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... ... @@ -1,45 +1,0 @@ 1 -Framework 2 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that presents the best policy option – key to out of round advocacy skills. 3 -Nixon 2K (Themba-Nixon, Makani. Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping communities use media and policy advocacy to advance health equity and justice, “Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing” Colorlines 3.2, 2000) //WW JA 1/15/16 4 -“This is all about policy," a woman complained to me in a recent conversation. "I'm an organizer." The flourish and passion with which she made the distinction said everything. Policy is for wonks, sell-out politicians, and ivory-tower eggheads. Organizing is what real, grassroots people do. Common as it may be, this distinction doesn't bear out in the real world. Policy is more than law. It is any written agreement (formal or informal) that specifies how an institution, governing body, or community will address shared problems or attain shared goals. It spells out the terms and the consequences of these agreements and is the codification of the body's values-as represented by those present in the policymaking process. Given who's usually present, most policies reflect the political agenda of powerful elites. Yet, policy can be a force for change-especially when we bring our base and community organizing into the process. In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so. 5 - 6 -The standard is combatting structural violence – epistemologically precedes normative ethics. 7 -Young 74. Iris Marion Young, Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago since 2000, masters and doctorate in philosophy in 1974 from Pennsylvania State University. “Justice and the Politics of Difference”. Princeton University Press, 1990, Digital Copy. 8 -Group representation, third, encourages the expression of individual and group needs and interests in terms that appeal to justice, that transform an "I want" into an "I am entitled to," in Hannah Pitkin's words. In Chapter 4 I argued that publicity itself encourages this transformation because a condition of the public is that people call one another to account. Group representation adds to such accountability because it serves as an antidote to self-deceiving self-interest masked as an impartial or general interest. Unless confronted with different perspectives on social relations and events, different values and language, most people tend to assert their perspective as universal. When social privilege allows some group perspectives to dominate a public while others are silent, such universalizing of the particular will be reaffirmed by many others. Thus the test of whether a claim upon the public is just or merely an expression of self interest is best made when those making it must confront the opinion of others who have explicitly with different, though not necessarily conflicting, experiences, priorities, and needs (cf. Sunstein, 1988, p. 1588). As a person of social privilege, I am more likely to go outside myself and have regard for social justice when I must listen to the voice of those my privilege otherwise tends to silence. 9 -Plan 10 -Plan Text: Public colleges and universities in the United States should derestrict constitutionally protected speech by amending Title IX policies to redefine sexual harassment. 11 -AAUP 16. (American Association of University Professors is a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals. Since 1915, the AAUP has helped to shape American higher education by developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this country's colleges and universities. “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX,” AAUP Kennesaw. March 24, 2016. http://aaup.kennesaw.edu/AAUP_TitleIX.pdf) //WW JA 1/5/16 12 -The 2014 AAUP report proposes a policy for colleges and universities desiring a separate statement of policy on sexual harassment. The proposal distinguishes conduct or speech defined as sexual harassment from protected speech: It is the policy of this institution that no member of the academic community may sexually harass another. Sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when: 1. such advances or requests are made under circumstances implying that one’s response might affect educational or personnel decisions that are subject to the influence of the person making the proposal; or 2. such speech or conduct is directed against another and is either abusive or severely humiliating, or persists despite the objection of the person targeted by the speech or conduct; or 3. such speech or conduct is reasonably regarded as offensive and substantially impairs the academic or work opportunity of students, colleagues, or co-workers. If it takes place in the teaching context, it must also be persistent, pervasive, and not germane to the subject matter. The academic setting is distinct from the workplace in that wide latitude is required for professional judgment in determining the appropriate content and presentation of academic material.91 13 -They continue: 14 -AAUP statements and reports should be amended, as needed, to further clarify the distinctions between sexual assault and harassment and between speech and conduct, and to strengthen academic freedom protections. The 2012 statement on Campus Sexual Assault uses the term “sexual violence…as a blanket term for sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual assault, rape, stalking, domestic violence, and other forms of sexual misconduct.” Using the term “sexual violence” so broadly does not adequately distinguish sexual harassment – particularly where it involves only speech – from other types of sexual misconduct. The 2014 report on Sexual Harassment proposes a policy that distinguishes protected speech from conduct or speech constituting sexual harassment. Further, the policy includes protection of conduct in the teaching context. This could include expressive conduct such as gestures, dance, or other types of actions. To further clarify the protection of speech and expressive conduct, the AAUP proposed policy could be amended to include specific references to academic freedom. The proposed policy could also be amended to clarify that teaching, research, and extramural speech protected by academic freedom are excluded from definitions of sexual harassment. 15 -The Advantage is Sexual Assault 16 -Scenario 1 – Education Consumerism 17 -Status quo sexual harassment laws fail – they’re driven by education consumerism – Title IX prioritizes minimizing administrative liability rather than effectively challenging assault. 18 -deBoer 15 (Fredrik deBoer is an academic and writer. He has a Ph.D. in English and graduated from Purdue University. “Why We Should Fear University, Inc.” NY Times. September 9, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html?_r=0) //WW JA 2/17/17 19 -The Kipnis affair was extreme, but it demonstrates the double-edged sword that is Title IX. The law, designed to enforce gender equality on campus, grants members of campus communities broad latitude in charging gender discrimination and mandates formal response from universities. The law can be a powerful tool for justice, but like all tools, it can be misused — especially as it ends up wielded by administrative and governmental functionaries. In this way, it becomes an instrument of power, not of the powerless. And because the law compels the self-protective, legalistic wings of universities to grind into gear, for fear of liability and bad publicity, invocations of Title IX frequently wrest control of the process and the narrative from student activists themselves, handing it to bureaucrats, whether governmental or institutional. Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense. Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating it. Of course, sexual harassment is a real and vexing problem, not merely on campus but in all kinds of organizations, and the urge to oppose it through policy is a noble one. But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions. If students have adopted a litigious approach to regulating campus life, they are only working within the culture that colleges have built for them. When your environment so deeply resembles a Fortune 500 company, it makes sense to take every complaint straight to H.R. I don’t excuse students who so zealously pursue their vision of campus life that they file Title IX complaints against people whose opinions they don’t like. But I recognize their behavior as a rational response within a bureaucracy. It’s hard to blame people within a system — particularly people so young — who take advantage of structures they’ve been told exist to help them. The problem is that these structures exist for the institutions themselves, and thus the erosion of political freedom is ultimately a consequence of the institutions. When we identify students as the real threat to intellectual freedom on campus, we’re almost always looking in the wrong place. Current conditions result in neither the muscular and effective student activism favored by the defenders of current campus politics nor the emboldened, challenging professors that critics prefer. Instead, both sides seem to be gradually marginalized in favor of the growing managerial class that dominates so many campuses. Yes, students get to dictate increasingly elaborate and punitive speech codes that some of them prefer. But what could be more corporate or bureaucratic than the increasingly tight control on language and culture in the workplace? Those efforts both divert attention from the material politics that the administration often strenuously opposes (like divestment campaigns) and contribute to a deepening cultural disrespect for student activism. Professors, meanwhile, cling for dear life, trying merely to preserve whatever tenure track they can, prevented by academic culture, a lack of coordination and interdepartmental resentments from rallying together as labor activists. That the contemporary campus quiets the voices of both students and teachers — the two indispensable actors in the educational exchange — speaks to the funhouse-mirror quality of today’s academy. I wish that committed student activists would recognize that the administrators who run their universities, no matter how convenient a recipient of their appeals, are not their friends. I want these bright, passionate students to remember that the best legacy of student activism lies in shaking up administrators, not in making appeals to them. At its worst, this tendency results in something like collusion between activists and administrators. 20 - 21 -The corporate university stifles gender progress to limit liability and enables rich white males to buy out of rape accusations. 22 -AAUP 2 (American Association of University Professors is a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals. Since 1915, the AAUP has helped to shape American higher education by developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this country's colleges and universities. “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX,” AAUP Kennesaw. March 24, 2016. http://aaup.kennesaw.edu/AAUP_TitleIX.pdf) //WW JA 2/16/17 23 -While the original aims of Title IX and the legal meaning of “sex discrimination” encompass more than sexual violations, today the claims most readily associated with Title IX involve sexual violence or sexual harassment, whether actual conduct or speech. This is largely a result of the efforts of a national student movement against sexual violence on campus, often in the name of enforcing Title IX. While students’ wide-ranging commitment to combating sexual violence across a number of fronts is admirable and necessary, institutional engagement with such activism in the context of the corporate university can result in disturbing outcomes. First, administrative efforts to address sexual harassment and violence have adopted bureaucratic and legalistic methods that reward the narrowest forms of activism, student or otherwise, on campus. In this context, invocations of Title IX—and in particular calls by some activists to adhere to OCR and US Department of Justice criteria—have effectively narrowed the popular meaning of sex discrimination to sexual speech and sexual violence, often conflating the two. This singular focus on sexual harassment has overshadowed issues of unequal pay, access, and representation throughout the university system. Additionally, the treatment of students as “clients” in the corporate university has obscured the question of how to deal with prohibited behavior on campus. The client-service model allows administrations to try to have it both ways. For example, the University of Colorado at Boulder recently settled a lawsuit, for $15,000, from a former student who said the university violated Title IX when it suspended him for nonconsensual sexual intercourse. The university’s behavior in this case satisfied the law, and it satisfied the accuser by finding the accused responsible, but it mitigated any fallout by settling the accused individual’s resulting lawsuit.81 This bureaucratic and legal resolution does not address the question of whether sex-based inequality is being remedied. Finally, investigations of claims of sexual harassment and violence do not necessarily understand those claims as embedded within the broader social dynamics on and off campus. As Janet Halley points out, this segmented approach to sex discrimination promotes partial and legalistic analyses of the nature and scope of the problem, obscuring how biases or discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation, or gender identity may be ignored or even perpetuated by a narrow view of gender equality.82 This approach fails to respond to the overarching question: What vision of justice, educational access, and public accountability should the enforcement of Title IX seek to facilitate? The answer depends in part on what counts as sex discrimination—particularly what conduct or speech (and in what amounts) can support a charge of sexual harassment. While financial cuts and program eliminations have threatened entire disciplines and methods of producing knowledge, struggles over the importance and scope of academic freedom in the context of sex discrimination have also surged across campuses nationwide. From trigger warnings to tweets, the AAUP has documented an increase in potential threats to the academic freedom that protects teaching, research, and extramural speech and that fosters shared governance by administrations, students, and faculty members. When Title IX concerns play out as sexual-harassment panics within the corporate university, academic freedom is threatened across several fronts.83 Under such interpretations of Title IX, faculty members who teach, research, and otherwise study sexuality are left especially vulnerable to sexual-harassment charges. Further, those who seek to bring material related to sex or sexuality into courses not specifically devoted to those topics are also reluctant to do so for fear of being accused of violating Title IX. In responding to the OCR’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, the AAUP warned of this danger, emphasizing that “any training for faculty, staff, and students” about how to identify and report sexual harassment “should explain the differences between educational content, harassment, and ‘hostile environments,’ and a faculty member’s professional judgment must be protected. Women’s studies and gender studies programs have long worked to improve campus culture by teaching about issues of systemic gender inequity, sex, and sexuality. The OCR should encourage discussion of topics like sexual harassment both in and outside of the curriculum, but acknowledge that what might be offensive or uncomfortable to some students may also be necessary for their education.” 24 -Scenario 2 – Rape Law 25 -Title IX results in silencing classes that discuss controversial subjects like rape law 26 -AAUP 3 (American Association of University Professors is a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals. Since 1915, the AAUP has helped to shape American higher education by developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this country's colleges and universities. “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX,” AAUP Kennesaw. March 24, 2016. http://aaup.kennesaw.edu/AAUP_TitleIX.pdf) //WW JA 2/16/17 ***BRACKETS IN ORIGINAL*** 27 -At USC–Upstate, the controversy about Fun Home coincided with the closure of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. The transfer of funds underscores the fact that the serious study of sex and sexuality is becoming increasingly vulnerable, leading to selfcensorship by faculty members. This state of affairs extends to areas such as creative writing, where some instructors are wary of assignments that may raise the specter of sex, and criminal law, where some faculty members have chosen to omit from their courses units on rape and sexual-assault law out of fear that students may claim that the content is too emotionally distressing. Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk contends that, ironically, after long feminist campaigns to include rape law in the law school curriculum, the topic has once again become difficult to teach. Not only is discussion of rape sometimes thought to be “triggering,” but discussions of how consent or nonconsent may be communicated in a sexual encounter or how social inequalities (tied to class, race, or sexual preferences) might bias the assessment of whether an incident is labeled as a crime risk being perceived as disrespectful of victims. As a result, some students view such necessary debates about the law and sexual violence as fostering a hostile environment.49 28 - 29 -The legal classroom should be the focal point of rape law discussions – the 1AC cultivates an open environment to challenge oppressive ideologies about rape, race and stereotypes. We change dominant perspectives by creating a counter-culture which addresses pedagogies of supremacy. 