightly biased since students who didn't participate may have been less likely to report they experienced any unwanted sexual contact. Foubert also said the sample ~-~- 27 universities ~-~- was not as broad as it could have been with most of the participants coming from elite institutions. "Those participating are most of our nation's most selective, large institutions. It did not include any Christian universities, small colleges, community colleges ... or other institutions of great importance," wrote Foubert, author of seven books that deal with the prevention of sexual assault. Rawlings, while not commenting directly on Foubert's criticism, said the survey was the "first very large scale survey of students" and included more specificity than other surveys in terms of what students were asked to gain a better sense of what is really happening on campuses across the country. The questions "are much more specific about the type of incidents that the students were asked to respond to. Did it involve violence? Did it involve force? ... And then what was the type of incident? Was it harassment? Was it penetration? All of those details, I think, are very important because definitions turn out to be very significant in understanding what the students are experiencing." Sofie Karasek, director of education and co-founder of the advocacy group End Rape on Campus, said the significance of the survey is that it provides evidence for many of the things she and other advocates thought were happening on campus, including how many students are reluctant to come forward after they are a victim of sexual assault. White House issues guidelines to colleges to combat rape More than 50 of the women who reported some of the most serious incidents, including forced penetration, didn't report it because they didn't think it was "serious enough," according to the survey. Others said they didn't come forward because they were embarrassed, ashamed or thought it would be too emotionally difficult or that they didn't think anything would be done about it. "I think that evidence is really important to have in terms of specific policies that we would use to combat this type of victim blaming mentality," said Karasek. Topping that list would be widespread education, she said, as early as middle school, in the areas of affirmative consent, healthy relationships, respect, what constitutes sexual assault are key and how and where to go to report it. "It was clear before but now it's even clearer that campus sexual assault is widespread and we need to be tackling it from a variety of standpoints." 12 +Plan Text: Public college and universities ought not restrict constitutionally protected speech about sexual assault. 13 + 14 +Strossen is the solvency advocate. Censorship is fundamentally grounded in patriarchy. Especially exacerbated in the instance of rape culture. Free speech is key to start up movements. 15 +Strossen 2k, Nadine. Defending pornography: Free speech, sex, and the fight for women's rights. NYU Press, 2000. KWo **brackets for grammar* 16 +The fundamental premise in the procensorship feminists’ philosophy~-~--is that our entire societal and legal system is patriarchal, reflecting and perpetuating the subordination of women~-~--itself conclusively refutes their conclusion that we should hand over to that system additional power. The procensorship feminists cannot have it both ways. If, as they contend, governmental power is inevitably used to the particular disadvantage of relatively disempowered groups, such as women, it follows that women’s rights advocates should oppose measures that augment that power, including Dworkin-MacKinnon-type laws. As columnist George Will observed: “For someone who so strenuously loathes American society which she says is defined by pornography. MacKinnon is remarkably eager to vest in this society’s representative government vast powers to regulate expression. Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also inevitable rapist or exploiter of another awoman. 17 + 18 +Being passive about rape culture causes violence and oppression. Speaking out is key to resist the patriarchy. 19 +Taslitz 99 Andrew, Professor, Howard Unviersity School of Law, former Assistant District Attorney, Philadelphia, PA, "Condemning the Racist Personality: Why the Critics of Hate Crimes Legislation Are Wrong", Boston College Law Review, Vol. 40, May 1999 Brackets in original 20 +Hate crimes legislation thus helps to dismantle group-based status hierarchies that are inconsistent with the egalitarian spirit of our modern constitutional culture.u" A similar objection has long been made by feminists who challenge our "rape culture." 121According to Emilie Buchwald, a rape culture "is a complex of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It, is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent." 122A significant number of surveys reveal that nearly one-half of all men admit they would commit rape if they thought they could get away with it.'2" Moreover, the most common motivation for date rape is the prestige young men achieve among their peers for frequent sex, whether consensual or not. 124Other rapists confess their desire to assert dominance or control over, or revenge upon, women. 125Rapists' motives thus reflect widespread, common views among many men that sexual aggression, to the point of emotional terrorism or even violence, is a mark of masculinity. 