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-Framing |
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-The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the affirmative policy vs a competiting neg policy option. |
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-The aff deploys the state to learn scenario planning- even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills |
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-Barma et al 16 – (May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp_2015.pdf) |
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-What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs. |
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-Imagining state solutions is key to getting students into politics and prevent a ceding of power to political elites. |
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-Giroux 06, Henry, Sociologist, “The abandoned generation: The urban debate league and the politics of possibility,” 2006 |
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-The decline of democratic values and informed citizenship can be seen in research studies done by The Justice Project in 2001 in which a substantial number of teenagers and young people were asked what they thought democracy meant. The answers testified to a growing depoliticization of American life and largely consisted of statements along the following lines: "Nothing," "I don't know," or "My rights, just like, pride, I guess, to some extent, and paying taxes," or "I just think, like, what does it really mean? I know its our, like, our government, but I don't know what it 6 technically is." The transition from being ignorant about democracy to actually sup- porting antidemocratic Tendencies can be seen in a number of youth surveys that have been taken since 2000. For instance, a survey released by the University of California, Berkeley, revealed that 69 percent of students support school prayer and 44 percent of young people aged fifteen to twenty-two support government restric- tions on abortions. A 2004 survey of 112,003 high school students on First Amendment rights showed that one third of students surveyed believed that the First Amendment went too far in the rights it guarantees and 36 percent believed that the press enjoyed too much freedom. This suggests not just a failing of education, but a crisis of citizenship and democracy. One consequence of the decline in democratic values and citizenship literacy is that all levels of government are being hollowed our, their role reduced to dismantling the gains of the welfare state as they increasingly construct policies that criminalize social problems and prioritize penal methods over social investments. When citizenship is reduced to consumerism, it should come as no surprise that people develop an indifference to civic engagement and participation in democratic public life. Unlike some theorists who suggest that politics as critical exchange and social engagement is either dead or in a state of terminal arrest, I believe that the current depressing state of politics points to an urgent challenge: reformulating the crisis of democracy as a fundamental crisis of vision, meaning, education, and political agency. Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not simply about power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, "has to do with political judgments and value choices," meaning that questions of civic education—learning how 8 to become a skilled citizen—afe central to democracy itself. Educators at all levels need to challenge the assumption that politics is dead, or the nature of politics will be determined exclusively by government leaders and experts m the heat of moral frenzy. Educators need to take a more critical position, arguing that knowledge, debate, and dialogue about pressing social problems offer individuals and groups some hope in shaping the conditions that bear down on their lives. |
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-Ideal theory strips away particularities making ethics inaccessible and epistemically skewed |
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-Mills 05, Charles, 2005, Ideal Theory” as Ideology, |
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-“The crucial common claim—whether couched in terms of ideology and fetishism, or androcentrism, or white normativity—is that all theorizing, both moral and nonmoral, takes place in an intellectual realm dominated by concepts, assumptions, norms, values, and framing perspectives that reflect the experience and group interests of the privileged group (whether the bourgeoisie, or men, or whites). So a simple empiricism will not work as a cognitive strategy; one has to be self-conscious about the concepts that “spontaneously” occur to one, since many of these concepts will not arise naturally but as the result of social structures and hegemonic ideational patterns. In particular, it will often be the case that dominant concepts will obscure certain crucial realities, blocking them from sight, or naturalizing them, while on the other hand, concepts necessary for accurately mapping these realities will be absent. Whether in terms of concepts of the self, or of humans in general, or in the cartography of the social, it will be necessary to scrutinize the dominant conceptual tools and the way the boundaries are drawn. This is, of course, the burden of standpoint theory—that certain realities tend to be more visible from the perspective of the subordinated than the privileged (Harding 2003). The thesis can be put in a strong and implausible form, but weaker versions do have considerable plausibility, as illustrated by the simple fact that for the most part the crucial conceptual innovation necessary to map nonideal realities has not come from the dominant group. In its ignoring of oppression, ideal theory also ignores the consequences of oppression. If societies are not oppressive, or if in modeling them we can abstract away from oppression and assume moral cognizers of roughly equal skill, then the paradigmatic moral agent can be featureless. No theory is required about the particular group-based obstacles that may block the vision of a particular group. By contrast, nonideal theory recognizes that people will typically be cognitively affected by their social location, so that on both the macro and the more local level, the descriptive concepts arrived at may be misleading.” (175) |
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-Thus, the standard is resisting material inequalities. Non-ideal theory necessitates consequentialism since instead of following rules that assume an already equal playing field, we take steps to correct the material injustice. |
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-Debate should deal with the real-world consequences of oppression. |
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-Curry 14, Tommy, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century, Victory Briefs, 2014, |
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-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 “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 definitiocan with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, there is a 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. As Mills states: “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,” so what we are seeking to resolve on the basis of “thought” is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our “theories” seek to address. Our attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenon—meaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation (be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to we must reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the oppressed worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters. |