30 -Denbow 14 (Jennifer M. Denbow is Assistant Professor at University of New England. “The Pedagogy of Rape Law: Objectivity, Identity and Emotion,” Journal of Legal Education, Volume 64, Number 1. August 2014. http://www.swlaw.edu/pdfs/jle/jle641denbow.pdf) //WW JA 2/17/17 31 -Since the law school classroom is one place where future legal professionals, many of whom will have substantial power, form their ideas about rape, discussion is crucial. Precisely because people have such different and charged views of rape, it is important that future lawyers at least have the opportunity to discuss it. Furthermore, the reluctance to teach rape law and the politics of the pedagogy of rape law cannot be divorced from the historic tendency of prosecutors and judges to presume that women are the sole victims survivors of sexual assault and in many instances trivialize rape accusations. Crenshaw argues, for example, that the reluctance of legal actors, including prosecutors, to address the rape of black women is rooted in stereotypes of black women’s licentiousness.43 The law school classroom could serve as a site where such stereotypes are confronted. A critical approach to the pedagogy of rape law would take the confrontation between different ways of understanding rape seriously and would be selfreflective about knowledge and its production. I would call not just for getting more instructors to teach rape law—and for a related push to reveal that the decision not to teach rape law is just as political as the decision to do so—but also for an effort to reveal the space of the classroom, as well as the claims to knowledge made therein, as political.44 The difficulty will be in developing a pedagogy that allows for exploration of one’s position and an inquiry into how that affects one’s understanding of the crime of rape. Rather than taking the objective as that which has no point of view, it must be acknowledged that there is no way not to have a point of view. As Crenshaw notes, not calling “into question the objectivity of the dominant perspective . . . fails to challenge majority students’ beliefs that the minority perspective is self-interested and biased, while the doctrinal framework and their own perspectives are not.”45 The exploration of experience and identity can thus destabilize the appearance of legal objectivity and requires those with the dominant view to account for their perspective. As hooks explains: . . . a critique of essentialism that challenges only marginalized groups to interrogate their use of identity politics or an essentialist standpoint as a means to exerting coercive power leaves unquestioned the critical practices of other groups who employ the same strategies in different ways and whose exclusionary behavior may be firmly buttressed by institutionalized structures of domination that do not critique or check it.46 32 - 33 -Scenario 3 – Student Journalism 34 -Broad definitions of Title IX have a chilling effect on student journalists who release information regarding sexual assault because college administrators police free speech to avoid funding losses. 35 -Dewulf 10-7-16 (Kaitlin Dewulf, Dewulf is double-majoring in Political science and Journalism and Mass Communication on the pre-law track. "An unintended consequence of Title IX", Student Press Law Center, 10-7-2016, page numbers here, http://www.splc.org/article/2016/10/an-unintended-consequence-of-title-ix)//DM Accessed 1-16-2017 36 -Passed more than 40 years ago, Title IX is a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex — which can include sexual harassment or sexual violence, such as rape, sexual assault, battery and coercion — in education programs and activities. All public and private schools receiving any federal funding must comply with Title IX. Before Title IX, women faced discrimination in academics, admissions, athletics and hiring. Though the effects of Title IX have increased gender equality in higher education, an unforeseen consequence of the law, as it is currently being interpreted, may be the restriction of college media. In an effort to rid college campuses of sex discrimination in compliance with Title IX — and avoid the potential loss of funding that comes with noncompliance — some college administrators have panicked, and have taken the law too far, some First Amendment advocates say. Just last year, the Daily Bull, a student comedy publication at Michigan Technological University, was slapped with disciplinary measures after satirizing issues of sexual harassment and assault. The publication’s editor, Rico Bastian, wrote an article, “Sexually Harassed Man Pretty Okay with Situation,” that describes a male student receiving “unwelcomed sexual contact from members of the opposite sex, all of which he later looked back on with feelings of complacency.” The satirical article — published alongside a satirical list of “Signs that she wants the D,” including reasons like she “only screams a little” — was an attempt to comically address how many people don’t take male sexual assault seriously, managing editor Mike Jarasz told the Student Press Law Center. Jarasz also said it may be “considered more acceptable” for an attractive person to sexually harass someone, as the article ends with the male student saying he felt violated after receiving a sexual look from a “kinda ugly” woman. Still, MTU Vice President for Student Affairs Les Cook did not find the article humorous. Cook sent out a campus-wide email denouncing the article for “advocating criminal activity on campus.” The university’s office of academic and community conduct placed the Daily Bull on probation for two years — which meant if the publication put out another problematic article, it could be removed as a student publication altogether — and issued staffers to take a cultural sensitivity course. The Daily Bull’s adviser stepped down, and the publication issued a retraction and apology. And although student governments are legally not permitted to withdraw funding in retaliation for content, student legislators at MTU voted to freeze the Daily Bull’s funding until its staffers attended a Title IX training course. The staff underwent a three-hour training, covering both Title IX and cultural competency, but “didn’t really learn much,” Bastian said. Cook also told the Daily Mining Gazette that the university was legally required by Title IX statutes to act in cases of sexual discrimination or harassment. “(The Constitution) doesn’t supersede Title IX,” he said. “Title IX is a federal compliance policy. Those policies supersede anything else.” That interpretation of the Constitution, however, is inherently wrong, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “Let’s be clear about one thing: The Constitution of the United States, including the First Amendment, is ‘the supreme Law of the Land,’ and does in fact supersede any federal regulation that violates it,” FIRE said in a statement following the discipline. Mark Wilcox, a spokesman for MTU, said conflicting regulatory mandates regarding Title IX affect the university’s compliance efforts. FIRE President Greg Lukianoff has repeatedly blamed censor-happy administrators on the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights — the department that enforces federal civil rights laws — which he said has significantly confused administrators and students on Title IX compliance. “For the overwhelming majority of my career what I’ve been fighting is administration overreach,” Lukianoff said in an interview with Reason.com. ADMINISTRATIVE OVERREACH In April, several free speech, academic freedom and education groups argued that interpreting Title IX to include speech that some students find offensive could not only threaten students’ speech rights, but also undermine their education and efforts to promote equality on campus in a letter to OCR. The letter — authored by the SPLC, FIRE, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Association of University Professors — argues that the office’s definition of harassment, set forth in “Dear Colleague” guidance letters to universities, poses profound threats to free expression. While the letter was written in response to a situation at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, where members of a campus group called Feminists United filed several complaints alleging that online harassment of female students over social media violates Title IX, it urged the department to provide more guidance in general. “We take the allegations of discrimination at UMW very seriously, and we urge OCR to adopt an approach that will target unlawful conduct without casting a net so wide that it scoops up innocent students and constitutionally protected speech,” the letter read. NCAC Executive Director Joan Bertin said that since people who post on Yik Yak — the social-networking app targeted at Mary Washington — are spreading news and opinion, much like student journalists, any guidance related to online communication apps issued by OCR could ultimately affect student journalists. “Student speech and peer-to-peer activity is of much interest to OCR,” Bertin said. “They are plainly prepared to issue citations or to start investigations if they hear things that they don’t think universities are responding to appropriately.” She said if one student ”who is really pissed off about a gender-based article published in the student newspaper” files a complaint, the department could begin an investigation and “set the stage” against student journalists. It could only be a matter of time, Bertin said, before Title IX requires administrators to regulate college media, and some officials are already practicing this form of censorship. She said university administrators are highly risk-averse, so if the choice is between being the object of a Title IX investigation or disciplining a student newspaper, she doesn’t think there is any question of which option administrators will choose. “There is a very well-founded concern that college administrators are overreaching into student media,” Bertin said. “They are acting preemptively, and are very aggressively policing speech with sexual content to avoid being on OCR’s hit list.” The OCR maintains that its efforts to combat sexual harassment and discrimination in schools is met with equal respect for the First Amendment. “OCR has made it clear that the laws and regulations it enforces protect students from prohibited discrimination and are not intended to restrict the exercise of any expressive activities or speech protected under the U.S. Constitution,” an OCR spokesperson said in an email. “When schools work to prevent and redress discrimination, they must respect the free speech rights of students, faculty, and other speakers.” CONFLICTING GUIDANCE Under Title IX, no person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. While short, the statute has been given a broad scope through U.S. Supreme Court decisions and DOE guidance to cover sexual harassment and sexual violence. Though schools must respond to and remedy all sexual harassment, they can only impose discipline for harassment if it creates a “hostile environment” — when it is so “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit” — and failure to do so puts schools at risk of losing federal funding. Since its implementation, vital definitions for compliance with Title IX have expanded drastically, despite rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court that have drawn distinctions between constitutionally protected offensive speech versus unlawful harassment. Though sexual harassment is not mentioned in the Title IX legislation itself, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1992 court case Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools that monetary damages could be awarded to individual victims of sexual harassment under Title IX. In separate cases in 1998 and 1999, the Supreme Court made clear that Title IX requires schools to take action to prevent and stop the harassment of students by faculty and staff, as well as other students. The decisions in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education and Gebser v. Lago Vista Independent School District established liability of the school, which occurs when the school knows about on- campus harassment that is creating a hostile environment and responds with “deliberate indifference.” But some First Amendment experts say this narrow definition has been absent from guidance given to college administrators through recent pronouncements by OCR. For example, a “Dear Colleague” letter by the department from 2010 defined “sexual harassment prohibited by Title IX” to extend to “making sexual comments, jokes or gestures; writing graffiti or displaying or distributing sexually explicit draws, pictures, or written materials; calling students sexually charged names; spreading sexual rumors; rating students on sexual activity or performance; or circulating, showing, or creating e-mails or Websites of a sexual nature.” Directed by this broad definition, rather than the one given in Davis, what is considered a Title IX violation can be unclear — which could lead college administrators to unnecessarily restrict what student journalists publish, experts said. AAUP recently published a report concluding that OCR’s broadened description of sexual harassment and heightened scrutiny of speech that includes sexual references of any kind has resulted in “a frenzy of cases in which administrators’ apparent fears of being targeted by OCR have overridden faculty academic freedom and student free speech rights.” In one recent episode, the University of Alaska-Fairbanks newspaper was the subject of a year-long university investigation — ultimately resulting in no punitive action — after a university employee filed a sexual harassment complaint after being offended by a joke about genitalia in an April Fool’s Day humor edition. College Media Association President Kelley Callaway said while Title IX once was used to ensure women had the same opportunities as men, she has seen its scope expand to include “almost anything that may offend someone.” “I think we’re living in a world where if anything could possibly offend, there is this idea to eliminate it,” Callaway said. “That is surely not the best environment for student journalists.” She said the vagueness of harassment definitions in “Dear Colleague” letters creates a lack of understanding that pushes college administrators to err on the side of caution when evaluating what is punishable under Title IX. “The fear that “Dear Colleague” letters put colleges under can cause it to be used in ways that could stifle various forms of free expression,” Callaway said. But Brett Sokolow, executive director of the Association of Title IX Administrators, said OCR is not to blame for the confusion among college administrators about how and when to enforce Title IX. Though the OCR could be more clear on its distinction between sexual harassment and hostile environment, he said, schools still have to remedy all harassment, whether they can impose discipline or not. Sokolow said some college administrators misinterpret OCR guidance, or misapply it as the result of malfeasance, but the lack of clarity “is not the culprit.” He said coherence is available for administrators willing to seek it out. If colleges or universities are violating anyone’s free speech rights, Sokolow said that’s “on them.” He said it is an administrator’s job to know when something is in violation of Title IX, and whether the school should impose discipline. “If an administrator doesn’t know, he or she isn’t doing their job,” Sokolow said. Still, Callaway said this confusion could cause student journalists to self-censor in an effort to avoid being disciplined through Title IX by administrators. “I think student journalists have a responsibility to serve their community, and if they are avoiding reporting on certain issues because of potential Title IX violations, they are not serving their community,” Callaway said. “To not talk about sexual assault on campus, that isn’t serving anyone.” But at Central Michigan University,that is exactly what student journalists are being told. Sydney Smith, managing editor of Central Michigan Life, said while attempting to publish the locations where sexual assault has occurred on campus, she was blocked several times by administrators and campus police. Smith said she thought it was vital to the safety of students on campus to know where sexual assault was most likely to occur, but was unable to obtain this information. She said she has attempted for months get this information through the Clery Act — which requires all colleges receiving federal funding to keep and disclose information about crime on campus and its efforts to improve it — but was unsuccessful. Smith tried several times to utilize the Freedom of Information Act — which allows the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased government documents — but administrators denied her requests. “Each time my requests were denied for the exact same reasons: invasion of privacy for those named in the report — even though I asked that the names be redacted — in violation of Title IX,” she said. “CMU administrators said that even though I wanted no names, someone could still ascertain and connect the dots to the person through the locations in the report.” She said the university police told her that CMU would not allow the releasing of the locations of sexual assault under Title IX, and that publishing those locations may “re-traumatize the victim.” “Leaving out information, especially regarding sexual assault on campus, does a tremendous disservice to the campus community,” Smith said. “As a woman, I feel it is my right to know where sexual assaults have occurred. What if there is a pattern?” Smith said publishing this information is crucial to the community because readers should know where sexual assaults have occurred because there could be clear indications of problem areas on campus. She said Title IX has a place, but universities need to follow the law more clearly when it comes to journalists. “I was told that obtaining police reports of assault was a ‘gray area’ of the law and Title IX required the university to be less transparent,” Smith said. “I highly doubt that is what lawmakers intended.” Steve Smith, a spokesperson for CMU, said redacting a name does not make it impossible to identify the survivor of sexual assault based on the location of the crime. He said location information, such as a dorm room, might lead to the identification of a victim, and would violate the student’s privacy. “Moreover, incident descriptions of an alleged sexual assault also may identify potential survivors and witnesses,” he said. “Imagine the massive chilling effect this would have on the reporting of rapes and other forms of sexual assault.” ‘A RECIPE FOR CENSORSHIP’ Despite a newspaper’s role to disseminate vital information to its readers, some administrators are treating student publications as an arm of the university by demanding compliance with Title IX and dictating what student journalists report on, First Amendment lawyers say. SPLC Executive Director Frank LoMonte said Title IX was built for severe, pervasive harassment directed at specific individuals that makes them unable to continue their education, and no one will ever be able to show that a newspaper article came close to reaching that point. Instead, he said, requiring student newspapers to comply with Title IX restricts free speech on campus and prevents student journalists from reporting key information regarding sexual assault that occurs on campus. “I think, whether accidentally or on purpose, a growing number of institutions are treating the campus publication like an extension of the college itself and claiming that a news story will breach the confidentiality of Title IX,” LoMonte said. “That just makes no sense.” A newspaper, just by definition, he said, cannot be harassment because it is “something you voluntarily pick up and can voluntarily put down.” He said there are constitutional boundaries that administrators can’t cross, and guidance by OCR has created confusion in the minds of administrators about where their authority begins and ends. This confusion, some say, creates a welcoming environment for censorship. Will Creeley, vice president of legal and public advocacy for FIRE, said there is an incredible chilling effect of overly broad, impermissibly vague interpretations of sexual harassment on free student press. “Any speech that has to do with sex or gender that rubs someone the wrong way — anything someone, somewhere doesn’t want to hear could be considered sexual harassment under OCR’s definition,” he said. He said the threat to student media posed by unclear Title IX compliance requirements is perhaps as great as the threat to any campus speech. “Student journalists are tasked with asking tough questions of those in power, like the student government or even administrators,” Creeley said. “People in power do not like being asked how they are exercising that power.” He said the OCR has opened the door for extremely broad restrictions on student speech, and it is “only a matter of time before some administrator decides to wield them.” He said unclear guidance from OCR and what he sees as the oversensitivity of today’s college students creates a “recipe for censorship.” Students and administrators alike, Creeley said, will censor student publications in order to avoid a Title IX investigation, if that becomes the norm. 37 -Underview 38 -1. Any is defined as some of not all. 39 -Cambridge Dictionary (Cambridge Dictionary. “Definition of “any” - English Dictionary”. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/any) //TruLe 40 -(used in negative statements and questions) some, or even the smallest amount (of): 41 -Outweighs – the resolution is negatively worded – this is the intended meaning of any - 42 - 43 -2. Abstract questioning is useless - debate should seek to design concrete alternatives. 44 -Bryant 12 (EDITED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE – the author said “she” and it was replaced with the word “to” – Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/) 45 -I must be in a mood today– half irritated, half amused –because I find myself ranting. Of course, that’s not entirely unusual. So this afternoon I came across a post by a friend quoting something discussing the environmental movement that pushed all the right button. As the post read, For mainstream environmentalism– conservationism, green consumerism, and resource management –humans are conceptually separated out of nature and mythically placed in privileged positions of authority and control over ecological communities and their nonhuman constituents. What emerges is the fiction of a marketplace of ‘raw materials’ and ‘resources’ through which human-centered wants, constructed as needs, might be satisfied. The mainstream narratives are replete with such metaphors carbon trading!. Natural complexity, mutuality, and diversity are rendered virtually meaningless given discursive parameters that reduce nature to discrete units of exchange measuring extractive capacities. Jeff Shantz, “Green Syndicalism” While finding elements this description perplexing– I can’t say that I see many environmentalists treating nature and culture as distinct or suggesting that we’re sovereigns of nature –I do agree that we conceive much of our relationship to the natural world in economic terms (not a surprise that capitalism is today a universal). This, however, is not what bothers me about this passage. What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all of this is true? What, given existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right? At least green consumerism, conservation, resource management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in activities that are making real differences. From this passage– and maybe the entire text would disabuse me of this conclusion –it sounds like we are to reject all of these interventions because they remain tied to a capitalist model of production that the author (and myself) find abhorrent. The idea seems to be that if we endorse these things we are tainting our hands and would therefore do well to reject them altogether. The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities. Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,31 +1,0 @@ 1 -Framework 2 -Currently, difference equals the other. This mantra is regurgitated by neoliberal elites, incessantly committing acts of Lacanian violence on marginalized populations. This equivocation of transsubjective difference destroys subjectivities and justifies violence. The role of the judge is to resist the conversion of difference to otherness and Lacanian subjectivity. 3 -Schoolman 8 Morton Schoolman is Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany, and the author of The Imaginary Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse. “The new pluralism: William Connolly and the contemporary global condition”. Duke University Press, 2008. Page 1-2//roman 4 -That generous and warm feeling for living Nature which flooded my heart with such bliss, so that I saw the world around me as a Paradise, has now become an unbearable torment a sort of demon that persecutes me wherever I go... There is not one moment which does not consume you and yours, and not one moment when you yourself are not inevitably destructive; the most harmless walk costs the lives of poor, minute creatures; one step of your foot annihilates their painstaking constructions, and stamps a small world into its ignominious grave. My heart is worn out by this consuming power latent in the whole of Nature which has formed nothing that will not destroy its neighbor and itself... I see nothing but an eternally devouring monster. —GOETHE, The Sorrows of the Young Werther GOETHE'S THOUGHT OF AN INELIMINABLE violence plaguing life, a violence intrinsic to the human condition, haunts political theory after the Second World War. It invites reflection on the possibility that genocide may be the raison d'étre of violence organized by states which, as dupes of generic human drives, act to destroy the "other" as they organize those drives to serve systemic ends. Following this reflection is unavoidably another. Perhaps all "ordinary/' and everyday constructions and punishments of difference as otherness also may be driven by what is human, all too human. Political theorists drawn to this pessimism by the horror of holocaust could be drawn to theoretical schools under the spell of such thought as Goethe's and prone to the despair that it would induce. Thus was I drawn to the work of Max Horkheimer and of Theodor Adorno, whose Dialectic of Enlightenment seemed to support Goethe's claim. Seeking antidotes to the disease of reason diagnosed in this great work, I have found several, though they do not abound. Two in particular offer relief, in different ways, from the violence toward difference that Horkheimer and Adorno relentlessly track through their dark, genealogical history of reason. Both antidotes recognize violence that is not less embedded in modernity and not less ubiquitous than the violence that Goethe fears. Yet because neither antidote agrees with his premise that violence is the nature of human and nonhuman being, they both avoid the impotency attached to a trajectory of endless violence that is, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, aided and abetted by global capital without opposition. One antidote, an approach to the problem of violence toward difference that is thoroughly historical and political, is the politics and vision of a democracy of "agonistic respect" theorized by William Connolly. Agonistic respect promises an end to violence, though Connolly makes no such claim explicitly. A second approach to the problem of violence toward difference is developed in my own work, in which I turn to aesthetic theory to conceptualize a form of democratic individuality resistant to pressures to convert difference to otherness.l Having been influenced by George Kateb, my approach to violence perhaps is less political than Connolly's, indebted as it is to an ensemble of different democratic workings whose formative impact on the private sphere has been conceptualized in Kateb's The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture,2 a work whose contributions to my efforts I have gratefully recorded.3 5 -The role of the ballot is consistency with Lacan's principle of agonism. Psychoanalytic analysis is key to create coherent discussions. Agonistic democracy allows for minorities to have a safe discursive environment. 6 -Bleiker 8 Roland Bleiker grew up in Zürich, Switzerland, where he was educated and worked as a lawyer. He then studied international relations in Paris, Toronto, Vancouver and Canberra. Bleiker worked for two years in a Swiss diplomatic mission in Panmunjom, the Korean DMZ. He held visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Bleiker’s current research focuses on the role of images and emotions in world politics. He coordinates an interdisciplinary Research Program on Visual Politics, which brings together several dozen scholars from across UQ. He is also collaborating with Emma Hutchison and David Campbell on an ARC-funded project that examines “how images shape responses to humanitarian crises.” “The new pluralism: William Connolly and the contemporary global condition”. Duke University Press, 2008. Page 114//roman 7 -Two civic virtues are necessary, Connolly believes, to render a journey toward a pluralist notion of democracy feasible in practice. The first is agonistic respect among multiple groups or individuals. This respect is necessary even when—indeed precisely when—these groups or individuals passionately disagree. Whereas the liberal notion of tolerance assumes a majority that occupies an authoritative center and bestows tolerance upon minorities, agonistic respect is operating when numerous interdependent minorities coexist and interact in a safe and respectful environment thus generating and sustaining a form of common governance.3-l These interacting units share a number of rights and duties, chief among them a willingness to respect each other's different faith or value system. Accepting difference, Connolly believes, should even include the recognition that each such value system, including one's own, is and should in principle be contestable.e-2 The second of Connolly's virtues in a world of deep pluralism is critical responsiveness: the willingness to listen carefully to others, particularly those who have not yet achieved sufficient recognition in the prevailing political and social setting. Not all demands by a new constituency should necessarily be accepted, but and Connolly admits this is the difficult part —existing norms or laws cannot necessarily serve as a base for judgment. A critical response must go beyond these foundations because they are often part of the problem itself. Whatever form it takes, the new, more critical attitude should involve cultivating a private disposition and the courage to express and defend this disposition in public.33 8 -Contention 9 -Thus the advocacy, public colleges and universities ought not restrict constitutionally protected free speech that Lacan's principle of hypersubjectivity justifies. 10 - 11 -Restriction on free speech are common, and more are coming now. 12 -Lukianoff 16, Greg Lukianoff, 1-4-2016, "Campus Free Speech Has Been in Trouble for a Long Time," Cato Unbound, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2016/01/04/greg-lukianoff/campus-free-speech-has-been-trouble-long-time //AD 13 -2015 will be remembered as a year in which campus free speech issues took center stage, receiving extensive coverage in outlets like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and Salon. Even President Obama voiced concerns about the lack of debate on college campuses. For those of us who have been fighting campus censors for years, it’s hard not to ask: “Where has everyone been?” My organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has been defending freedom of expression on campus since 1999. We can attest that free speech, open inquiry, and academic freedom have always been threatened on campus by one force or another, even long before we were founded. Most people are familiar with the supposed heyday of political correctness of the 1980s and 90s, but there is a popular misconception that speech codes and censorship were defeated in the courts of law and public opinion by the mid-90s. In reality, the threats to campus speech never went away. Before examining what has changed to alarm the public—rightfully—about the state of open discourse in higher education, it’s important to note what hasn’t changed. Speech Codes and Political Correctness Never Went Away Scholars, including First Amendment expert Robert O’Neil, claim that politically correct speech codes were given a “decent burial” in the mid-90s. But despite being repeatedly defeated in court, speech codes became the rule rather than the exception on campus. FIRE has been tracking and rating speech codes at hundreds of colleges and universities since 2006. Eight years ago, 75 percent of the institutions we surveyed maintained policies worthy of FIRE’s “red light” rating, meaning they clearly and substantially restricted freedom of speech. Since then, the percentage of schools with red light speech codes has steadily declined each year. This good news is due, at least in part, to FIRE’s aggressive campaigning and lawsuits. Over the past few years, the number of campuses with red light policies decreased from 62.1 percent (2013) to 55.2 percent (2015). And, in FIRE’s 2016 speech code report, that figure is below 50 percent (49.3 percent) for the first time. Unfortunately, this may be only a temporary high-water mark; pressure from students and the federal government makes the resurgence of speech codes almost inevitable. The past 15 years are rife with examples of speech-policing. There are the classic political correctness cases, such as the 2004 incident in which a University of New Hampshire student was evicted from his dorm for posting flyers joking that freshman women could lose the “Freshman 15” by walking up the dormitory stairs. In 2009, Yale University students were told they shouldn’t quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Bucknell University students were forbidden from handing out “Obama Stimulus Dollars.” But many cases do not follow the “PC” mold and just involve old-fashioned abuses of power. Examples include the University of Wisconsin-Stout’s censorship of a professor’s “Firefly” poster, Central New Mexico Community College’s shutdown of a student newspaper for publishing a “Sex Issue,” and former Valdosta State University student Hayden Barnes’ unjust expulsion for protesting a parking garage (which led to an eight-year-long legal battle that finally concluded in 2015). Federal Antidiscrimination Law as the Secret Engine of Campus Censorship Some trends that long precede (and may explain) the current threats to campus free speech include the massive expansion of the bureaucratic class at universities, which officially began outnumbering the number of full-time instructors in 2005, and the rise of the “risk management” industry, which makes a fortune teaching universities how to avoid lawsuits by regulating almost every aspect of student life. This brings us to the institution that is perhaps most responsible for exacerbating the problems of speech codes and hair-trigger censorship: the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). By the late 1980s, colleges were adopting “anti-harassment” codes that restricted protected speech. In the mid-1990s, the campus speech code phenomenon converged with the expansion of federal anti-discrimination law by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). OCR encouraged and even required harassment codes, and although its guidance tried to “balance” the need for these codes with the First Amendment, by the time FIRE was founded in 1999, universities were using the “federal government made me do it” excuse to justify even the most laughably unconstitutional speech codes. In 2003, in perhaps its most redeeming moment, OCR issued a letter clarifying that it has no power to mandate that universities—public or private—police speech that is protected under the First Amendment. OCR explained that public universities, which are bound by the First Amendment, cannot ban merely offensive speech. And if private universities, which are not bound by the First Amendment (except in California through the Leonard Law), pass such speech codes, OCR made clear that they can in no way argue that the federal government forced their hand. This message was never fully accepted by campus administrators, who wanted expansive speech codes, or by risk managers, who believed it was safer to discourage offensive speech than face a lawsuit. Nonetheless, the 2003 letter did help defuse an old excuse. Unfortunately, the Department of Education under the Obama administration has been much more aggressive, granting itself new powers and redefining harassment in such broad language that virtually any offensive speech could be considered a matter of federal oversight. In May 2013, OCR and the Department of Justice (DOJ) entered into a resolution agreement with the University of Montana that the agencies deemed “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country.” This “blueprint” mandates an extraordinarily broad definition of sexual harassment: “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal conduct”—i.e., speech. The blueprint holds that this conduct need not be “objectively offensive” to constitute sexual harassment. This means that if a listener takes offense to any sex- or gender-related speech, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker has engaged in sexual harassment. Additionally, the final UM policy reviewed and approved by OCR and DOJ as part of their resolution agreement goes beyond policing sex-related speech by also prohibiting