126 Moreover, the fear of rape leads many women to dress modestly, 'avoid public spaces at night without the company of a man, and gen- erally seek male protection.P27 This limits women's freedom of movement and expression, inducing them to comply with patriarchal standards for proper behavior.' 28But, "w henever one group is made to feel dependent on another group, and this dependency is not reciprocal, then there is a strong comparative benefit to the group that is not in the dependent position." 129A dependent group is seen as weaker and, therefore, of less value. 13" Because a rape culture makes women de- pendent on men for protection, but not vice-versa, women conic to be seen as weaker and less worthy than men. "Rape culture" thus consists of a climate, a freely expressed set of attitudes that fosters subordinate female social status. Philosopher Larry May has explained how holding and expressing such group-subordinating attitudes itself imposes some measure of moral responsibility on the offending speakers. A man who discusses women as "Other" promotes more prevalent, more deeply entrenched views of women as lesser beings."' Similarly, the expression of racist attitudes creates a sense of solidarity with those of similar mind.' 32As feelings of another group's lower value become more shared and more intense, the greater becomes the risk that others sharing those atti- tudes will act on them to cause harm.'" Accordingly, sexist and racist speech further promote stereotypes that help to justify such harm."4 It is this heightened riskof harm that matters to May; it is irrelevant that the harm does not conic about. 135just as a man who shoots into a crowd to see people scream is lucky if no one is hurt, so is it, for May, a matter of moral chance if sexist or racist speech does not result in rape, lynching, or lesser harms.':" 1The sexist or racist speaker is thus morally culpable for the expression of his offending attitudes, even if he intends no concrete harm.'" Of course, says May, the speaker is far less culpable than one who intentionally and directly inflicts harm,'''" The speaker may merit only shame or guilt, 'as opposed to the full moral blame that justifies criminal punishment.m But the harm that the speaker's message imposes—itsi contribution to a sexist or racist culture, or "climate"m—helps us to understand better the unique harms done by those, like hate criminals, who combine gender or racially subordinating messages with the direct, intentional infliction of concrete harm."' The subordinate groups' mere perception of an increased risk of harm may also have unsettling consequences. Sensing greater risks, minorities may step cautiously to avoid certain neighborhoods and seek not to offend majorities by "uppity behavior" or the expression of unpopular views."2These defensive behaviors limit excluded groups' political, emotional, and social lives, much in the way that feminists see rape fear as breeding female dependency and a female nature compli- ant with patriarchal notions of "proper" gendered behavior.'" ' Femi- nists and other critical theorists sense more clearly than May that, even absent increased risks of harm or the perception of such increased risks, the expression of racist and sexist attitudes constitutes subordination in and of itself. Absent such expression, a culture that under- stands one group as inferior to another could not exist.'" May also stresses that members of the dominant group who do not actively challenge such subordinating messages share moral blame for the bias-motivated harms done by other members of the dominant group. 145 First, passive tolerators benefit from the harms committed by other members of their group. For example, kind and compassionate men who would never dream of committing rape benefit when women suffer rape fear that makes them more dependent on, and accepting of, the needs of their male companions." Sonic active and passive dominant group members thus share a kind of brotherhood of oppression Second, those who mean no harm, do much to cause it. when they casually express attitudes of mistrust of female competelice or fear of black males as dangerous. Such prejudices contribute to the climate of subordination. Third, and relatedly, many of the passive are in a position to reduce the risk of harm by challenging hateful messages yet fail to do so. 149 A society that does not condemn hate crimes in law and in action makes many of us collaborators creating and perpetuat- ing rape and racist cultures. Note, finally, that May stresses the harm caused by our attitudes.''" Attitudes are predispositions to act that reveal themselves in the con- junction of our thoughts with our behavior) Only when racial hatred leads to hateful action can we be said to have a hateful predisposition. The sum total of our predispositions, however, constitutes our charac- ter. 2For the reasons noted in this Article's introduction, we are each individually responsible for our character. Therefore, for May, the group-based harms of a racist culture stein from the same source as the individual-based harms of stereotyped justice 7—the evils of racist personality. 21 + 22 +And social injustice is the root cause of violence. 