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-No act omission distinction for states means means based theories collapse to consequentialism. |
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-Sunstein and Vermule 05Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The University of Chicago Law School. “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life‐Life Tradeoffs.” JOHN M. OLIN LAW and ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005 |
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-In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private actionfor example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. |
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-Policy making debates require consequentialism- it’s the only moral theory available to governments |
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-Goodin 90 Robert Goodin, Philosophy Fellow @ The Australian National Defense University. “THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE”, 1990, p. 141-2. AS 11/4/13 |
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-My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more probable for them than private individuals. Before proceeding with the large argument, I must therefore say what it is that makes it so special about for public officials and their situations that make it is both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices – public and private alike – are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, they are relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know and what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allows public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct. |
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-Harms |
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-Patriotic Correctness runs rampant- dissent is charged with treason and lines of critical thought are silenced. Higher education has been coopted by the military industrial complex, reducing the roles of teachers to mere technicians. Educators should reject the call of abstraction and open up everything for contestation. |
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-Giroux 13, Henry, Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University, 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university |
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-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. |
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-Militarism makes people disposable- justifying and creating everyday violence like shootings and drone strikes. Heg Good doesn’t impact turn the aff-military criticism is good because it stops the glorification of the military and violence, which spillsover. |
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-Giroux 16, Henry, Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34349-gun-culture-and-the-american-nightmare-of-violence |
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-Gun violence in the United States has produced a culture soaked in blood - a culture that threatens everyone and extends from accidental deaths, suicides and domestic violence to mass shootings. In late December, a woman in St. Cloud, Florida, fatally shot her own daughter after mistaking her for an intruder. Less than a month earlier, on December 2, in San Bernardino, California, was the mass shooting that left 14 people dead and more than 20 wounded. And just two months before that, on October 1, nine people were killed and seven wounded in a mass shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon. Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers. At a policy level, violence drives the arms industry and a militaristic foreign policy, and is increasingly the punishing state's major tool to enforce its hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth. The United States is utterly wedded to a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, while mass incarceration is treated as the chief mechanism to "institutionalize obedience." At the same time, a shark-like mode of competition replaces any viable notion of solidarity, and a sabotaging notion of self-interest pushes society into the false lure of mass consumerism. The increasing number of mass shootings is symptomatic of a society engulfed in racism, fear, militarism, bigotry and massive inequities in wealth and power. Guns and the hypermasculine culture of violence are given more support than young people and life itself. Over 270 mass shootings have taken place in the United States in 2015 alone, proving once again that the economic, political and social conditions that underlie such violence are not being addressed. Sadly, these shootings are not isolated incidents. For example, one child under 12 years old has been killed every other day by a firearm, which amounts to 555 children killed by guns in three years. An even more frightening statistic and example of a shocking moral and political perversity was noted in data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which states that "2,525 children and teens died by gunfire in the United States in 2014; one child or teen death every 3 hours and 28 minutes, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week." Such figures indicate that too many youth in the United States occupy what might be called war zones in which guns and violence proliferate. In this scenario, guns and the hypermasculine culture of violence are given more support than young people and life itself. The predominance of a relatively unchecked gun culture and a morally perverse and politically obscene culture of violence is particularly evident in the power of the gun lobby and its political advocates to pass laws in eight states to allow students and faculty to carry concealed weapons "into classrooms, dormitories and other buildings" on campuses. In spite of the rash of recent shootings on college campuses, Texas lawmakers, for instance, passed one such "campus carry bill," which will take effect in August 2016. To add insult to injury, they also passed an "open carry bill" that allows registered gun owners to carry their guns openly in public. Such laws not only reflect "the seemingly limitless legislative clout of gun interests," but also a rather irrational return to the violence-laden culture of the "Wild West." As in the past, individuals will be allowed to walk the streets, while openly carrying guns and packing heat as a measure of their love of guns and their reliance upon violence as the best way to address any perceived threat to their security. This return to the deadly practices of the " Wild West" is neither a matter of individual choice nor some far-fetched yet allegedly legitimate appeal to the Second Amendment. On the contrary, mass violence in the United States has to be placed within a broader historical, economic and political context in order to address the totality of the forces that produce it. Focusing merely on mass shootings or the passing of potentially dangerous gun legislation does not get to the root of the systemic forces that produce the United States' love affair with violence and the ideologies and criminogenic institutions that produce it. Imperial policies that promote aggression all across the globe are now matched by increasing levels of lawlessness and state repression, which mutually feed each other. On the home front, civil society is degenerating into a military organization, a space of lawlessness and warlike practices, organized primarily for the production of