discriminatory harassment on the basis of 17 different categories, including “political ideas.” Treating this resolution agreement as a “blueprint” puts public universities in an impossible situation: violate the First Amendment or risk investigation and the possible loss of federal funding. OCR backed away from its characterization of the Montana agreement as a “blueprint” in a November 2013 letter to me. But unlike the clarification it issued in 2003, OCR has never communicated this to universities. As a result, as universities revise their sexual misconduct policies, they now include the blueprint’s definition of sexual harassment. There can be little doubt that the number of institutions doing so will only increase until OCR clarifies that it cannot require universities to adopt such a definition. OCR is unlikely to forego unconstitutional speech-policing any time soon. In October, OCR announced that it would open a Title IX investigation into the University of Mary Washington after students filed a complaint about the school’s handling of sexist and racist Yik Yak posts. If this investigation leads to new federal “guidance” on colleges’ responsibility to police students’ social media activity, even more protected campus speech could be threatened. What Has Changed: Students Using Their Free Speech to Limit Free Speech The biggest and most noticeable change in campus censorship in recent years has been the shift in student attitudes. Today, students often demand freedom from speech rather than freedom of speech. Media coverage of the campus free speech crisis exploded in 2014 after a rash of “disinvitations”—student and faculty attempts to disinvite controversial speakers from campus, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde. Attention from the media has increased as more student-led efforts have gained popularity, such as demands for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces,” and efforts to police so-called “microaggressions.” Critiquing PC culture is nothing new for conservative outlets, but even left-leaning authors at the New Republic, The Nation, New York Magazine, and The New York Timeshave been writing extensively about how these trends reflect very new, often alarming student attitudes about open discourse. In my 15 years at FIRE, students have historically been the most reliably pro-free-speech constituency on campus. Students often showed more common sense than the professoriate, and certainly much more than the administrators. But when stories about campus race-related protests inundated the news in the fall of 2015, I knew something had changed. It began when students at Wesleyan University demanded that the school’s primary student newspaper be defunded after it published a student op-ed that was critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. Shortly after, Wesleyan’s student government unanimously approved a resolution that will tentatively cut the paper’s printing budget by half. Things escalated when I saw firsthand that Yale students were demanding the resignations of two faculty members for sending out an email that questioned whether universities should tell students what they should or shouldn’t wear as Halloween costumes. Then, just days later, student protests at the University of Missouri soured when protesters manhandled a student journalist. These protests put First Amendment defenders and free speech advocates like me in a somewhat difficult position. Of course, I’m supportive of students exercising their free speech rights. Indeed, I find it refreshing that students have overcome their oft-diagnosed apathy towards serious social issues. However, it’s distressing that many of the protesters are using their free speech to demand limitations on others’ free speech. The irony of these demands was particularly prominent at the University of Missouri, where FIRE recently helped pass a state law making it illegal to limit free speech activities on public university campuses to tiny zones. This new law helped make the Mizzou students’ protests possible. But in a twist, the protesters created their own free speech exclusion zone to prevent media from covering the protest. Now student protestors at at least 75 American colleges and universities have released lists of demands “to end systemic and structural racism on campus.” Although this is a laudable goal, a troubling number of these demands would prohibit or chill campus speech. For example, many of the demands try to make the expression of racial bias, which is generally protected speech, a punishable offense. At Johns Hopkins University, protesters demand “impactful repercussions” for anyone who makes “Black students uncomfortable or unsafe for racial reasons.” Similarly, protesters at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University demand “strong repercussions and sanctions” for those who commit “racist actions and racial bias on campus.” And Emory University protestors want a bias response reporting system and sanctions for even “unintentional” acts or behaviors, including “gestures.” Others go as far as to mandate that universities forbid “hate speech.” At Missouri State University, protesters demand that administrators announce a “commitment to differentiating ‘hate speech’ from ‘freedom of speech.’” Protesters at Dartmouth College want “a policy with serious consequences against hate speech/crimes (e.g. Greek house expelled for racist parties).” Similarly, student protesters at the University of Wyoming demand that the code of conduct be revised to hold students accountable for hate speech, complete with “a detailed reporting structure.” The evidence that today’s students value freedom of speech less than their elders is not just anecdotal. In October, Yale University’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program released a survey that found that 51 percent of U.S. college students favor campus speech codes, and that 72 percent support disciplinary action against “any student or faculty member on campus who uses language that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive.” These troubling results were echoed by a November 2015 global survey from Pew Research Center finding that a whopping 40 percent of U.S. millennials ages 18–34 believe the government should be able to punish speech offensive to minority groups (as compared to only 12 percent of the Silent generation 70–87 year-olds, 24 percent of the Boomer generation 51–69 year-olds, and 27 percent of Gen Xers 35–50 year-olds). Conclusion Thankfully, through old strategies and new ones, we can improve the climate for free speech on campus. Just one student or professor can protect free expression for thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, by filing a lawsuit against his or her school with the help of FIRE’s Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project. SUFS is undefeated so far and has resulted in seven settlements that send the clear message to institutions that it will be expensive to ignore their obligations under the First Amendment. What’s more, with every speech-protective judgment, it becomes harder for administrators to defend themselves with “qualified immunity,” which shields individuals from personal liability where the law isn’t clear. Litigation might also be our best shot at forcing OCR to step back from its efforts to coerce institutions into adopting unconstitutional policies. Clearer and narrower policies than OCR’s May 2013 definition of “sexual harassment” have been struck down in court on numerous occasions. But until institutions see a real threat of an expensive judgment against them for overbroad harassment policies, they’ll continue to be motivated by the threat of OCR pulling their funding for what it seems to consider underbroad policies—i.e., colleges will err on the side of prohibiting protected expression. And because money talks, alumni should withhold donations to institutions that break the law or renege on promises to respect students’ and professors’ rights. And of course, anyone can contact his or her legislators and ask them to support bills—like the ones FIRE helped enact in Missouriand Virginia—that ensure students may fully exercise their free speech rights on public campuses statewide. These strategies may motivate schools to make quick changes, but free speech advocates know that long-lasting progress comes through cultural change. How do we teach a generation about the value of free expression when speech is too often presented as a problem to be overcome, rather than part of the solution to many social ills? This is our great challenge, and it must be faced with both determination and creativity if the always-fragile right of freedom of speech is to endure. 14 - 15 -Free speech ignites the divide between the subject and the other, opening up a space for the hyperreal pedagogy that is essential in favor of radical politics. 16 -ACLU 16. American Civil Liberties Union. For almost 100 years, the ACLU has worked to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States., “Hate Speech on Campus”, ACLU, 2016. https://www.aclu.org/other/hate-speech-campus//AD 17 -Many universities, under pressure to respond to the concerns of those who are the objects of hate, have adopted codes or policies prohibiting speech that offends any group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. That's the wrong response, well-meaning or not. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content. Speech codes adopted by government-financed state colleges and universities amount to government censorship, in violation of the Constitution. And the ACLU believes that all campuses should adhere to First Amendment principles because academic freedom is a bedrock of education in a free society. How much we value the right of free speech is put to its severest test when the speaker is someone we disagree with most. Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible: When one of us is denied this right, all of us are denied. Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has fought for the free expression of all ideas, popular or unpopular. That's the constitutional mandate. Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech ~-~- not less ~-~- is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance. College administrators may find speech codes attractive as a quick fix, but as one critic put it: "Verbal purity is not social change." Codes that punish bigoted speech treat only the symptom: The problem itself is bigotry. The ACLU believes that instead of opting for gestures that only appear to cure the disease, universities have to do the hard work of recruitment to increase faculty and student diversity; counseling to raise awareness about bigotry and its history, and changing curricula to institutionalize more inclusive approaches to all subject matter. 18 -The absence of meaning creates a world wherein we are trapped between conflicting hyperreal subjectivities, embracing Lacan's dialogue allows us to dismantle the structures that fuel the dichotomous divide. 19 -Campbell 08 (David Campbell insert quals. “The new pluralism: William Connolly and the contemporary global condition”. Duke University Press, 2008. Page 280-281) //WW JA 12/16/16 20 -In Connolly’s terms, what Hardt and Negri have failed to allow for with this either/ or logic is the relationship between micropolitics and macro-politics that animates large parts of Connolly’s recent writings. Micro-politics— related to arts of the self, and techniques of the self in some formulations— involves those practices that work on us or are drawn on by us to establish us, individually or collectively. They are techniques through which existing identities can be stabilized, new identities permitted, or new formations enabled. They can be located in a multitude of cultural and social sites (clubs, families, neighborhoods, the media, the military, religious groups, and the like) though they always work at numerous “in-between” points, nodes, and lines of the network state. Micropolitics flows from the paradoxical relationship of identity\ difference and is vital to a deep, multidimensional pluralism. 33 Notwithstanding the term and its examples, micropolitics cannot be confined to a sense of the local, regional, or substate. It is not a conception that translates into the idea of a confined space or particular scale. Instead, micropolitics indicates the significance of the transversal rather than the transnational, highlighting how the global is simultaneously local and the local necessarily global. As Connolly maintains, therefore, there is a constitutive relationship between the micropolitical and the macropolitical, with the latter understood in more formal political and institutional terms. As he writes, “micropolitics operates below the threshold of large legislative acts and executive initiatives, even as it ranges widely and sets conditions of possibility for these more visible actions. Technique and micropolitics form connective links joining practices of memory, perception, thinking, judgment, institutional design and political ethos.” 34 Although far from being the only transversal links—“market, antimarket practices (such as oligopolies, monopolies, and command systems), state decrees, and interstate agreements also play critical roles”— they do play an especially important role “below the threshold of political visibility inside every domain of life.” What the emphasis on the micropolitical points to is the significance of the visceral for contemporary thought and politics. In contrast to the epistemological register of intellectualism, where a sometimes narrow and shallow conception of reason governs thinking, the visceral is the densely layered register of political thought where affect— those dispositions to perceive, believe, associate, and decide— gives “texture and direction” to the “level of refined intellectuality.” Although it is infused with ideas and not antithetical to the intellectual, the visceral register is “not susceptible to modification by argument, dialogue or conversation alone.” 35 This is why methodological contests are often bitterly fought in the humanities and social sciences— each represents a question of faith as much as it does method. 36 Addressing the visceral register therefore means coming to terms with “the importance of relational techniques of the self and micro-politics. Such tactics mix image, movement, posture, concept and argument to new effect, simulating the process by which the habit in question became embodied the first time around.” 37 Paying attention to the affective and the visceral requires a new understanding of causality. Intellectualism implies a sense of what Connolly calls “efficient causality,” in which “you first separate factors and then show how one is the basic cause, or they cause each other, or how they together reflect a basic cause.” 38 In contrast— though not in place of efficient causality— there is emergent causality, whereby elements have effects at multiple levels, infusing areas and issues beyond their domain, and then, through adaptations, circuits, and feedback, themselves changing in response to these effects. Emergent causality thus refigures causation as resonance, whereby the elements affected fuse, “metabolizing into a moving complex.” 39 For Connolly this recasting of causation as resonance is the basis for a trenchant political critique of contemporary American politics at home and abroad. Seeing the country governed by a “theo-econopolitical machine”— the result of cowboy capitalism, evangelical Christians, the electronic news media, and the Republican Party forming an assemblage— Connolly offers a radical new way of explaining how (among other degradations) “state practices of torture,” “an international climate of fear and loathing against the Islamic world,” and “the Guantánamo Gulag” have come to be accepted, with lies and distortions about alternatives and those who promote them made equally acceptable. In large part, the power of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine” is established by “media presentations that do much of their work below the level of explicit attention and encourage the intense coding of those experiences as they do.” 40 So while the objects of concern are micropolitical and American (at least in the first instance), the effects of concern are macropoliti-cal and global. Connolly’s jeremiad is an appeal to “citizens who refuse to have their thinking placed under the automatic purview of the regime in which they reside, of religious authorities tied to the state, or corporate interests linked to either.” 41 The task for those citizens— both in and beyond America, united in cross-state, non-national movements— is to engage in their own “micropolitical work on the subliminal register.” 42 This is an especially challenging task, because given the idea of emergent rather than efficient causality, and the techniques of the self employed below the level of conscious politics by the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, it is not clear how this micropolitical resistance can be undertaken consciously and deliberately toward a desired outcome. 21 -Pluralism is a pre-requisite to societal change because it enables a re-orientation of values, but discourse must be paired with material change to be effective. 22 -Schoolman and Campbell 08 Morton Schoolman Morton Schoolman is Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany, and the author of The Imaginary Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse. David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the chairperson of the political science department. “Introduction: pluralism “old” and “new”’.