23 +Scheper-Hughes 4 (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn) (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22) 24 +This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, theundeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide areborn, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization). 25 +The role of the judge must resist the imposition of dominant ideology on marginalized groups in educational spaces. TRIFONAS 03: 26 +Trifonas, Peter. PEDAGOGIES OF DIFFERENCE: RETHINKING EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE. New York, London. 2003. 27 +Domination and subordination, I imply that they are relations of power. In an educational context, the exercise of power is accomplished in interactions (i.e., in a social organization), manifesting itself as acts of exclusion, marginalization, silencing, and so forth. Thus, paying attention to how power operates along axes of gender, race, class, and ability (that is, recognizing that social differences are not given, but are accomplished in and through educational settings) is a step toward educational equity. What does the above discussion mean in the educational context? It means that in the interactions of teachers with students in the classroom, or in other contexts, attention needs to be directed toward how dominant and subordinate relations (be they based on race, gender, class, or ability) permeate these contexts and intersect in complicated ways to produce inequality and marginalization. The frequently used and well-meaning phrase, “I treat everyone the same, ” often used by teachers and administrators to indicate their lack of bias in a diverse educational setting, in fact masks unequal power relations. Similarly, educational policies that assume that people are the same or equal may serve to entrench existing inequality precisely because people enter into the educational process with different and unequal experiences. These attempts, well meaning though they may be, tend to render inequality invisible, and thus work against equity in education. In her exploration of white privilege in higher education in the United States, Frances Rains (1998), an aboriginal-Japanese American woman, states emphatically that these benign acts are disempowering for the minority person because they erase his or her racial identity. The denial of racism in this case is in fact a form of racism. Thus, in moving toward equity in education that allows us to address multiple and intersecting axes of difference and inequality, I recommend that we try to think and act “against the grain” in developing educational policies and handling various kinds of pedagogical situations. 5 To work against the grain is to recognize that education is not neutral; it is contested. Mohanty puts it as such: … Education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. It is a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political positions. (Mohanty 1990:184) We need to develop a critical awareness of the power dynamics operative in institutional relations-and of the fact that people participate in institutions as unequal subjects. Working against the grain is to take a proactive approach to understanding and acting upon institutional relations, whether in the classroom, in other interactions with students, or in policy development. Rather than overlooking the embeddedness of gender, race, class, ability, and other forms of inequality that shape our interactions, working against the grain makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process. In her exploration of feminist pedagogy, Linda Briskin (1990) makes a clear distinction between nonsexist and antisexist education critical to our understanding here. She asserts that nonsexism is an approach that attempts to neutralize sexual inequality by pretending that gender can be made irrelevant in the classroom. Thus, for instance, merely asserting that male and female students should have equal time to speak-and indeed giving them equal time-cannot adequately rectify the endemic problem of sexism in the classroom. One of Briskin's students reported that in her political science tutorials that when the male students spoke, everyone paid attention. When a female student spoke, however, the class acted as if no one was speaking (13). Neutrality is an attempt to conceal the unequal distribution of power. An against the grain approach would acknowledge explicitly that we are all gendered, racialized, and differently constructed subjects who do not participate in interactional relations as equals. This goes beyond formulating sexism, racism, abilism, and class privilege in individualist terms and treating them as if they were personal attitudes. Terry Wolverton (1983) discovered the difference between nonracism and antiracism in her consciousness-raising attempt: I had confused the act of trying to appear not to be racist with actively working to eliminate racism. Trying to appear not racist had made me deny my racism, and therefore exclude the possibility of change. (191) Being against the grain means seeing inequality as systemic and interpersonal (rather than individual), and combatting oppression as a collective responsibility, not just as a personal attribute (so that somehow a person can cleanse herself or himself of sexism, racism, abilism, or class bias). It is to pay attention