violence. For instance, as Steve Martinot observes at CounterPunch, the police now use their discourse of command and power to criminalize behavior; in addition, they use military weapons and surveillance tools as if they are preparing for war, and create a culture of fear in which militaristic principles replace legal principles. He writes: This suggests that there is an institutional insecurity that seeks to cover itself through social control ... the cops act out this insecurity by criminalizing individuals in advance. No legal principle need be involved. There is only the militarist principle.... When police shoot a fleeing subject and claim they are acting in self-defense (i.e. threatened), it is not their person but the command and control principle that is threatened. To defend that control through assault or murderous action against a disobedient person implies that the cop's own identity is wholly immersed in its paradigm. There is nothing psychological about this. Self-worth or insecurity is not the issue. There is only the military ethic of power, imposed on civil society through an assumption of impunity. It is the ethos of democracy, of human self-respect, that is the threat. The rise of violence and the gun culture in the United States cannot be separated from a transformation in governance in the United States. Political sovereignty has been replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reins of governance. The more money influences politics, the more corrupt the political culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is largely dependent on having huge amounts of capital at one's disposal, while laws and policies at all levels of government are mostly fashioned by lobbyists representing big business corporations and financial institutions. Moreover, such lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is now carried out in the open by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other individuals, groups and institutions invested in the militarization of US society. This lobbying is then displayed as a badge of honor - a kind of open testimonial to the lobbyists' disrespect for democratic governance. But money in politics is not the only major institutional factor in which everyday and state violence are nourished by a growing militarism. As David Theo Goldberg has argued in his essay "Mission Accomplished: Militarizing Social Logic," the military has also assumed a central role in shaping all aspects of society. Militarization is about more than the use of repressive power; it also represents a powerful social logic that is constitutive of values, modes of rationality and ways of thinking. According to Goldberg, The military is not just a fighting machine.... It serves and socializes. It hands down to the society, as big brother might, its more or less perfected goods, from gunpowder to guns, computing to information management ... In short, while militarily produced instruments might be retooled to other, broader social purpose - the military shapes pretty much the entire range of social production from commodities to culture, social goods to social theory. The militarization and corporatization of social logic permeates US society. The general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values, civic consciousness and critical citizenship are also the result of the work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial interests, a powerful set of corporate-controlled media agencies that are largely center-right and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. Military ideals permeate every aspect of popular culture, policy and social relations. In addition, a pedagogy of historical, social and racial amnesia is constructed and circulated through celebrity and consumer culture. A war culture now shapes every aspect of society as warlike values, a hypermasculinity and an aggressive militarism seep into every major institution in the United States, including schools, the corporate media and local police forces. The criminal legal system has become the default structure for dealing with social problems. More and more people are considered disposable because they offend the sensibilities of the financial elite, who are rapidly consolidating class power. Under such circumstances, violence occupies an honored place. |
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-This outweighs |
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-a. Root Cause- once violence becomes normalized, then anything including the neg impacts can occur and no one cares, making solving them impossible |
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-b. Aggregation- Militarism impacts constantly occur which means they aggregate every single day. By the time the neg impacts occur- the aff will massively outweighs on magnitude. |
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-Plan |
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-Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected speech that criticizes the military’s policies. |
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-Wilson 10, John K., Ph.D candidate with dissertation on the history of academic freedom in America and author of three books, early excerpt from Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies which was later published in 2010 |
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-In the wake of 9/11, academic freedom suffered under a wave of patriotic correctness in America. An institution of higher learning should not fear controversy or prefer bland clichés to intellectual content. All colleges should prohibit banning speakers, even if they dissent from a particular orthodoxy. The response to the terrible acts of terrorism on September 11, 2001, did not require an exception to the rules of academic freedom. To the contrary, the period after 9/11 was a moment when intellectual scrutiny of American foreign policy wasmore important than ever. Higher education did no worse, and perhaps better, than other American i n s t i t u t i on s , s u ch as Con g ress and the media, that accepted the Bush Administration plans, often without debate or inquiry. Sadly, though, the enemies of academic freedom too often succeeded in their aim of silencing dissent. Both the ideal and the practice of academic freedom have been under attack since 9/11, as America became a place where, in the words of Bush press secretary Ari Fleisher, you had to “watch what you say.”31 |
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-Advantage |
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- States |
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-Patriotic correctness silences anti-military dissent. Multiple examples and empirical surveys prove. |
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-Wilson 2, John K., Ph.D candidate with dissertation on the history of academic freedom in America and author of three books, early excerpt from Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies which was later published in 2010 |