//roman 23 -Thus, in Connolly's view, and in the view of other theorists whose work defined the critical temper, conventional pluralist theory is biased, burdened by normative assumptions, and top- heavy with methodologies masking an ideological and institutional infrastructure that organizes socioeconomic and political power to favor certain interests and groups. For Connolly and other theorists who share a critical temper, however, the burden of proof does not end with the demonstration of the biases of conventional pluralist theory. It is dedicated equally to developing alternative models of pluralist practice and to devising strategies for reform that bring democratic politics into conformity with the theory and practice of these models—although not entirely. As Connolly emphasizes, while proponents must be clear about the normative commitments embedded in their empirical models, their expectation and the expectation of their political allies and supporters must not be that the alternatives envisioned be fully attainable in practice. Practice always lags behind. Rather, alternative models are to provide bases for appraising the performance of the established pluralist system, including grounds to appreciate the achievements of existing pluralist practices, and they are to assist in setting goals for reform. Alternative models can also spur impulses for political reform and, importantly, create opportunities for reform by dramatizing future possibilities that can be realized through the political reorganization of already developed cultural and material resources. Put differently, alternative models can help to avoid the contented attitude toward the established political system that conventional pluralist theory often appears to encourage. Finally, alternative models also bring "the critical temper into sharper focus," which is to say that the critical temper has not completed its work until it turns back reflexively to appraise and revise as necessary every theoretical and practical aspect of critique. Such were the intended purposes of two alternative models of pluralism developed by Connolly in new works published not long after Political Science and Ideology and The Bias of Pluralism. In The Terms of Political Discourse (1974) Connolly explored how key concepts in politics are constructed from a normative point of view, and how normative differences among concepts can make them essentially contestable. "2 Connolly's larger intention here was to develop an alternative model of inquiry to the reigning positivist of modern pluralism and alternative models of pluralist politics. Indeed, in The Politicized Economy (1976) he and his coauthor Michael Best introduce an analysis of consumption distinguishing between consumer goods that expand inequality as they are generalized and consumer goods that reduce inequality as they are expanded to become inclusive goods.3 Their intention with this analysis was to construct an alternative model of pluralism able to reduce inequality and instruct political efforts to that end. Of course, the responsibility that the critical temper assumes is to move through political engagement at the theoretical level to political engagement at the practical level. This conventional way to formulate the relationship between theory and practice is somewhat misleading, though, for Connolly considers political theory generally a form of political practice, and in this context the critical temper itself instructs political strategy, for example by demonstrating the need and potential for reducing social and economic inequality. Connolly agrees with several of the theorists whose ideas fuel the critical temper that because its work broaches the political realm, the social science community can, like intellectuals as a whole, become an agent for political change and a pluralizing force within a political system whose barriers to democratic pluralism the critical temper understands well. The critical temper's political role grows out of its academic functions. It would help to "educate a larger public to the deficiencies of a biased pluralism," reopen "forgotten debates among social scientists, challenging the complacency of some and activating the latent concerns of others," and exert "constructive pressures on liberals in and around government. "4 Connolly is neither sanguine, nor cavalier, nor highly optimistic about improving the prospects for political reform through the allied agencies of the critical temper and its public. He recognizes that political strategy is the greatest challenge faced by the critics of conventional pluralist theory, because its theoretical advocates and the modern pluralist system of politics both work to define and limit the terms of political discourse. Yet he also recognizes that the challenge cannot be left to the routine politics of modern pluralism, to the positivist model of inquiry at one time dominant in the academy, or to the belief that the promise of a democratic pluralism will be redeemed by historical forces whose objectivity is vulnerable to the same criticism brought to bear on all other forms of positivism. 24 -They continue 25 -This is not to say that for Connolly conceptual revision is sufficient to produce political change. It is to insist that conceptual revision is a precondition for political change that prefigures it by alleging its necessity, suggesting its possibility, and opening opportunities and inferring strategies for change. Connolly’s many examples from the political life of the modern democratic world bear out this plurality of ways in which conceptual revision and political change are connected. To cite one, his consideration of “institutional racism” highlights the connection between revisions in the terms of our political discourse and the prefigured political changes that ensue. The claim that private and public institutions systematically discriminated against racial minorities was an interpretation of racism contesting established understandings that had underscored individual responsibility for racism. No sooner did the new concept of institutional racism enter into political life than members of the polity could not avoid considering the charge, even as they resisted it, that institutions in which they were implicated and that they believed to be legitimate unwittingly promoted inequality and lagged behind democratic progress achieved in other quarters of society. They were compelled to entertain the possibility that reform should be introduced through political strategies that solicited their support. If they were to abstain from involvement they now ran the risk of being implicated in racist beliefs from which they thought they were free. “Institutional racism” exemplifies how reflection on established concepts can call into question long-standing practices in which everyone is implicated, where reform supposes political action that depends upon antecedent conceptual revision. Politics— in this instance political struggle surrounding claims about discriminatory policies for which institutions are responsible— is bound up with struggles over the application and revision of familiar concepts. 26 -Unstable politics provides the chaos needed to generate ideas – proceduralism cedes public spaces to private institutions. 27 -Honig 13 (Bonnie Honig is a political, feminist, and legal theorist specializing in democratic theory. In 2013-14, she became Nancy Duke Lewis Professor-Elect of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, succeeding Anne Fausto-Sterling in the Chair in 2014–15. Honig was formerly Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. “The optimistic agonist: an interview with Bonnie Honig,” OpenDemocracy. March 7, 2013. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/nick-pearce-bonnie-honig/optimistic-agonist-interview-with-bonnie-honig) //WW JA 12/15/16 28 -BH: Most liberal and deliberative democratic theory treats proceduralism as a substitute for political engagement or as exhaustive of proper modes of political engagement. So when one reads the written work of these thinkers, often one can find (as with Habermas) that there’s a way in which the procedural mode of politics is, in a subtle or hidden way, dependent upon other modes of politics, but these other modes are not treated in the same honorific terms as proceduralism or discourse ethics because these other modes are unstable, or frightening or marginal. They are sometimes allowed to inform politics but they must be translated into the stable forms that institutionalisation requires. Habermas talks about the sluices through which issues move from the streets into more formal channels. But unstable and marginal political movements or tumults conjure up the passion and loyalty that fidelity to procedure postulates. And they also provide the imagination and fantasy of possible and alternative futures that bring people into politics, sweep them up into movements or give them a reason to participate. That is why I say in my book Emergency Politics that, without the events that proceduralists want to marginalise – like the crowd protests in the streets of Philadelphia (discussed by Jason Frank inConstituent Moments) – for example, the idea of attachment to a constitution is about as ‘attractive as kissing a typewriter.’ In short, the secret lifeblood of the constitutional patriot is connected to things that are destabilising of orderly constitutionalism or proper proceduralism and therefore are defined out of the centre. But that centre of orderly politics is actually deeply dependent on the energy and animation and frankly, the fun, that come from gathering together around issues that are affectively charged. Arendt once asked, while sitting on a panel debate on feminism, ‘What would we lose if we win?’ For the proceduralist that’s a good question to think about. If you actually succeeded in turning politics into mere proceduralism – completely procedural practices with none of the tumult and chaos that attend democratic forms of life – you lose the things you need for a democratic form: first, the tumult and spontaneity and even surprise that attend entry into the public sphere, and, second, public things. Admittedly procedures themselves are public things, but you also need parks and schools, prisons, armies and land and all the kinds of things people can struggle and fight over. In the US now, many of these are privatised or subcontracted out by the government to private industry. For proceduralists, such public things are what the procedures are there to manage. What we’ve seen over the last 20 years of neo-liberalism is a tendency to privatise or undercut those public things. So Hannah Arendt’s great and annoying question about feminism, ‘What would we lose if we win?’ is poignant in the context of proceduralists’ struggle with neo-liberalism. If the proceduralists won we’d have great procedures, but we would have little need of them because we would have nothing to distribute, as all the public things would be privately owned or managed. NP: With regards to public objects, are you saying that democracy requires objects of engagement, affection, ownership and contest that, in some sense, must be public in order to exist? BH: Yes. I mean that democracy postulates not just a demos, the people, about which we debate so much when it comes to the politics of immigration, multiculturalism and assimilation. And it requires more than procedures, for reasons I just alluded to. Those are important dimensions of democratic theory and practice, but the other term which is talked about less, is objects, whose ‘thingness’ creates a sense of publicity beyond the so-called public sphere, and whose finitude creates friction. Public things, to borrow from Wittgenstein, cannot be anything or nothing. They are something, and if a thing is something, it has a kind of definiteness to it. This isn’t to reduce things to pure materialism – everything has a life in language – but in their thingness, public things have a kind of finitude to them, and the friction that comes of fighting over finite things, that friction can be seen as the electricity of political life, or one source of its charge. When we focus on the demos and on procedure, we take our eye off what we should see as the important ball in the game – having public objects. Under neo-liberalism it’s become quite clear that we can drown in proceduralism – there’s no problem keeping people busy with paperwork and accountability, or in the case of deliberative democrats for example, we can have important debates about how to redraw and then defend the borders of a democratic country legitimately – but if all those things take up all our time, we’ll look up from our papers and our borders one day, and see that there isn’t anything left to fight over. What democracy has always been about is fighting over the public thing. These could be airwaves, as in public broadcasting, or water or climate, or national history or education or parks, prisons, or the military and its codes, membership and responsibilities. 29 -Optimistic agonism is necessary for political action. Proceduralism and political withdrawal fail – they’re self-defeating, unrealistic, and ineffective. 30 -Honig 2 (Bonnie Honig is a political, feminist, and legal theorist specializing in democratic theory. In 2013-14, she became Nancy Duke Lewis Professor-Elect of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, succeeding Anne Fausto-Sterling in the Chair in 2014–15. Honig was formerly Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. “The optimistic agonist: an interview with Bonnie Honig,” OpenDemocracy. March 7, 2013. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/nick-pearce-bonnie-honig/optimistic-agonist-interview-with-bonnie-honig) //WW JA 12/15/16 31 -BH: Optimism is the agonist’s greatest asset. People who would like to be able to withdraw from politics, who are tempted by the pleasures of private life untouched by contestation – in other words, who don’t think the private sphere is infused with power relations that need to be addressed – may feel put upon by the claims made by agonistic politics. It seems to refuse to them the withdrawal they seek. From their perspective, then, the claim that political contestation is unending seems to be quite pessimistic because, if your goal is withdrawal to a private life untouched by political engagement, the argument that engagement is inescapable seems pessimistic. But if you aspire to forms of life in common constellated around public things, in affectively charged ways that are both pleasurable and sometimes infuriating, built around finding, promoting and building shared public objects, engaged in some common cause, but not disciplined into oppressive forms of normalisation, then agonistic politics is very optimistic. Moreover, if you crave withdrawal but find waiting for you in the so-called private sphere, accretions of power and privilege that signal your impotence in a world beyond your control and influence, then agonism’s commitment to action in concert is for you, and its screams optimism. We have talked a lot about publicity and public things, but to be really clear it is around these things that equality and liberty and justice take shape. When they become merely procedural values, or when the form they take has to do with targets or indicators, they become shapeless and unrewarding values. They can only do the work that makes us value them if they are situated in the material life of citizens and residents together. And that I think is the optimism of agonistic politics. There is always an ongoing contestation, some of it in defence of historical achievements such as the welfare state, but agonism is not per se always oppositional or inherently contestational. It just anticipates resistance to all efforts to institute and maintain equality or justice. I argued in my first book that even the best of such efforts always generate remainders and so we agonists must also be attentive to those and aware that a further politics must follow to redress that. Thus, agonists hope that we can experience political engagement with pleasure and joy as well as the attending frustration that always comes with the friction of life in common. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,65 +1,0 @@ 1 -Framework 2 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that presents the best policy option – key to out of round advocacy skills. 3 -Nixon 2K (Themba-Nixon, Makani. Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping communities use media and policy advocacy to advance health equity and justice, “Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing” Colorlines 3.2, 2000) //WW JA 1/15/16 4 -“This is all about policy," a woman complained to me in a recent conversation. "I'm an organizer." The flourish and passion with which she made the distinction said everything. Policy is for wonks, sell-out politicians, and ivory-tower eggheads. Organizing is what real, grassroots people do. Common as it may be, this distinction doesn't bear out in the real world. Policy is more than law. It is any written agreement (formal or informal) that specifies how an institution, governing body, or community will address shared problems or attain shared goals. It spells out the terms and the consequences of these agreements and is the codification of the body's values-as represented by those present in the policymaking process. Given who's usually present, most policies reflect the political agenda of powerful elites. Yet, policy can be a force for change-especially when we bring our base and community organizing into the process. In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so. 5 - 6 -The standard is combatting structural violence – epistemologically precedes normative ethics. 7 -Young 74. Iris Marion Young, Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago since 2000, masters and doctorate in philosophy in 1974 from Pennsylvania State University. “Justice and the Politics of Difference”. Princeton University Press, 1990, Digital Copy. 8 -Group representation, third, encourages the expression of individual and group needs and interests in terms that appeal to justice, that transform an "I want" into an "I am entitled to," in Hannah Pitkin's words. In Chapter 4 I argued that publicity itself encourages this transformation because a condition of the public is that people call one another to account. Group representation adds to such accountability because it serves as an antidote to self-deceiving self-interest masked as an impartial or general interest. Unless confronted with different perspectives on social relations and events, different values and language, most people tend to assert their perspective as universal. When social privilege allows some group perspectives to dominate a public while others are silent, such universalizing of the particular will be reaffirmed by many others. Thus the test of whether a claim upon the public is just or merely an expression of self interest is best made when those making it must confront the opinion of others who have explicitly with different, though not necessarily conflicting, experiences, priorities, and needs (cf. Sunstein, 1988, p. 1588). As a person of social privilege, I am more likely to go outside myself and have regard for social justice when I must listen to the voice of those my privilege otherwise tends to silence. 