to oppression as an interactional property that can be altered (see Manners 1998). Roger Simon (1993) suggests, in his development of a philosophical basis for teaching against the grain, which shares many commonalities in how I think about an integrative approach to equity in education, that teaching against the grain is fundamentally a moral practice. By this he does not mean that teachers simply fulfill the mandate and guidelines of school authorities. He believes that teachers must expose the partial and imperfect nature of existing knowledge, which is constructed on the basis of asymmetrical power relations (for instance, who has the power to speak and whose voices are suppressed?). It is the responsibility of the teacher or educator to show how dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing constrict human capacities. In exposing the power relations integral to the knowledge construction process, the educator, by extension, must treat teaching and learning as a mutual and collaborative act between teachers and students. What may this ideal look like in practice? Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) also explores the notion of teaching against the grain in her research on how teachers and students worked together in a preservice program in the Philadelphia area. Borrowing from Gramsci's formulation that action is everyone's responsibility, she asserts that teaching is fundamentally a political activity. In practical terms, she outlines what it may mean to teach against the grain in an actual teaching and learning situation. Her succinct articulation is worth quoting at length: To teach against the grain, teachers have to understand and work both within and around the culture of teaching and the politics of schooling at their particular schools and within their larger school system and communities. They cannot simply announce better ways of doing things, as outsiders are likely to do. They have to teach differently without judging the ways other teach or dismissing the ideas others espouse…. They are not at liberty to publicly announce brilliant but excoriating critiques of their colleagues and the bureaucracies in which they labor. Their ultimate commitment is to the school lives and futures of the children with whom they live and work. Without condescension or defensiveness, they have to work with parents and other teachers on different ways of seeing and measuring development, connecting and dividing knowledge, and knowing about teaching and schooling. They have to be astute observers of individual learners with the ability to pose and explore questions that transcend cultural attribution, institutional habit, and the alleged certainty of outside experts. They have to see beyond and through the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising unanswerable and often uncomfortable questions. Perhaps most importantly, teachers who work against the grain must name and wrestle with their own doubts, must fend off the fatigue of reform and depend on the strength of their individual and collaborative convictions that their work ultimately makes a difference in the fabric of social responsibility. (Cochran-Smith 1991:284-85) For me, to be against the grain is therefore to recognize that the routinized courses of action and interactions in all educational contexts are imbued with unequal distribution of power that produce and reinforce various forms of marginalization and exclusion. Thus, a commitment to redress these power relations (i.e., equity in education) involves interventions and actions that may appear “counter-intuitive.” 6 Undoing inequality and achieving equity in education is a risky and uncomfortable act because we need to disrupt the ways things are “normally” done. This involves a serious (and frequently threatening) effort to interrogate our privilege as well as our powerlessness. It obliges us to examine our own privilege relative though it may be, to move out of our internalized positions as victims, to take control over our lives, and to take responsibilities for change. It requires us to question what we take for granted, and a commitment to a vision of society built on reflection, reform, mutuality, and respect in theory and in practice. Teaching and learning against the grain is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It is protracted, difficult, uncomfortable, painful, and risky. It involves struggles with our colleagues, our students, as well as struggles within ourselves against our internalized beliefs and normalized behaviors. In other words, it is a lifelong challenge. However, as Simon (1993) puts it, teaching against the grain is also a project of hope. We engage in it with the knowledge and conviction that we are in a long-term collaborative project with like-minded people whose goal is to make the world a better place for us and for our childre 28 +The ballot is key - just like voting in system of government, casting a ballot in a debate is an endorsement of material change. Thus, the judge is not just the arbiter of who wins the debate, but is recognized as an agent implementing change on a micropolitical level. 