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-Compared to earlier “wartime” situations, academic freedom is far more protected today than at any time in the past. But the danger posed to academic freedom cannot be ignored. Efforts to silence faculty and students, even when they are unsuccessful, can make others around the country more reluctant to speak openly. Only by denouncing all efforts at censorship and vigorously defending the right of freedom on college campuses, can we continue to protect academic freedom. The cliché of our times, constantly repeated but often true, is that 9/11 “changed everything.” One thing that it changed was academic freedom. The controversy over the limits of free speech on college campuses across the nation began immediately. On the morning of September 11, 2001, University of New Mexico history professor Richard Berthold joked with his class, “Anyone who would blow up the Pentagon would have my vote.” Berthold received death threats, keeping him off campus. On September 27, an unidentified person left a message on the provost’s voice-mail saying if Berthold were not “ousted” within 24 hours, Berthold would be ousted by other sources. Berthold was threatened in front of his home by a biker who came at him screaming obscenities, and he received several angry e-mails and letters with messages such as “I’d like to blow you up.” New Mexico state representative William Fuller declared,“Treason is giving aide or comfort to the enemy. Any terrorist who heard Berthold’s comment was comforted.” In the end, Berthold was pressured to retire from his job because of those 11 words he spoke on 9/11.Mohammad Rahat, an Iranian citizen and University of Miami medical technician who turned 22 years old on September 11, 2001, declared in a meeting that day, “Some birthday gift from Osama bin Laden.” Although Rahat said that he meant it “in a sarcastic way,” Rahat was suspended and then fired on September 25, 2001. Paula Musto, vice president of university relations, declared that Rahat’s “comments were deeply disturbing to his co-workers and superiors at the medical school. They were inappropriate and unbecoming for someone working in a research laboratory. He was fired because he made those comments, certainly not because of his ethnic background.” Rahat had received only positive evaluation in 13 months working in the lab. 6 At the University of California at Los Angeles, library assistant Jonnie Hargis was suspended without pay for one week after sending an e-mail response criticizing American policies in Iraq and Israel. Hargis’ union successfully pursued a grievance; Hargis was repaid for his lost income, the incident was stricken from his job record, and the university was forced to clarify its e-mail policies.7On September 13, 2001, two resident assistants in Minnesota complained to the dean of students that undergraduates felt fearful and uneasy because some professors questioned the competence of the Bush Administration. According to the resident assistants,“The recent attacks extend beyond political debate, and for professors to make negative judgments on our government before any action has taken place only fosters a cynical attitude in the classroom.” The administration asked faculty to think hard about what they said. Greg Kneser, dean of students, declared:“There were students who were just scared, and an intellectual discussion of the political ramifications of this was not helpful for them. They were frightened, and they look to their faculty not just for intellectual debate” but as “people they trust.”8 Even hypothetical discussions were suspicious. Portland Community College philosophy professor Stephen Carey challenged students in his critical thinking class to consider an extreme rhetorical proposition that would cause great emotion, like “Bush should be hung, strung up upside down, and left for the buzzards.” One student’s mother, misunderstanding the example, called the FBI and accused Carey of threatening to kill the President, and the Secret Service investigated him.9 When four leftist faculty at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC) criticized U.S. foreign policy at a teach-in, Scott Rubush of FrontPage magazine, declared, “They’re using state resources to the practical effect of aiding and abetting the Taliban.”The magazine recommended that these faculty be fired. “Tell the good folks at UNC–Chapel Hill what you think of their decision to allow anti-American rallies on their state-supported campus,” FrontPage urged. The administration received hundreds of angry e-mails, and was denounced on the floor of the North Carolina legislature. Several antiwar faculty members received death threats.10 In addition to phys i cal threats and attack s , A rab and Muslim students also faced enormous scru t i ny from the authori t i e s . An October 2001 survey by the Am e ri can Association of Collegiate Registrars and Ad m i s s i ons Officers found thatat least 220 colleges had been contacted by law enforcement in the weeks after 9/11. Police or FBI agents made 99 requests for private “n on - d i re c t o ry ”i n f o rm a t i on ,s u ch as course sch e d u l e s , that under law cannot be released without student con s e n t , a s u b p o e n a , or a pending danger (on ly 12 of the requests had a subpoena, a l t h o u g h the Immigra t i on and Na t u ra l i za t i on Se rvice doesn’t re q u i reconsent for inform a t i on on foreign students). Most requests were for individual students, although 16 requests for student re c o rds were “based on ethnicity. ” Law enforcement re c e i ve d the inform a t i on from 159 sch o o l s , and on ly eight denied any re q u e s t s . I n response to the violence and persecution against Muslim and Arab students, some colleges did try to restrict offensive speech in ways that resulted in threats to academic fre e d om . At Orange Coast Com mu n i ty College (OCC) on September 20, 2001, government professor Ken Hearlson was suspended for 11 weeks after Muslim students accused him of being biased against them and calling them “terrorists.” Hearlson denied the accusation. A tape recording of the class found that the most extreme statements were misheard, although Hearlson did apparently point a finger at Middle Eastern students while he blamed Arab countries for fomenting terrorism.11 In a case at Johns Hopkins University, Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), was demoted (but later reinstated) after a September 14 panel discussion on terrorism in which he criticized Iraq, Pakistan, and Palestinians.12 I n response to the violence and persecution against Muslim and Arab students, some colleges did try to restrict offensive speech in ways that resulted in threats to academic fre e d om . At Orange Coast Com mu n i ty College (OCC) on September 20, 2001, government professor Ken Hearlson was suspended for 11 weeks after Muslim students accused him of being biased against them and calling them “terrorists.” Hearlson denied the accusation. A tape recording of the class found that the most extreme statements were misheard, although Hearlson did apparently point a finger at Middle Eastern students while he blamed Arab countries for fomenting terrorism.11 In a case at Johns Hopkins University, Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), was demoted (but later reinstated) after a September 14 panel discussion on terrorism in which he criticized Iraq, Pakistan, and Palestinians.12 Anti-military views expressed in an e-mail could put a professor’s job at risk. At Chicago’s St. Xavier University, history professor Peter Kirstein sent this response to an Air Force cadet asking him to help promote an Air Force event: “You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage.” Although Kirstein apologized for his e-mail, many called for his dismissal. On November 15, 2002, St. Xavier president Richard Yanikoski announced that Kirstein would be immediately suspended, receive a reprimand, and undergo a post-tenure review during a Spring 2003 sabbatical.13 Another tenured professor was suspended for responding rudely to an unsolicited e-mail and saying that killing is wrong. While conservatives contended that a few cases of censorship proved that left-wing thought police rule over college campuses, my extensive survey of academic freedom and civil liberties at American universities found the opposite: left-wing critics of the Bush Administration suffered by far the most numerous and most serious violations of their civil liberties. Censorship of conservatives was rare, and almost always overturned in the few cases where it occurred. Patriotic correctness—not political correctness—reigned supreme after 9/11. |