9 - 10 -Prefer consequence-based frameworks: 11 -1 Intent and means-based frameworks reflect privilege and decenter oppressed voices 12 -Utt ’13. Jamie Utt is a writer and a diversity and inclusion consultant and sexual violence prevention educator, “Intent vs. Impact: Why Your Intentions Don’t Really Matter,” July 30, 2013 13 -Imagine for a moment that you’re standing with your friends in a park, enjoying a nice summer day. You don’t know me, but I walk right up to you holding a Frisbee. I wind up – and throw the disc right into your face. Understandably, you are indignant. Through a bloody nose, you use a few choice words to ask me what the hell I thought I was doing. And my response? “Oh, I didn’t mean to hit you! That was never my intent! I was simply trying to throw the Frisbee to my friend over there!” Visibly upset, you demand an apology. But I refuse. Or worse, I offer an apology that sounds like “I’m sorry your face got in the way of my Frisbee! I never intended to hit you.” Sound absurd? Sound infuriating enough to give me a well-deserved Frisbee upside the head? Yeah. So why is this same thing happening all of the time when it comes to the intersection of our identities and oppressions or privileges? Intent v. Impact From Paula Deen to Alec Baldwin to your annoying, bigoted uncle or friend, we hear it over and over again: “I never meant any harm…” “It was never my intent…” “I am not a racist…” “I am not a homophobe…” “I’m not a sexist…” I cannot tell you how often I’ve seen people attempt to deflect criticism about their oppressive language or actions by making the conversation about their intent. At what point does the “intent” conversation stop mattering so that we can step back and look at impact? After all, in the end, what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us? In some ways, this is a simple lesson of relationships. If I say something that hurts my partner, it doesn’t much matter whether I intended the statement to mean something else – because my partner is hurting. I need to listen to how my language hurt my partner. I need to apologize. And then I need to reflect and empathize to the best of my ability so I don’t do it again. But when we’re dealing with the ways in which our identities intersect with those around us – and, in turn, the ways our privileges and our experiences of marginalization and oppression intersect – this lesson becomes something much larger and more profound. This becomes a lesson of justice. What we need to realize is that when it comes to people’s lives and identities, the impact of our actions can be profound and wide-reaching. And that’s far more important than the question of our intent. We need to ask ourselves what might be or might have been the impact of our actions or words. And we need to step back and listen when we are being told that the impact of our actions is out of step with our intents or our perceptions of self. Identity Privilege and Intent For people of identity privilege, this is where listening becomes vitally important, for our privilege can often shield us from understanding the impact of our actions. After all, as a person of privilege, I can never fully understand the ways in which oppressive acts or language impact those around me. What I surely can do is listen with every intent to understand, and I can work to change my behavior. Because what we need to understand is that making the conversation about intent is inherently a privileged action. The reason? It ensures that you and your identity (and intent) stay at the center of any conversation and action while the impact of your action or words on those around you is marginalized. So, if someone ever tells you to “check your privilege,” what they may very well mean is: “Stop centering your experience and identity in the conversation by making this about the intent of your actions instead of their impact.” That is: Not everything is about you. “What They Did” vs. “What They Are” The incredible Ill Doctrine puts it well when he explains the difference between the “What They Did” conversation and the “What They Are” conversation, which you can watch here. In essence, the “intent” conversation is one about “what they are.” Because if someone intended their action to be hurtful and racist/sexist/transphobic/pickyourpoison, then they must inherently be racist/sexist/transphobic/pickyourpoison. On the other hand, the “impact” conversation is one about “what they did.” For you, it takes the person who said or did the hurtful thing out of the center and places the person who was hurt in the center. It ensures that the conversation is about how “what they did” hurts other people and further marginalizes or oppresses people. And it’s important for people to understand the difference. Just because you did something sexist doesn’t mean that you are sexist. Just because you said something racist doesn’t mean that you are racist. When your actions are called into question, it’s important to recognize that that’s all that is being called into question – your actions, not your overall character. Listen. Reflect. Apologize. Do Better. It doesn’t matter whether we, deep down, believe ourselves to be __________-ist or whether we intended our actions to be hurtful or _________-ist. It. Doesn’t. Matter. If the impact of our actions is the furthering of oppression, then that’s all that matters. So we need to listen, reflect, apologize, and work to do better in the future. What does that look like? Well, to start, we can actually apologize. I don’t know about you, but I am sick of hearing the ““I am sorry your face got in the way of my Frisbee! I never intended to hit you” apologies. Whether it’s Paula Deen weeping on TV or Alec Baldwin asking us to simply trust that he’s not a “homophobe,” those are not apologies. That’s why I was incredibly inspired and relieved to see a major organization do it well when Kickstarter apologized and took full responsibility for their role in funding a creepy, rapey seduction guide. They apologized earnestly and accepted the role they played in something really terrible. hey pledged to never allow projects like this one to be funded in the future. And then they donated $25,000 to RAINN. At the interpersonal level, we can take a cue from Kickstarter. When we are told that the impact of our action, inaction, or words is hurtful and furthers oppression, we can start by apologizing without any caveats. From there, we can spend the time to reflect in hopes of gaining at least some understanding (however marginal) of the harmful impact. And we can do our best to move forward by acting more accountably. 14 -2 Experience is epistemic – it is how we empirically ground our existence. Pain is universally bad and pleasure is universally good. 15 -Nagel 86 (Thomas “The View From Nowhere”, 1986) 16 -I shall defend the unsurprising claim that sensory pleasure is good and pain bad, no matter who’s they are. The point of the exercise is to see how the pressures of objectification operate in a simple case. Physical pleasure and pain do not usually depend on activities or desires which themselves raise questions of justification and value. They are just is a sensory experiences in relation to which we are fairly passive, but toward which we feel involuntary desire or aversion. Almost everyone takes the avoidance of his own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure as subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are not back up by any further reasons. On the other hand if someone pursues pain or avoids pleasure, either it as a means to some end or it is backed up by dark reasons like guilt or sexual masochism. What sort of general value, if any, ought to be assigned to pleasure and pain when we consider these facts from an objective standpoint? What kind of judgment can we reasonably make about these things when we view them in abstraction from who we are? We can begin by asking why there is no plausibility in the zero position, that pleasure and pain have no value of any kind that can be objectively recognized. That would mean that I have no reason to take aspirin for a severe headache, however I may in fact be motivated; and that looking at it from outside, you couldn't even say that someone had a reason not to put his hand on a hot stove, just because of the pain… Without some positive reason to think there is nothing in itself good or bad about having an experience you intensely like or dislike, we can't seriously regard the common impression to the contrary as a collective illusion. Such things are at least good or bad for us, if anything is. What seems to be going on here is that we cannot from an objective standpoint withhold a certain kind of endorsement of the most direct and immediate subjective value judgments we make concerning the contents of our own consciousness. We regard ourselves as too close to those things to be mistaken in our immediate, nonideological evaluative impressions. No objective view we can attain could possibly overrule our subjective authority in such cases. There can be no reason to reject the appearances here. 17 -3 Intentions and states of being are non-falsifiable and can only be informed by hypothetical consequences 18 -4 Life is a prerequisite to moral agency and freedom – justifies exceptions to their hyperindividualistic ethics. 19 -Advantage 1 – Resiliency 20 -Climate change is here – sea level rise and superstorms threaten coastal cities across the US. It’s too late to mitigate. 21 -Gillis 16 (Justin Gillis covers the science of global climate change and the policy implications of that science. He grew up in Georgia, graduated from the University of Georgia, and joined The Times after an award-winning career as a reporter and editor at The Miami Herald and The Washington Post. “Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun,” The New York Times. September 3, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/science/flooding-of-coast-caused-by-global-warming-has-already-begun.html) //WW JA 3/7/17 22 -For decades, as the global warming created by human emissions caused land ice to melt and ocean water to expand, scientists warned that the accelerating rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’ coastline. Now, those warnings are no longer theoretical: The inundation of the coast has begun. The sea has crept up to the point that a high tide and a brisk wind are all it takes to send water pouring into streets and homes. Federal scientists have documented a sharp jump in this nuisance flooding — often called “sunny-day flooding” — along both the East Coast and the Gulf Coast in recent years. The sea is now so near the brim in many places that they believe the problem is likely to worsen quickly. Shifts in the Pacific Ocean mean that the West Coast, partly spared over the past two decades, may be hit hard, too. These tidal floods are often just a foot or two deep, but they can stop traffic, swamp basements, damage cars, kill lawns and forests, and poison wells with salt. Moreover, the high seas interfere with the drainage of storm water. In coastal regions, that compounds the damage from the increasingly heavy rains plaguing the country, like those that recently caused extensive flooding in Louisiana. Scientists say these rains are also a consequence of human greenhouse emissions. “Once impacts become noticeable, they’re going to be upon you quickly,” said William V. Sweet, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md., who is among the leaders in research on coastal inundation. “It’s not a hundred years off — it’s now.” Local governments, under pressure from annoyed citizens, are beginning to act. Elections are being won on promises to invest money to protect against flooding. Miami Beach is leading the way, increasing local fees to finance a $400 million plan that includes raising streets, installing pumps and elevating sea walls. In many of the worst-hit cities, mayors of both parties are sounding an alarm. “I’m a Republican, but I also realize, by any objective analysis, the sea level is rising,” said Jason Buelterman, the mayor of tiny Tybee Island, one of the first Georgia communities to adopt a detailed climate plan. But the local leaders say they cannot tackle this problem alone. They are pleading with state and federal governments for guidance and help, including billions to pay for flood walls, pumps and road improvements that would buy them time. 23 - 24 -Coastal disasters hurt minority communities the hardest – they can’t afford to relocate or rebuild. 25 -Worth 15 (Pamela Worth is a journalist for the Huffington Post and writer for the Union of Concerned Scientists. She specializes writing on climate change, sustainable agriculture and transportation, nuclear weaponry and power, and public health and safety. “Where Climate Change Hits First and Worst,” Union of Concerned Scientists. Fall 2015. http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/catalyst/fa15-where-climate-change-hits-first-and-worst) //WW JA 3/7/17 26 -Turcios describes Opa-locka as a residential community whose population is largely African-American and Latino, with a few small businesses, a lot of families, and homes for low-income seniors. It is also a community changing because of climate change. These days, he says, it’s hotter, more humid, and it rains more. “Flooding is happening more often, there’s more floodwater than usual, and there’s more damage to houses than ever before.” Turcios knows a lot could be done to help prevent flooding damage to homes like his. But even with his job as a bank security guard, he’s not sure he can afford those measures—such as elevating his home by putting it on stilts. He doesn’t know what Opa-locka is doing to prepare for climate-related impacts, but he does know this: while South Florida has experienced relatively few storms over the last 10 years, it is only a matter of time before the next big one hits. In Florida, like the rest of the United States, poor populations often bear the brunt of climate impacts, living on the front lines of rising seas, catastrophic storms, and drought. These frontline communities are disproportionally communities of color: according to 2011 data, wealth inequality along racial lines has burgeoned dramatically in the United States in recent years. The typical black household has just 6 percent of the wealth of the typical white household; the typical Latino household has 8 percent. Low-income communities cope with chronically low investment in their neighborhoods, poorly built and maintained infrastructure, and the legacy of housing policies that have effectively segregated towns and cities—in some cases, forcing poorer populations to live closer to power plants, airports, waste sites, and otherwise undesirable land that is often affected “first and worst” by natural disasters. And when those natural disasters strike, efforts to help communities recover often fail those most in need—as when the promise to rebuild Opa-locka’s roofs only resulted in the distribution of blue tarps. Studies show that low-income and communities of color in the New York-New Jersey area were among the hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy, and continue to struggle to find housing. One study of an African-American community in Maryland affected by Sandy found that residents there experienced flooding in their streets for days longer than other communities, and had more difficulty accessing food and housing. In New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee failure and flood killed hundreds, the majority of people who were trapped in the city and left waiting for rescue and aid were overwhelmingly African-American and poor. Poor populations, and elderly nursing home residents, are more likely to lack transportation during disasters. And the fact that these populations may also have a high prevalence of chronic health problems increases their vulnerability to other storm-related hazards. In Opa-locka during Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, for example, Turcios says the news and other media kept locals informed about evacuation locations and procedures, but people without cars and/or driver’s licenses—predominantly the poor and elderly—had little choice but to stay home and weather the storms. 27 -Advantage 2 – Housing market 28 -Coastal flooding results in billions of dollars of damage and will collapse the housing market – adaptation is key now. 29 -Urbina 16 (Ian Urbina s an investigative reporter for The New York Times based in the Washington Bureau. His investigations most often focus on worker safety and the environment. He has received a Pulitzer, a Polk, and various other journalism awards. “Perils of Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate,” New York Times. November 24, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/24/science/global-warming-coastal-real-estate.html) //WW JA 3/6/17 30 -Rising sea levels are changing the way people think about waterfront real estate. Though demand remains strong and developers continue to build near the water in many coastal cities, homeowners across the nation are slowly growing wary of buying property in areas most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. A warming planet has already forced a number of industries — coal, oil, agriculture and utilities among them — to account for potential future costs of a changed climate. The real estate industry, particularly along the vulnerable coastlines, is slowly awakening to the need to factor in the risks of catastrophic damage from climate change, including that wrought by rising seas and storm-driven flooding. But many economists say that this reckoning needs to happen much faster and that home buyers urgently need to be better informed. Some analysts say the economic impact of a collapse in the waterfront property market could surpass that of the bursting dot-com and real estate bubbles of 2000 and 2008. The fallout would be felt by property owners, developers, real estate lenders and the financial institutions that bundle and resell mortgages. Over the past five years, home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25 percent less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood, according to county-by-county data from Attom Data Solutions, the parent company of RealtyTrac. Many coastal residents are rethinking their investments and heading for safer ground. “I don’t see how this town is going to defeat the water,” said Brent Dixon, a resident of Miami Beach who plans to move north and away from the coast in anticipation of worsening king tides, the highest predicted tide of the year. “The water always wins.” These concerns have taken on a new urgency since the presidential election of Donald J. Trump, who has long been a skeptic of global warming, claiming in 2012 that it was a concept “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” A real estate developer, Mr. Trump is also the owner of several South Florida properties, including Mar-a-Lago, a 20-acre site that stretches between the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway in Palm Beach. Mr. Trump’s recent selection of Myron Ebell to lead his Environmental Protection Agency transition team intensified these worries in Florida and among many climate scientists. Mr. Ebell has helped lead the charge against the scientific consensus that global warming exists and is caused by people. State lawmakers in Massachusetts and New Jersey are pushing to impose new rules on real estate agents and others, obligating them to disclose climate-related damage like previous flooding. Banks and insurers need to protect their collateral and investors more by improving their methods for estimating climate-change risks and creating more standardized rules for reporting them publicly, economists warn. In April, Sean Becketti, the chief economist for Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giant, issued a dire prediction. It is only a matter of time, he wrote, before sea level rise and storm surges become so unbearable along the coast that people will leave, ditching their mortgages and potentially triggering another housing meltdown — except this time, it would be unlikely that these housing prices would ever recover. 