29 +Foucault 81 Michel, 1981, an interview with Libération, “Is it really important to think?” *brackets in original 30 +Liberation: On election night we asked you for your initial reactions. You didn't want to answer. But today you feel more at ease about talking... Michel Foucault: In fact, I was treating voting as a way of acting. After that, it’s the government’s turn to act. Now the time is right to react to what’s starting to be done. In any case, I believe that we’ve got to treat the people as grown up enough to decide for themselves when they vote, and to celebrate afterwards if the occasion demands. Besides, it appears to me that they managed quite well. Liberation: Then what are your reactions today? M. F.: Three things strike me. For a good twenty years, a series of questions has been posed from within society itself. And for a long time these questions have not been admitted into “serious” and institutional politics. The socialists seem to have been the only ones to grasp the reality of these problems, to echo them — this was, doubtless, not irrelevant to their victory. Thirdly, and most remarkably, the steps don’t head in the direction of the majority opinion. Neither on the death penalty nor on the immigrant question do the choices follow the most current opinion. This belies what one could have said about the inanity of all those questions posed over the last ten or fifteen years; what one could have said about the non-existence of a logic of the left in governing; what one was able to say about the demagogic ease of the initial steps which were proposed. On nuclear energy, immigrants, the legal system, the government has anchored its decisions in actual problems by referring to a logic which didn’t head in the direction of the majority opinion. And I’m sure that the majority approves of this way of doing things, if not of the measures themselves. In saying this, I’m not saying that it’s all done and now we can go relax. These initial steps are not a charter, but they are, nevertheless, more than symbolic gestures. Compare this with what Giscard did the day after his election: shaking hands with prisoners. This was a purely symbolic gesture, addressed to an electorate which wasn’t his. Today you have an initial set of actual steps which perhaps is run counter to one part of the electorate, but which mark a style of government. Liberation: In fact, it’s an entirely different way of governing which seems to be established. M. F.: Yes, that’s an important point, one which could only have become apparent with Mitterrand’s victory. It seems to me that this election has been felt by many to be a kind of victorious event 6vdnement victoire, that is to say, a modification of the relation between governors and governed. Not that the governed have taken the place of the governors. After all, it was a question of a displacement within the political class. One enters into a party government with its incumbent dangers, and that must never be forgotten. Secondly, in relation to these problems (I’m thinking chiefly of the legal system la justice or the immigrant question) the initial steps or the initial declarations conform absolutely to what we could call a “ logic of the left" une “ loglque du gauche”. This is the reason Mitterrand was elected. But what is at stake as a result of this modification is to know whether it is possible to establish, between governors and governed, a relation which will not be one of submission, but a relation in which work le travail will have an important role. 31 +The role of the ballot is to endorse the best strategy for rejecting patriarchal institutions in society. 32 +Moghadam, Valentine. Feminist scholar and author. 2001. “Violence and Terrorism: Feminist Observations on Islamist Movements, State, and the International System,” from Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 21.1-2, Project Muse. **brackets for clarity** 33 +Our world desperately needs new economic and political frameworks in order to end the vicious cycle of violence and bring about people-oriented development, human security, and socio-economic justice, including justice for women. Such frameworks are being proposed in international circles, whether by some UN circles, the antiglobalization movement, or the global feminist movement. Women's peace movements in particular constitute an important countermovement to terrorism, and they should be encouraged and funded. Feminists and women's groups have long been involved in peace work, and their analyses and activities have contributed much to our understanding of the roots of conflict and the conditions for conflict resolution, human security, and human development. There is now a prodigious feminist scholarship that describes this activism while also critically analyzing international relations from various disciplinary vantage points, including political science.° The activities of antimilitarist groups such as the Women's international League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Women Strike for Peace, and the Women of Greenham Common are legendary, and their legacy lies in ongoing efforts to "feminize" peace, human rights, and development. At the third UN conference on women, in Nairobi in 1985, women decided that not only equality and development, but also peace and war were their affairs.