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-This censorship prevents higher education from being the uniquely key institution that can create a cultural shift away from militarism by teaching students to resist. |
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-Jaschik and Giroux 07, Henry Giroux and Scott Jaschik, 'The University in Chains', (Interview), 2007, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/07/giroux |
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-Q: How do you think the state of academic freedom has changed since 9/11? A: Criticisms of the university as a stronghold of dissent have a long and inglorious history in the United States, extending from attacks in the 19th century by religious fundamentalists to anti-communist witch-hunts conducted in the 1920s, 1930s, and again in the 1950s, during the infamous era of McCarthyism. Harkening back to the infamous McCarthy era, a newly reinvigorated war is currently being waged by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives, and corporate fundamentalists against the autonomy and integrity of all those independent institutions that foster social responsibility, critical thought, and critical citizenship. While the attack is being waged on numerous fronts, the universities are where the major skirmishes are taking place. What is unique about this attack on academic freedom are the range and scope of the forces waging an assault on higher education. It is much worse today, because corporations, the national security state, the Pentagon, powerful Christian evangelical groups, non-government agencies, and enormously wealthy right-wing individuals and institutions have created powerful alliances ~-~- the perfect storm so to speak ~-~- that are truly threatening the freedoms and semi-autonomy of American universities. Higher education in the United States is currently being targeted by a diverse number of right-wing forces that have assumed political power and are waging an aggressive and focused campaign against the principles of academic freedom, sacrificing critical pedagogical practice in the name of patriotic correctness and dismantling the ideal of the university as a bastion of independent thought, and uncorrupted inquiry. Ironically, it is through the vocabulary of individual rights, academic freedom, balance, and tolerance that these forces are attempting to slander, even vilify, an allegedly liberal and left-oriented professoriate, to cut already meager federal funding for higher education, to eliminate tenure, and to place control of what is taught and said in classrooms under legislative oversight. There is more at work in the current attack than the rampant anti-intellectualism and paranoid style of American politics outlined in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, written over 40 years ago. There is also the collective power of radical right-wing organizations, which in their powerful influence on all levels of government in spite of a democratically controlled Congress and most liberal social institutions feel compelled to dismantle the open, questioning cultures of the academy. Underlying recent attacks on the university is an attempt not merely to counter dissent but to destroy it and in doing so to eliminate all of those remaining public spaces, spheres, and institutions that nourish and sustain a culture of questioning so vital to a democratic civil society. Dissent is often equated with treason; the university is portrayed as the weak link in the war on terror by powerful educational agencies; professors who advocate a culture of questioning and critical engagement run the risk of having their names posted on Internet web sites while being labeled as un-American; and various right-wing individuals and politicians increasingly attempt to pass legislation that renders critical analysis a liability and reinforces, with no irony intended, a rabid anti-intellectualism under the call for balance and intellectual diversity. Genuine politics begins to disappear as people methodically lose those freedoms and rights that enable them to speak, act, dissent, and exercise both their individual right to resistance and a shared sense of collective responsibility. While higher education is only one site, it is one of the most crucial institutional and political spaces where democratic subjects can be shaped, democratic relations can be experienced, and anti-democratic forms of power can be identified and critically engaged. It is also one of the few spaces left where young people can think critically about the knowledge they gain, learn values that refuse to reduce the obligations of citizenship to either consumerism or the dictates of the national security state, and develop the language and skills necessary to defend those institutions and social relations that are vital to a substantive democracy. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted, a meaningful conception of politics appears only when concrete spaces exist for people to come together to talk, think critically, and act on their capacities for empathy, judgment, and social responsibility. What the current attack on higher education threatens is a notion of the academy that is faithful to its role as a crucial democratic public sphere, one that offers a space both to resist the “dark times” in which we now live and to embrace the possibility of a future forged in the civic struggles requisite for a viable democracy. |
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-Empowering academics is uniquely key to disrupting the culture of militarism in universities. The only way the system survives is if academia continues to produce scholarship uncritical of it |
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-Chatterjee and Maira 14 Piya Chatterjee, Backstrand Chair and Professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College, Sunaina Maira, Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis, “The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent,” University of Minnesota Press, 2014 JW |
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-In a post-9/ 11 world, the U.S. university has become a particularly charged site for debates about nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, and democracy. The “crisis” of academic freedom emerges from events such as the ones we witnessed in Riverside and Davis but also in many other campuses where administrative policing flexes its muscles along with the batons, chemical weapons, and riot gear of police and SWAT teams and where containment and censorship of political critique is enacted through the collusion of the university, partisan off-campus groups and networks, and the state. After 9/ 11, we have witnessed a calamitously repressive series of well-coordinated attacks against scholars who have dared to challenge the national consensus on U.S. wars and overseas occupations. Yet there has been stunningly little scholarly attention paid to this policing of knowledge, especially against academics who have dared to challenge the national consensus on U.S. wars and overseas occupations and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Simultaneously, the growing privatization of the public university, as in California, has demonstrated the ways in which the gates of access to public higher education are increasingly closed and the more subtle ways in which dissident scholarly and pedagogical work (and their institutional locations) is delegitimized and— in particularly telling instances— censored at both public and private institutions. The 9/ 11 attacks and the crises of late capitalism in the global North have intensified the crisis of repression in the United States and also the ongoing restructuring of the academy— as well as resistance to that process— here as well as in the global South. 