31 - 32 -The coastal housing bubble will pop in the next decade – federal legal frameworks are key to avoid the crash. 33 -Baptiste 16 (Nathalie Baptiste is a journalist based in Washington, DC, who writes about criminal justice, policing reform, and politics. Her work has appeared in The American Prospect and Mother Jones. “That Sinking Feeling,” American Prospect. February 19, 2016. http://prospect.org/article/sinking-feeling-politics-sea-level-rise-and-miamis-building-boom) //WW JA 3/7/17 34 -Stoddard’s goal is to explain to people what’s happening so that instead of a market crash, there’s a slow slide. “A lot of people ask me, ‘How much time do I have?’” he says. He tells them they don’t have to sell this year, but if it’s their intention to sell, they shouldn’t wait ten more. He also considers the homeowner’s financial situation. “It depends on if your financial well-being is dependent on your home equity. If so, your time horizon should be short—I would suggest you sell.” “As the reality of seawater rise sinks in, mortgage companies may conclude that 30 years is too long of a time to gamble on,” says Stoddard. “Maybe they’ll only issue 15-year mortgages.” If that were to cause people planning to sell later to change their minds and try to sell now, the result would be a run on the market. Stoddard offers a scenario in which an event leads to an overnight crash. “If you owe $250,000 on your house, but you can only get $50,000, what do you do then?” When properties lose value, underwater homeowners end up with no resources to relocate, essentially becoming refugees. “After a storm,” Stoddard explains, “it’s harder to sell your house.” If a devastating storm comes through and decimates South Florida and people move out, the city ends up with a lot of vacancies. A drop in the property taxes would erode city and county coffers. The first thing to go would be municipal services, Stoddard adds. With limited sanitation and maintenance services, cities and towns begin falling apart. Despite this threat looming on the horizon, there doesn’t seem to be enough planning for how to handle the impending crash. “We know it’s coming—but nobody is taking preparations,” says Stoddard. “The federal government hasn’t developed a legal framework on how to help people deal with it.” Stoddard’s goal is to try to explain to people that the crash is coming. “My goal is to make it a slow slide, rather than a crash. … The slower the change happens, the more people are able to adapt to it. It can be bad or it can be really, really, really bad—take your choice.” 35 - 36 -The collapse of the housing market would initiate a recession worse than ever before – damning millions into a life of poverty. 37 -Street 11.(Paul L. Street, Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org) is the author of many books and studies, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004), The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010), Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2005), and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011)., “Public Health Concerns? Urban Neoliberal Racism, Mass Poverty, and the Repression of Occupy”, The Official Website of Paul L. Street, 02-12-11, http://www.paulstreet.org/?p=560) //AD 38 -Nothing is more consistently and positively correlated with poor health, crime, illness, educational failure – with threats to public health and safety – than poverty, a great destroyer of lives and opportunity. At the same time, poverty’s negative impact on its most immediate victims and the broader society is magnified and intensified by the extreme spatial concentration of the poor in high poverty neighborhoods. As the Brookings researchers note in their report The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s: “Rather than spread evenly, the poor tend to cluster and concentrate in certain neighborhoods or groups of neighborhoods within a community. Very poor neighborhoods face a whole host of challenges that come from concentrated disadvantage—from higher crime rates and poorer health outcomes to lower-quality educational opportunities and weaker job networks. A poor person or family in a very poor neighborhood must then deal not only with the challenges of individual poverty, but also with the added burdens that stem from the place in which they live.” 9 Enduring poverty in a very poor neighborhood subjects poor residents to obstacles and difficulties reaching beyond the costs of individual poverty. It is one thing to be technically poor but live in a safe “middle class” neighborhood with well-maintained homes, good schools, green space, thriving shops, accessible quality health care, regular public transportation, full-service grocery stores, and other amenities. It is another thing to be poor in a dangerous, crime-ridden, high-poverty neighborhood with boarded up and dilapidated homes, where: the schools feel like jails; intact families are rare; nutrition is purchased under bullet-proofed plastic windows at inflated prices from combination food-liquor stores that lack fresh vegetables and specialize in starchy high sugar and salt items; gangs are prevalent; diabetes, hepatitis, and HIV are near epidemic; prison histories are more common than jobs; more than 40 percent of the men have been saddled with the lifelong mark of a criminal record; incarceration is an almost routine experience for young males; parks are scarce and/or too precarious to visit; doctors and dentists are absent and small shops are rare; taxies never go and public transit is irregular and hard to reach.10 As sociologist Douglas Massey noted in 1994, “housing markets…distribute much more than a place to live; they also distribute any good or resource that is correlated with where one lives. Housing markets don’t just distribute dwellings, they also distribute education, employment, safety, insurance rates, services, and wealth in the form of home equity; they also determine the level of exposure to crime and drugs, and the peer groups that one’s children experience.”11 Massey’s observation notwithstanding, U.S poverty remains highly and (by the Brookings researchers’ finding) increasingly concentrated. After declining somewhat during the long economic boom of the 1990s, Brookings reports, the number of Americans living in “extreme poverty neighborhoods” – where 40 percent of the residents live below the poverty line – rose by one third between 2000 and 2009. Currently in the U.S., 10.5 percent of poor people live in such neighborhoods, up from 9.1 percent in 2000. New York City, where the financial titan turned Mayor recently spent $7 million repressing and finally evicting Occupy from the city’s affluent financial district, is home to 1,575, 032 officially poor people and to 174 extreme poverty census tracts that house 697,375 people, including 375,876 poor. Chicago, where the rugged hippie-punching corporate mayor Rahm Emmanuel (Barack Obama’s former White House chief-of-staff) has consistently denied Occupiers a campsite, is home to 593,000 poor people and to 124 extreme poverty tracts that together house 304,139 people including 140,574 poor. Los Angeles, where Antonio Villaraigosa recently evicted his city’s Occupy Movement over mass public protest, is home to 844,712 poor people and to 65 extreme poverty tracts that house more than a quarter million (264,888) residents. Philadelphia, where Occupy was recently evicted, is home to 352,265 poor people and 58 extreme poverty census tracts that house 222,434 people.12 The recently increased concentration of poverty reflects among other things the disastrous impact of two recessions (the most recent one constituting the biggest economic downturn since the 1930s). Unfolding due to the capitalist profits addiction 13 of the Occupation Movement’s official enemy the One Percent, the crises have taken a terrible toll on the employment prospects, net worth, and geographic mobility opportunities for the nation’s disproportionately nonwhite poverty population. Racial oppression is critical here, beneath the movement’s sometimes simplistic division between the super-rich and “the rest of us” (the 1 Percent and the 99 Percent). The Brookings study’s online version includes a link to maps showing the location of the extreme poverty tracts dozens of American cities.14 As is obvious to anyone familiar with the racialized geography of these highly segregated metropolises, the maps demonstrate that America’s zones of concentrated urban misery are very disproportionately black and Latino. And indeed, while blacks make up 12.6 percent of overall U.S. population, the Brookings reports that blacks comprise 45 percent of the population (by far and away the largest share) that lives in the nation’s extreme poverty neighborhoods. 15 The mortgage crisis created by the financial elite and the collapse of the housing market has been particularly devastating in Black and Latino neighborhoods. This is because those households’ net worth is more proportionately tied up in home equity, thanks to the broad absence of financial wealth in the Black and Latino communities. As the leading wealth and power analyst G. William Domhoff explains on his Web site Who Rules America?: “In 2007, the average white household had 15 times as much total wealth as the average African-American or Latino household. If we exclude home equity from the calculations and consider only financial wealth, the ratios are in the neighborhood of 100:1. Extrapolating from these figures, we see that 70 of white families’ wealth is in the form of their principal residence; for Blacks and Hispanics, the figures are 95 and 96, respectively.”16 To make matters worse, the predatory home lending practices (carried out by the leading financial institutions owned and run by the One Percent) that did do much to precipitate the mortgage and financial collapse of 2007 and 2008 particularly targeted people of color. As David McNally notes: “By 1998…subprime mortgages composed one-third of all home loans made to African-Americans and a fifth of those made to Latinos. And the numbers just kept rising. By 2005, 70 percent of all subprime loans made in Washington, D.C. went to African-Americans. A year later, African-Americans received 41 percent of all sub-prime mortgages in New York, while 29 percent went to Latinos. Women of color were especially vulnerable to subprime extortion Inevitably, as the mortgage rates kicked higher it became increasingly difficult for the borrowers to make payments, especially as job loss soared, especially among workers of color, reducing peoples’ capacity to pay.”17 Incredibly enough but consistent with longstanding racial patterns in U.S. labor markets, four of every ten black Americans experienced unemployment during the 2008-09 Great Recession. As McNally elaborates: “Throughout the first half of 2010, official unemployment among blacks was over 16 percent, while among Latinos, it hovered around 13 percent. In thirty-five of America’s largest cities, official jobless rates for blacks were between 30 and 35 percent- levels equal to the worst days of the Great Depression emphasis added….Not surprisingly, blacks and Latinos are almost three times more likely to live in poverty than whites.”18 In today’s New York Times (I am writing on the morning of Thursday, December 1, 2011), liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof reflects on the recollections of former Chase Home Finance regional vice president James Theckston, who told Kristof how he won company accolades for high sales in 2006 and 2007. Theckston “says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans…These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up,” Kristof writes. “If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction,” Kristof comments, “it helps to listen to a former banker like Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.”19 39 -Plan 40 -Plan Text: The United States should guarantee a right to housing for coastal communities at risk of natural disasters. 41 -A right to housing is SPECIFICALLY key – the plan ensures equitable disaster relief by conducting pre-disaster research and streamlining disaster response and recovery efforts. 42 -IHRC 16 (Written by International Human Rights Committee members: E. Michelle Andrews, Cristine Delaney Goldman, Katherine Hughes, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Jean McCarroll, Matthew Putorti, and Laura Steven. The report was overseen by past chairs Elisabeth Wickeri and Stephen Kass. “ADVANCING THE RIGHT TO HOUSING IN THE UNITED STATES: Using International Law as a Foundation,” THE INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTEE OF THE NEW YORK CITY BAR ASSOCIATION. February 2016. http://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072632-AdvancingtheRighttoHousingIHR2122016final.pdf) //WW JA 3/6/17 43 -The United States’ failure to recognize a right to adequate housing further complicates its response to an increasing number of devastating natural disasters.187 A response to such disasters based on international human rights law would require an assessment of both the extent of the disaster and the ongoing implementation of the right to adequate housing.188 Were the federal government to recognize such a right, a number of key items to be assessed could be incorporated into its disaster recovery plans, including (i) the ratio of housing damage to overall damage, (ii) damage to rental units versus owner-occupied units, (iii) degree of habitability, (iv) cost to rebuild, (v) measurement of damage concentration, and (vi) pre-disaster local conditions such as housing costs and other social and economic data. During post-disaster recovery periods, authorities could then measure annually, for example, the number of houses rebuilt, the profile of the returned population, and community participation, all as marked against this pre-disaster and pre-recovery information.190 As a result, these measurements could be used to ensure access to affordable, decent housing by all populations impacted during the disaster by streamlining disaster relief efforts, exposing discriminatory practices, appropriately allocating federal, state, and local relief funds, and otherwise. Hurricane Katrina looms large in recent memory with respect to concerns about a lack of adequate housing in a post-disaster context. In the third year following the storm, 72 of New Orleans’s population had returned to the city; however, approximately 70 of affordable rental housing was decommissioned or demolished due to the storm.191 As a result, rents skyrocketed.192 Furthermore, in the post-disaster period, HUD opted to demolish 4,500 severely damaged rental units and declined to renovate others, thus further exacerbating the situation.193 In fact, although New Orleans’s rate of returning residents is impressive, there is a disparity in the rates of return between those who were able to rebuild with their own funds and those who were reliant on government aid.194 As has been well documented, the Lower Ninth Ward, home to a substantial low-income African-American population, has experienced “minimal levels of return,” while the Lakeview district, home to a white, middle-class population, has experienced “significant” recovery.195 Recognition of a right to adequate housing, as defined under international human rights law, would go a long way toward curing the shortfalls in housing that were experienced by the most vulnerable populations in post-Katrina New Orleans. The criticisms and shortcomings of the response to Hurricane Katrina have certainly informed federal, state, and local governments’ response to the housing crisis that arose in New York and New Jersey following Superstorm Sandy.196 Moreover, the scale of the housing shortage in post-Sandy New York and New Jersey is far eclipsed by that experienced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.197 However, a human rights-based housing framework, which recognizes the right to adequate housing and incorporates clearly-defined measurements of achievement, would be indispensable in crafting both preparation and post-disaster response plans that ensure that (i) the needs of the most vulnerable are met and (ii) housing-related discrimination— whether intentional or inadvertent—does not come into play.198 Undoubtedly, government officials have gained valuable experience in dealing with these issues during recent disasters, but a human rights approach would ensure ongoing monitoring in the weeks, months, and years following the initial response. 44 - 45 -The inevitable impacts of climate change mandate an adaptational strategy to ensure even human rights applications – the plan is key. 46 -Stillings 14 (Zackary L. Stillings is a graduate from the University of Michigan Law School and B.A., French Language and Literature and International Studies, University of Alabama. “Human Rights and the New Reality of Climate Change: Adaptation's Limitations in Achieving Climate Justice,” Michigan Journal of International Law. Vol. 35 Issue 3. 