° The Nairobi conference took place in the midst of the crisis of Third World indebtedness and the implementation of austerity policies recommended by the World Bank and the IME Feminists were quick to see the links between economic distress, political instability, and violence against women. As Lucille Mair noted after the Nairobi conference: This economic distress exists in a climate of mounting violence and militarism... violence follows an ideological continuum, starting from the domestic sphere where it is tolerated, if not positively accepted. It then moves to the public political arena where it is glamorized and even celebrated.... Women and children are the prime victims of this cult of aggression.14 Since the 1980s, when women activists formed networks to work more effectively on local and global issues, transnational feminist networks have engaged in dialogues and alliances with other organizations in order to make an impact on peace, security, conflict resolution, and social justice.. The expansion of the population of educated, employed, mobile, and politi¬cally-aware women has led to increased activism by women in the areas of peace, conflict resolution, and human rights. Around the world, women have been insisting that their voices be heard, on the streets, in civil society organizations, and in the meeting halls of the multilateral organizations. Demographic changes and the rise of a "critical mass" of politically engaged women are reflected in the formation of many women's groups that are highly critical of existing po¬litical structures; that question masculinist values and behav¬iors in domestic politics, international relations, and conflict; and that seek to make strategic interventions, formulating solutions that are informed by feminine values. An important proposal is the institutionalization of peace education. 34 +Links to you because you have a much reduced chance of you or your friends facing harassment. 35 + 36 +Debate should surround material consequences—ideal theories ignore the concrete nature of the world and legitimize oppression. 37 +Curry 14 Dr. Tommy J; “The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century”, Victory Briefs, 2014 38 +Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, it is set against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. ¶ This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. 39 + 40 +Speech restriction sets a dangerous precedent that enables endless exceptions to the First Amendment. 41 +White 16 Ken White (attorney), 11-29-2016, "Lawsplainer: Why Flag Burning Matters, And How It Relates To Crush Videos", https://www.popehat.com/2016/11/29/lawsplainer-why-flag-burning-matters-and-how-it-relates-to-crush-videos/ 42 +It's significant because of the way the government defended the statute. The government's lead argument wasn't that crush videos were outside of First Amendment protection because they fell into an already-recognized exception, like defamation or obscenity or incitement. They argued that the Supreme Court should recognize a new categorical exception to First Amendment protection for animal cruelty, because animal cruelty is so awful. They also argued that courts can recognize new exceptions to the First Amendment by weighing the "value" of the targeted speech against the harm it threatens. The Supreme Court — in an 8 to 1 decision — firmly rejected those two arguments. First, the Court said, the historically recognized exceptions to First Amendment protection are well-established, and you can't just go around adding new ones: “From 1791 to the present,” however, the First Amendment has “permitted restrictions upon the content of speech in a few limited areas,” and has never “included a freedom to disregard these traditional limitations.” Id., at 382–383. These “historic and traditional categories long familiar to the bar,” Simon and Schuster, Inc. v. Members of N. Y. State Crime Victims Bd. , 502 U. S. 105, 127 (1991) ( Kennedy, J. , concurring in judgment)—including obscenity, Roth v. United States , 354 U. S. 476, 483 (1957) , defamation, Beauharnais v. Illinois , 343 U. S. 250, 254–255 (1952) , fraud, Virginia Bd. of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc. , 425 U. S. 748, 771 (1976) , incitement, Brandenburg v. Ohio , 395 U. S. 444, 447–449 (1969) ( per curiam ), and speech integral to criminal conduct, Giboney v. Empire Storage and Ice Co. , 336 U. S. 490, 498 (1949) —are “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem.” Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire , 315 U. S. 568, 571–572 (1942) . Second, the Court said, the government's proposed methodology — that the Court should identify new categorical exceptions by balancing, on a case-by-case basis, the value of speech against its harm — is antithetical to First Amendment analysis and dangerous: The Government thus proposes that a claim of categorical exclusion should be considered under a simple balancing test: “Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.” Brief for United States 8; see also id., at 12. As a free-floating test for First Amendment coverage, that sentence is startling and dangerous. The First Amendment ’s guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits. The First Amendment itself reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs. Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it. The Constitution is not a document “prescribing limits, and declaring that those limits may be passed at pleasure.” Marbury v. Madison , 1 Cranch 137, 178 (1803). 