2 What does it mean, then, to challenge the collusion of the university with militarism and occupation, the privatization of higher education, and economies of knowledge from within the U.S. university? When scholars and students who openly connect U.S. state formation to imperialism, war, and racial violence are disciplined, then how are we to understand freedom , academic and otherwise? How is post-9/ 11 policing and surveillance linked to racial, gendered, and class practices in the neoliberal academy? Has the War on Terror simply deepened a much longer historical pattern of wartime censorship and monitoring of intellectual work or is this something new? This edited volume offers reports from the trenches of a war on scholarly dissent that has raged for two or three decades now and has intensified since 9/ 11, analyzed by some of the very scholars who have been targeted or have directly engaged in these battles. The stakes here are high. These dissenting scholars and the knowledges they produce are constructed by right-wing critics as a threat to U.S. power and global hegemony, as has been the case in earlier moments in U.S. history, particularly during the Cold War. Much discussion of incidents where academics have been denied tenure or publicly attacked for their critique of U.S. foreign or domestic policies, as in earlier moments, has centered on the important question of academic freedom. However, the chapters in this book break new ground by demonstrating that what is really at work in these attacks are the logics of racism, warfare, and nationalism that undergird U.S. imperialism and also the architecture of the U.S. academy. Our argument here is that these logics shape a systemic structure of repression of academic knowledge that counters the imperial, nation-building project. The premise of this book is that the U.S. academy is an “imperial university.” As in all imperial and colonial nations, intellectuals and scholarship play an important role— directly or indirectly, willingly or unwittingly— in legitimizing American exceptionalism and rationalizing U.S. expansionism and repression, domestically and globally. The title of this book, then, is not a rhetorical flourish but offers a concept that is grounded in the particular imperial formation of the United States, one that is in many ways ambiguous and shape-shifting. 3 It is important to note that U.S. imperialism is characterized by deterritorialized, flexible, and covert practices of subjugation and violence and as such does not resemble historical forms of European colonialism that depended on territorial colonialism. 4 As a settler-colonial nation, it has over time developed various strategies of control that include proxy wars, secret interventions, and client regimes aimed at maintaining its political, economic, and military dominance around the globe, as well as cultural interventions and “soft power.” The chapters here help to illuminate and historicize the role of the U.S. university in legitimizing notions of Manifest Destiny and foundational mythologies of settler colonialism and exceptional democracy as well as the attempts by scholars and students to challenge and subvert them. This book demonstrates the ways in which the academy’s role in supporting state policies is crucial, even— and especially—as a presumably liberal institution. Indeed, it is precisely the support of a liberal class that is always critical for the maintenance of “benevolent empire.” 5 As U.S. military and overseas interventions are increasingly framed as humanitarian wars— to save oppressed others and rescue victimized women— it is liberal ideologies of gender, sexuality, religion, pluralism, and democracy that are key to uphold. 6 The university is a key battleground in these culture wars and in producing as well as contesting knowledges about the state of the nation. |
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-Education has already been corrupted- I control uniqueness on this issue- its time to act now. Chile empirically proves- the aff spillsover to real reform. |
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-Williams 15, Jo, Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy, 2015, Australian Journal of Adult Learning |
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-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. |
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-Counterspeech works- empirics prove it promotes inclusion needed for movements and resolves hate speech- censorship simply alienates others |
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-Calleros 95 Calleros, Charles R. “Paternalism, Counterspeech, and Campus Hate-Speech Codes: A Reply to Delgado and Yun” (Professor of Law, Arizona State University). HeinOnline. Arizona State Law Journal. 1995 |
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-However, campus communities that have creatively used this approach can attest to the surprising power of counterspeech. Examples of counterspeech to hateful racist and homophobic speech at Arizona State and Stanford Universities are especially illustrative.61 In an incident that attracted national attention, the campus community at Arizona State University ("A.S.U.") constructively and constitutionally responded to a racist poster displayed on the outside of the speaker's dormitory door in February 1991. Entitled "WORK APPLICATION," it contained a number of ostensibly employment-related questions that advanced hostile and demeaning racial stereotypes of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Carla Washington, one of a group of African- American women who found the poster, used her own speech to persuade a resident of the offending room voluntarily to take the poster down and allow her to photocopy it. After sending a copy of the poster to the campus newspaper along with an opinion letter deploring its racist stereotypes, she demanded action from the director of her residence hall. The director organized an immediate meeting of the dormitory residents to discuss the issues. In this meeting, I explained why the poster was protected by the First Amendment, and the women who found the poster eloquently described their pain and fears. One of the women, Nichet Smith, voiced her fear that all nonminorities on campus shared the hostile stereotypes expressed in the poster. Dozens of residents expressed their support and gave assurances that they did not share the hostile stereotypes, but they conceded that even the most tolerant among them knew little about the cultures of others and would 62 benefit greatly from multicultural education.
The need for multicultural education to combat intercultural ignorance and stereotyping became the theme of a press conference and public rally organized by the student African-American Coalition leader, Rossie Turman, who opted for highly visible counterspeech despite demands from some students and staff to discipline the owner of the offending poster. The result was a series of opinion letters in the campus newspaper discussing the problem of racism, numerous workshops on race relations and free speech, and overwhelming approval in the Faculty Senate of a measure to add a course on American cultural diversity to the undergraduate breadth 63 requirement.
