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... ... @@ -1,67 +1,6 @@ 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 -\ 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). - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,24 +1,0 @@ 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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... ... @@ -1,76 +1,0 @@ 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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