43 +The aff is a contingent demand on the state that seeks to reform it from within. Totalizing accounts of action ignore complexity and are defeatist – playing the cards we’re dealt can make constructive change 44 +Laura Zanotti 13, associate professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech., Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2008 and joined the Purdue University faculty in 2009. “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World”, originally published online 30 December, Sage 45 +Unlike positions that adopt governmentality as a descriptive tool and end up embracing the liberal substantialist ontological assumptions and epistemological framework they criticize, positions that embrace an intra-agential (or relational) ontology, maintain that nothing ‘‘is’’ but everything is made within specific practices. Governmentality as a research program that explores ‘‘the present as multiply constituted, polytemporal . . . and recombinatory . . . and not just the expression of a singular logic or the resultant of a linear process’’61 has an important role to play as a methodology of inquiry that brings to the foreground the techniques through which power is practically enacted, the ambiguity embedded in its practices, and the various tactics for unsettling it that become possible in the context of multifarious political encounters. Because political power scripts do not stand as substances that preexist the practices of their making and the specific relations that construct them, the application of a relational ontology and of an archival methodology opens the way for nonidealist, engrained in praxis, analyses of politics and conceptualizations of political agency. In this framework, the space for politics is rooted on ambiguity and performativity, that is on the making and remaking of meaning, subjects, power, and political spaces in the context of agonic relations. What Does This All Matter for Political Agency? I will now turn to elaborating more specifically on the relevance of scholarly positions that, while not necessarily relying mainly on governmentality as a research program, have imagined both power and subjects in non-substantialist ways and embraced situatedness and ambiguity as the very constitutive space for politics for conceiving political agency beyond liberal straightjackets. For Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, far from being issues to be resolved or feared in the name of a sovereign universal truth and the definition of what one’s identity is, ambiguity and uncertainty are indeed political resources to be deployed in sites of struggles where the ‘‘differences between inside and outside are uncertain.’’62 Here political action is not predicated on asserting ‘‘the life and freedom or some sovereign identity, some community of truth that is victimized and repressed by power.’’63 Instead, resistance is very much about questioning practices of power that attempt ‘‘to impose and fix ways of knowing and doing that shall be recognized as natural and necessary to autonomous being.’’64 For Ashley and Walker, in other words, political action is about questioning assumptions about the unity of identity, the mighty homogeneity of power, and the stability of categories of thought. Downplaying ambiguity is indeed itself a technique of power. In taking issue with ‘‘descriptive’’ governmentality theories, Jacqueline Best argued representing social events as totally calculable is itself a governmental strategy, part of government’s very attempts to depoliticize them.65 For Best, such representations undermine the analysis of what ‘‘exceeds efforts to govern through risk.’’66 Therefore, one should not be seduced by contemporary governmental strategies’ own promise of infallibility. For Best, ambiguity brings to the foreground the limits of knowledge and should be included in current analyses of governmental tactics. Ambiguity is a fundamental trajectory of power, rooted in the nontransparency of language that always calls for hermeneutics and opens the possibility for political interpretation and manipulation even in the presence of governmental strategies of regulation. Indeed, pace liberal institutionalism that looks at norms as ‘‘entities’’ and explanatory variables for institutional behavior, regulations are only a shell and norms are always in context, negotiated and renegotiated in the contingent spaces within which they are interpreted. Postcolonial literature has also offered interesting insights of how political agency may be exerted in the face of power’s self representation as a powerful and mighty script. Homi Bhabha has argued that colonial power’s self-representation as ‘‘unity’’ is a colonial strategy of domination and explored the subversive potential of the mimicry and mockery of the colonized.67 For Bhabha, The display of hybridity—its peculiar ‘‘replication’’—terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery. Such a reading of colonial authority profoundly unsettles the demand that figures at the centre of the originary myth of colonialist power. It is the demand that the space it occupies be unbounded, its reality coincident with the emergence of an imperialist narrative and history, its discourse nondialogic, its enunciation unitary, unmarked by the trace of difference-a demand that is recognizable in a range of justificatory Western ‘‘civil’’ discourses. 