The four women who initially confronted the racist poster were empowered by the meeting at the dormitory residence and later received awards from the local chapter of the NAACP for their activism.64 Rossie Turman was rewarded for his leadership skills two years later by becoming the first African-American elected President of Associated Students of A.S.U.,65 a student body that numbered approximately 40,000 students, only 66 2.3 percent of them African-American. Although Delgado and Yun are quite right that the African-American students should never have been burdened with the need to respond to such hateful speech, Hentoff is correct that the responses just described helped them develop a sense of self-reliance and constructive activism. Moreover, the students' counterspeech inspired a community response that lightened the students' burden and provided them with a sense of community support and empowerment. Indeed, the students received assistance from faculty and administrators, who helped organize meetings, wrote opinion letters, spoke before the Faculty Senate, or joined the students in issuing public statements at the press conference and public rally.67 Perhaps most important, campus administrators wisely refrained from disciplining the owners of the poster, thus directing public attention to the issue of racism and ensuring broad community support in denouncing the racist poster. Many members of the campus and surrounding communities might have leapt to the racist speaker's defense had the state attempted to discipline the speaker and thus had created a First Amendment issue. Instead, they remained united with the offended students because the glare of the public spotlight remained sharply focused on the racist incident without the distraction of cries of state censorship. Although the counterspeech was not aimed primarily at influencing the hearts and minds of the residents of the offending dormitory room, its vigor in fact caught the residents by surprise. 68 It prompted at least three of them to apologize publicly and to display curiosity about a civil rights movement that they were too young to have witnessed first hand. 69 This effective use of education and counterspeech is not an isolated instance at A.S.U., but has been repeated on several occasions, albeit on smaller scales.7°
One year after the counterspeech at A.S.U., Stanford University responded similarly to homophobic speech. In that case, a first-year law student sought to attract disciplinary proceedings and thus gain First Amendment martyrdom by shouting hateful homophobic statements about a dormitory staff member. The dean of students stated that the speaker was not subject to discipline under Stanford's code of conduct but called on the university community to speak out on the issue, triggering an avalanche of counterspeech. Students, staff, faculty, and administrators expressed their opinions in letters to the campus newspaper, in comments on a poster board at the law school, in a published petition signed by 400 members of the law school community disassociating the law school from the speaker's epithets, and in a letter written by several law students reporting the incident to a prospective employer of the offending student.71 The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of speech, just not the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary sanctions as a form of empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert enough to catch his verbal hardball and throw it back with ten times the force. Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of offensive speech is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is conceded by Delgado and Yun. In both of the cases described above, the targets of hateful speech were supported by a community united against bigotry. The community avoided splitting into factions because the universities eliminated the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful speakers were protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top administrators to develop standards for, and some limitations on, their participation in such partisan speech. 72 Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out against intolerance when it is isolated as an issue rather than diluted in muddied waters along with concerns of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr., depended partly for their success on the consciences of the national and international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their television sets and in the print media,73 the empowerment of the targets of hateful speech rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community who sympathize with them. One can hope that the counterspeech and educational measures used with success at A.S.U. and Stanford stand a good chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual inquiry at any campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate. On the other hand, counterspeech by the targets of hate speech could be less empowering on a campus in which the majority of students, faculty, and staff approve of hostile epithets directed toward members of minority groups. One hopes that such campuses are exceedingly rare; although hostile racial stereotyping among college students in the United States increased during the last decade, those students who harbored significant hostilities (as contrasted with more pervasive but less openly hostile, subconscious racism) still represented a modest fraction of all students.74 Moreover, even in a pervasively hostile atmosphere, counterspeech might still be more effective than broad restrictions on speech. |
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-Even if the militarism framing is wrong- discussion and education on the issue creates responsible citizens in other areas by enabling them to think about the world in a different way |
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-Evans and Giroux 16, Brad Evans and Henry Giroux, The Violence of Forgetting, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/opinion/the-violence-of-forgetting.htmlB.E.: Considering Hannah Arendt’s warning that the forces of domination and exploitation require “thoughtlessness” on behalf of the oppressors, how is the capacity to think freely and in an informed way key to providing a counter to violent practices? H.G.: Young people can learn to challenge violence, like those in the antiwar movement of the early ’70s or today in the Black Lives Matter movement. Education does more than create critically minded, socially responsible citizens. It enables young people and others to challenge authority by connecting individual troubles to wider systemic concerns. This notion of education is especially important given that racialized violence, violence against women and the ongoing assaults on public goods cannot be solved on an individual basis. Violence maims not only the body but also the mind and spirit. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, it lies “on the side of belief and persuasion.” If we are to counter violence by offering young people ways to think differently about their world and the choices before them, they must be empowered to recognize themselves in any analysis of violence, and in doing so to acknowledge that it speaks to their lives meaningfully. There is no genuine democracy without an informed public. While there are no guarantees that a critical education will prompt individuals to contest various forms of oppression and violence, it is clear that in the absence of a formative democratic culture, critical thinking will increasingly be trumped by anti-intellectualism, and walls and war will become the only means to resolve global challenges. Creating such a culture of education, however, will not be easy in a society that links the purpose of education with being competitive in a global economy.There is a growing culture of conformity and quietism on university campuses, made evident in the current call for safe spaces and trigger warnings. This is not just conservative reactionism, but is often carried out by liberals who believe they are acting with the best intentions. Violence comes in many forms and can be particularly disturbing when confronted in an educational setting if handled dismissively or in ways that blame victims. Yet troubling knowledge cannot be condemned on the basis of making students uncomfortable, especially if the desire for safety serves merely to limit access to difficult knowledge and the resources needed to analyze it. Critical education should be viewed as the art of the possible rather than a space organized around timidity, caution and fear. Creating safe spaces runs counter to the notion that learning should be unsettling, that students should challenge common sense assumptions and be willing to confront disturbing realities despite discomfort. The political scientist Wendy Brown rightly argues that the “domain of free public speech is not one of emotional safety or reassurance,” and is “ not what the public sphere and political speech promise.” A university education should, Brown writes, “ call you to think, question, doubt” and “ incite you to question everything you assume, think you know or care about.” This is particularly acute when dealing with pedagogies of violence and oppression. While there is a need to be ethically sensitive to the subject matter, our civic responsibility requires, at times, confronting truly intolerable conditions. The desire for emotionally safe spaces can be invoked to protect one’s sense of privilege — especially in the privileged sites of university education. This is further compounded by the frequent attempts by students to deny some speakers a platform because their views are controversial. While the intentions may be understandable, this is a dangerous road to go down. Confronting the intolerable should be challenging and upsetting. Who could read the testimonies of Primo Levi and not feel intellectually and emotionally exhausted? Or Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, not to mention those of Malcolm X? It is the conditions that produce violence that should upset us ethically and prompt us to act responsibly, rather than to capitulate to a privatized emotional response that substitutes a therapeutic language for a political and worldly one. |
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-Underview |
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-1. All theory arguments have an implicit aff flex standard- the most recent empirics of late elim rounds show huge neg side bias |
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-Adler 15, Are Judges Just Guessing? A Statistical Analysis of LD Elimination Round Panels by Steven Adler http://nsdupdate.com/2015/03/30/are-judges-just-guessing-a-statistical-analysis-of-ld-elimination-round-panels-by-steven-adler/ |
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-Yet a plausible objection here might be that maybe the elimination round data need to be further segmented. For instance, perhaps the data do not meet this randomization because judges can easily distinguish between winners and losers in early elimination rounds, which typically contain more-lopsided matchups, but that in late elimination rounds the decision is much murkier. In fact, I find some support for this hypothesis, though it may be an artifact of a smaller sample-size for this segment.To evaluate this hypothesis, I replicated the above analysis, but pared down to the 36 coded rounds that took place in quarterfinals or later. In these rounds, the Neg side-bias was even more pronounced, with Neg winning 61 of elimination rounds, so the ‘expected’ randomization rate on ballots to achieve such an overall win-rate would be 57 for the Neg and 43 for the Aff. This creates the following expected distribution, compared to the actual observed distribution for these late elimination rounds: |
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-2. Vote aff if I win a counter-interp |
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-a. AFF flex – negative has the ability to win on either layer so the aff needs the same ability in the 2ar. 2AR is too short to win a new shell and play defense against the 2NR theory arguments so the AFF needs reciprocal layers rather than adding more unreciprocal avenues. That’s not a problem in the long 2nr. |
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-b. reciprocity- Only the neg can read T because only the aff has a burden to be topical. Thus the aff needs an RVI to compensate for the neg’s unique avenue to the ballot. |
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-3. On T, prefer reasonable aff interps. The judge should use reasonability with a bright line of the presence of link and impact turn ground for the negative. Since he has equal access to offense, there’s no abuse because structural access to the ballot is the same. |
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-A. There are multiple legitimate interpretations of the topic and the aff goes into the round with no knowledge of 1NC strategy. I had to choose between mutually exclusive interps and the neg can always read T so don’t punish me for having to set grounds. |
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-B. Increases topical clash by avoiding unnecessary theory |
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-C. I can’t read T on the neg and the NC is reactive, so he can always pick a strategy that adapts to meet my AC and give him a shot at winning the round. |
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-4. Semantic considerations are Racist- |
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-Niemi 15, Rebar, Mr. Nebel’s neighborhood, OR Nebel Tea– I sip it, 2015, http://premierdebatetoday.com/2015/09/22/nebel-t-i-sip-it/ |
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-Though I believe Mr. Nebel to be fundamentally wrong on the debate theoretical level, I have a more serious objection. I will make this claim in the strongest terms I possibly can. Correctness is racism. Correctness is “you must be either a boy or a girl or you are wrong.” Correctness is “the ideal functioning body versus all others.” Correctness is one kind of person having access to The Truth and others lacking it. Correctness is “sit down and shut up.” Correctness is “your kind aren’t welcome here.” Any debater who runs so called “Nebel T” and any judge who votes for this argument must acknowledge that they are situationally and strategically embracing a perspective from which there is an implicit or explicit metric of what it means to be a competent english speaker. What is the logical conclusion of speaking competent english? The notion that “mongrel” forms of english are inferior, diminished, unpersuasive, and should not have access to the ballot. Quite possibly the notion that those who can’t live up to these standards should not be involved in debate. After all, their dialects are not what resolutions are written in – it is people like Mr. Nebel whose dialect prescribes correct resolutional meaning. You may say that “competent speakers” was a rhetorical flourish, I am nitpicking, and that Mr. Nebel should certainly be allowed to take back his offensive speech. I will say this: the competent english speaker, aka the correct type of thinking and being, is the fundamental goal and top-level value that Mr. Nebel appeals to throughout his articles. If this is “not what he meant” then he did not mean that debaters should pay any attention to nor follow his logic. Either he defends correctness or he concedes the irrelevance and negative impacts to fairness and education of his position. Nebel may appeal to pragmatics as a way out of the appeal to correctness, but in fact, his pragmatic claims are a pragmatic justification for correctness. This concedes pragmatics first anyway, and that so to speak, is a flow I can win on. It is my opinion that there is no in or out of round benefit that correctness could provide sufficient to outweigh the toxicity of its implementation and rhetorical methodology. |