68 Bhabha sees subjection and resistance as intimately related. Political agency is a process of hybridization through transformation of meaning. Thus, ‘‘Colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition.’’69 Political agency is not portrayed as the free subjects’ total rejection of a unified totalizing assemblage of power. While (the colonizer’s) power attempts to reproduce its script by creating the ‘‘mimic men,’’ that is, the ‘‘docile colonial subjects who are ‘almost the same, but not quite’,’’70 it also creates an ambivalence, a contradiction between ‘‘same’’ and ‘‘not quite’’ that can be appropriated by the subaltern. Mimicry is easily camouflaged as mockery, with the colonial subject consequently subverting or refusing to simply repeat the master’s lessons. Instead of producing a controlled imitation or a managed response from the native, the civilizing mission elicits an answer back, a menacing look, a distorted and disturbing echo.71 Agency is exerted through moves that are imbricated with discourses of power but also recognize and question them. In this way, universal claims are unsettled and power’s purported unity menaced. Bhabha sends a note of caution to those whose response to subjection is direct opposition, a warning that ‘‘overcoming domination, far from getting rid of it, often occasions its mere reversal.’’72 Thus, Ilan Kapoor suggests that ‘‘the agent must play with the cards s/he is dealt, and the hegemon, despite the appearance of absolute strength, needs or desires the subaltern.’’73 Purity of identity may not ever have been a possibility, even less when the very ideas of what accounts for identity and alterity are being rapidly reworked. In relying on Foucault’s understanding of power and on feminist elaborations of Identity,74 Roland Bleiker has embraced a non- substantialist standpoint and the acceptance of ambiguity as central for conceptualizing human agency and for exploring its actual transformative possibilities. Bleiker questions positions that see agency as a reflection of externally imposed circumstances as well as traditions that ‘‘bestow the human subject . . . with a relatively large sense of autonomy.’’75 Assumptions of fundamental autonomy (or ‘‘freedom’’) would ‘‘freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others.’’76 As Bleiker puts it: ‘‘A conceptualization of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition, a one-sentence statement that captures something like an authentic nature of human agency. There is no essence to human agency, no core that can be brought down to a lowest common denominator, that will crystallize one day in a long sought after magic formula. A search for such an elusive centre would freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others.’’77 For Bleiker, universals are indeed tainted with an imperial flavor. This includes the imperialism of ideas of identity based on liberty and freedom (rather than imbrication, situatedness, and relationality) as the ontological horizon for understanding human nature and assessing political agency. Non-substantialist positions do not assume the existence of monolithic power scripts or ontologically autonomous subjects; do not establish linear links between intentions and outcomes, and do not assume that every form of agency needs an identifiable agent. Instead, they call for careful attention to contexts. In this disposition, Bleiker advocates a modest conceptualization of agency, one that relies upon Michel de Certeau’s operational schemes, Judith Butler’s contingent foundations, or Gilles Deleuze’s rhizomes.78 In a similar vein, in a refreshing reading of realism, Brent Steele has highlighted the problematic aspects of assessing political agency based upon actors’ intention and focused on contexts as the yardstick for assessing political actions.79 For Steele, ‘‘as actors practice their agency within the space of a public sphere, intentionality—at best—becomes dynamic as new spaces in that sphere open up. Intentions, even if they are genuine, become largely irrelevant in such a dynamic, violent, and vibrant realm of human interaction.’’80 In shifting attention from ‘‘intention’’ to the context that made some actions possible, Steele sees agency as a ‘‘redescription’’ of existing conditions, rather than the total ‘‘rejection’’ of or ‘‘opposition’’ to a totalizing ‘‘script.’’ As a consequence, Steele advocates ‘‘pragmatist humility’’ for politicians and scholars as well.81 In summary, in non-substantialist frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and multifarious 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 construction 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 governmentality 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 importance 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 straightjacket. 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 hybridization and redescriptions are not considered as options. The complexity of politics is reduced to homogenizing and/or romanticizing narratives and political engagements are reduced to total heroic rejections or to revolutionary moments. 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 t - EntryDate
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