2014. http://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066andcontext=mjil) //WW JA 3/4/17 47 -The UNHRC’s Resolution concerned itself with several specific rights.19 In particular, it found that climate change could impact the right to food, the right to health, the right to housing, and, by implication, the right to self-determination.20 It is these rights, as well as the right to life mentioned in the Inuit petition, that the majority of scholars have focused on during subsequent discussions regarding climate change and human rights.21 Specifically, in the months following the UNHRC’s Resolution, scholars largely focused on human rights law as it related to climate change mitigation—that is, how to hold large emitting nations for human rights violations arising from failures to mitigate climate harms.22 In many ways, this was a logical starting point: why not attempt to hold those actually responsible for climate change accountable for their past emissions, or for failing to curb future emissions? Due in large part to the weakness of the international human rights regime,23 however, scholars soon realized that holding large emitters responsible for extraterritorial harms due to climate change would be nearly impossible.24 Accordingly, scholars began to turn their attention elsewhere, with several more recent papers specifically examining the applicability of the human rights regime to climate change adaptation. 25 In some ways, this approach has proven more successful. In certain situations, for instance, it might well be possible to use human rights law to hold nations responsible for failing to adequately adapt to climate change.26 Specifically, a nation might—by improperly adapting to future climate change-related disasters—be held responsible for failing to guard its citizens’ human rights. This Note uses the unique lens of environmental justice, a theory largely concerned with basic fairness for all communities, to examine this adaptation-focused body of scholarship and to evaluate its likely implications for the world’s most vulnerable nations. Environmental justice is a particularly salient means of evaluating the efficacy of the adaptation-focused approach to climate change, because the theory’s central premise is that environmental benefits and burdens should be distributed evenly across communities and populations. Using the principles of environmental justice on an international level, then, is a way to elucidate the differences in environmental benefits and burdens across national boundaries. 48 - 49 -The plan works from the bottom up to develop effective policies to provide essential housing needed to adapt. 50 -Worth 2 (Pamela Worth is a journalist for the Huffington Post and writer for the Union of Concerned Scientists. She specializes writing on climate change, sustainable agriculture and transportation, nuclear weaponry and power, and public health and safety. “Where Climate Change Hits First and Worst,” Union of Concerned Scientists. Fall 2015. http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/catalyst/fa15-where-climate-change-hits-first-and-worst) //WW JA 3/7/17 51 -“Our priority is working to help ensure that our nation’s transition to cleaner energy and more resilient communities is equitable,” says Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and climate policy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “These changes have to include opportunities, especially jobs and infrastructure investments, for underrepresented communities.” (See our related interview with Van Jones) The first step in building equitable climate resilience, Cleetus says, is to identify particularly vulnerable communities. Efforts to cut emissions nationwide will benefit people everywhere, but resilience to climate impacts must be built up in specific locations. The disproportionate burden of climate change faced by African-Americans, Latinos, and other people of color requires greater policy attention and resources. To aid in this effort, Cleetus and her team have developed a screening tool to help identify “hot spot” communities in the United States by measuring both socioeconomic factors and vulnerability to sea level rise. Drawing attention to these communities’ special planning needs can inform decisions about the resources required to adequately protect their residents. For example, the UCS tool identified Orleans Parish in Louisiana as a high-risk area when taking into consideration both climate impacts and socioeconomic factors such as poverty rates and per capita income. Within 15 years, the parish faces a projected sea level rise of 6 to 10 inches and a threefold increase in tidal flooding events, but many parish residents cannot afford to adequately prepare for these events, and are already struggling with storm surge flooding and land loss today. UCS is recommending the creation of a National Climate Resilience Fund to help protect the residents of Orleans Parish and similar communities with federal funds targeted specifically to such hot spots (see “How to Make Climate Resilience Effective and Fair,” below). Although UCS is calling on national leaders to work toward climate equity, it is just as important to listen to the residents of communities who are learning to cope with climate change about what their towns and cities need, and how they have managed to keep their neighborhoods together through worsening conditions. Members of these communities are keenly aware of the gaps in current resources and policies that need to be closed, and they must have a voice in the process of building community resilience. “Any successful effort has to start by including local leaders in the decision-making process and listening to their needs and concerns,” Cleetus points out. 52 - 53 -The plan works – empirically proven 54 -Chaplin 16 (Tracey S. Chaplin is a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies. “The U.S. Strategy for Flood Resilience Is Underwater,” NextCity. August 24, 2016. https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/us-strategy-flood-resilience-coastal-cities-competitions) //WW JA 3/6/17 55 -Intense storms produced over 20 inches of rain in the Baton Rouge area. The resulting flood crisis claimed the lives of 13 people, and over 20,000 people had to be rescued by the Coast Guard and other first responders. Over 40,000 homes are damaged, many irreparably. President Barack Obama’s administration has granted an emergency disaster declaration expected to apply to more than 30 parishes — nearly half of all parishes in the state. As the impacts of climate change continue to accelerate, water is projected to be one of the most impacted resources, increasingly experienced in extremes: rising sea levels, superstorms and drought. This is not the first time that Louisiana has experienced these extremes. Hurricane Katrina is still a painful wound in New Orleans, both in local memory and in the physical destruction left in her wake. On the Louisiana coast, indigenous communities have been losing a hard-fought battle against rising sea levels as the Gulf of Mexico swallows their homes, contaminating drinking water and bleaching agricultural lands. Unfortunately, experts predict that this flood crisis will not be the last. Rising sea levels associated with impacts of climate change are predicted to ravage the Louisiana coastline, where 1.29 million people are at risk. Facing rising waters, residents in one Alaska town voted in August to move their entire village. National displacement as a result of sea level rise is projected to reach 13 million people by the end of this century. Researchers at MIT and Princeton University have found that the types of superstorms that used to make landfall once a century could now arrive every three to 20 years, and that so-called “500-year floods” might arrive as often as every 25 years, according to findings published in Nature Climate Change. These impacts of climate change wreak havoc on infrastructure, livelihoods and access to potable water. How is the government responding? To be sure, federal disaster relief, such as that issued for the flood crisis of southern Louisiana, is an appropriate short-term response. However, long-term solutions are imperative. And because the United States does not recognize the human right to water, proposed solutions must, unfortunately, strike a delicate balance between providing access and denying that access is due to citizens. 56 - 57 -Underview 58 -Ask if I will meet your interp in cx; this avoids unnecessary theory- we can work something out; this allows for greater substantive debate which is the only form of education which is unique to debate. Grant me an auto I meet on T/theory if the interp isn’t checked to discourage nonchecking. 59 -Abstract questioning is useless - debate should seek to design concrete alternatives. 60 -Bryant 12 (EDITED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE – the author said “she” and it was replaced with the word “to” – Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/) 61 -I must be in a mood today– half irritated, half amused –because I find myself ranting. Of course, that’s not entirely unusual. So this afternoon I came across a post by a friend quoting something discussing the environmental movement that pushed all the right button. As the post read, For mainstream environmentalism– conservationism, green consumerism, and resource management –humans are conceptually separated out of nature and mythically placed in privileged positions of authority and control over ecological communities and their nonhuman constituents. What emerges is the fiction of a marketplace of ‘raw materials’ and ‘resources’ through which human-centered wants, constructed as needs, might be satisfied. The mainstream narratives are replete with such metaphors carbon trading!. Natural complexity, mutuality, and diversity are rendered virtually meaningless given discursive parameters that reduce nature to discrete units of exchange measuring extractive capacities. Jeff Shantz, “Green Syndicalism” While finding elements this description perplexing– I can’t say that I see many environmentalists treating nature and culture as distinct or suggesting that we’re sovereigns of nature –I do agree that we conceive much of our relationship to the natural world in economic terms (not a surprise that capitalism is today a universal). This, however, is not what bothers me about this passage. What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all of this is true? What, given existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right? At least green consumerism, conservation, resource management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in activities that are making real differences. From this passage– and maybe the entire text would disabuse me of this conclusion –it sounds like we are to reject all of these interventions because they remain tied to a capitalist model of production that the author (and myself) find abhorrent. The idea seems to be that if we endorse these things we are tainting our hands and would therefore do well to reject them altogether. The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities. Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. 62 -Particularism is good—root cause claims and focus on overarching structures ignore application to material injustice. 63 -Gregory Fernando Pappas 16 Texas AandM University “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice”, The Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016, BE 64 -The pragmatists’ approach should be distinguished from nonideal theories whose starting point seems to be the injustices of society at large that have a history and persist through time, where the task of political philosophy is to detect and diagnose the presence of these historical injustices in particular situations of injustice. For example, critical theory today has inherited an approach to social philosophy characteristic of the European tradition that goes back to Rousseau, Marx, Weber, Freud, Marcuse, and others. Accord- ing to Roberto Frega, this tradition takes society to be “intrinsically sick” with a malaise that requires adopting a critical historical stance in order to understand how the systematic sickness affects present social situations. In other words, this approach assumes that¶ a philosophical critique of specific social situations can be accomplished only under the assumption of a broader and full blown critique of soci- ety in its entirety: as a critique of capitalism, of modernity, of western civilization, of rationality itself. The idea of social pathology becomes intelligible only against the background of a philosophy of history or of an anthropology of decline, according to which the distortions of actual social life are but the inevitable consequence of longstanding historical processes. (“Between Pragmatism and Critical Theory” 63)¶ However, this particular approach to injustice is not limited to critical theory. It is present in those Latin American and African American political philosophies that have used and transformed the critical intellectual tools of ¶ critical theory to deal with the problems of injustice in the Americas. For instance, Charles W. Mills claims that the starting point and alternative to the abstractions of ideal theory that masked injustices is to diagnose and rectify a history of an illness—the legacy of white supremacy in our actual society.11 The critical task of revealing this illness is achieved by adopting a historical perspective where the injustices of today are part of a larger historical narrative about the development of modern societies that goes back to how Europeans have progressively dehumanized or subordinated others. Similary, radical feminists as well as Third World scholars, as reaction to the hege- monic Eurocentric paradigms that disguise injustices under the assumption of a universal or objective point of view, have stressed how our knowledge is always situated. This may seem congenial with pragmatism except the locus of the knower and of injustices is often described as power structures located in “global hierarchies” and a “world-system” and not situations.12¶ Pragmatism only questions that we live in History or a “World-System” (as a totality or abstract context) but not that we are in history (lowercase): in a present situation continuous with others where the past weighs heavily in our memories, bodies, habits, structures, and communities. It also does not deny the importance of power structures and seeing the connections be- tween injustices through time, but there is a difference between (a) inquiring into present situations of injustice in order to detect, diagnose, and cure an injustice (a social pathology) across history, and (b) inquiring into the his- tory of a systematic injustice in order to facilitate inquiry into the present unique, context-bound injustice. To capture the legacy of the past on present injustices, 65 - we must study history but also seek present evidence of the weight of the past on the present injustice.¶ If injustice is an illness, then the pragmatists’ approach takes as its main focus diagnosing and treating the particular present illness, that is, the particular situation-bound injustice and not a global “social pathology” or some single transhistorical source of injustice. The diagnosis of a particular injustice is not always dependent on adopting a broader critical standpoint of society in its entirety, but even when it is, we must be careful to not forget that such standpoints are useful only for understanding the present evil. The concepts and categories “white supremacy” and “colonialism” can be great tools that can be of planetary significance. One could even argue that they pick out much larger areas of people’s lives and injustices than the categories of class and gender, but in spite of their reach and explanatory theoretical value, they are nothing more than tools to make reference to and ameliorate particular injustices experienced (suffered) in the midst of a particular and unique re- lationship in a situation. No doubt many, but not all, problems of injustice are a consequence of being a member of a group in history, but even in these cases, we cannot a priori assume that injustices are homogeneously equal for all members of that group. Why is this important? The possible pluralism and therefore complexity of a problem of injustice does not always stop at the level of being a member of a historical group or even a member of many groups, as insisted on by intersectional analysis. There may be unique cir- cumstances to particular countries, towns, neighborhoods, institutions, and ultimately situations that we must be open to in a context-sensitive inquiry. If an empirical inquiry is committed to capturing and ameliorating all of the harms in situations of injustice in their raw pretheoretical complexity, then this requires that we try to begin with and return to the concrete, particular, and unique experiences of injustice.¶ Pragmatism agrees with Sally Haslanger’s concern about Charles Mills’s view. She writes: “The goal is not just a theory that is historical (v. ahistori- cal), but is sensitive to historical particularity, i.e., that resists grand causal narratives purporting to give an account of how domination has come about and is perpetuated everywhere and at all times” (1). For “the forces that cause and sustain domination vary tremendously context by context, and there isn’t necessarily a single causal explanation; a theoretical framework that is useful as a basis for political intervention must be highly sensitive to the details of the particular social context” (1).13¶ Although each situation is unique, there are commonalities among the cases that permit inquiry about common causes. We can “formulate tentative general principles from investigation of similar individual cases, and then . . . check the generalizations by applying them to still further cases” (Dewey, Lectures in China 53). But Dewey insists that the focus should be on the indi- vidual case, and was critical of how so many sociopolitical theories are prone to starting and remaining at the level of “sweeping generalizations.” He states that they “fail to focus on the concrete problems which arise in experience, allowing such problems to be buried under their sweeping generalizations” (Lectures in China 53).¶ The lesson pragmatism provides for nonideal theory today is that it must be careful to not reify any injustice as some single historical force for which particular injustice problems are its manifestation or evidence for its exis- tence. Pragmatism welcomes the wisdom and resources of nonideal theories that are historically grounded on actual injustices, but it issues a warning about how they should be understood and implemented. It is, for example, sympathetic to the critical resources found in critical race theory, but with an important qualification. It understands Derrick Bell’s valuable criticism as context-specific to patterns in the practice of American law. Through his inquiry into particular cases and civil rights policies at a particular time and place, Bell learned and proposed certain general principles such as the one of “interest convergence,” that is, “whites will promote racial advantages for blacks only when they also promote white self-interest.”14 But, for pragma- tism, these principles are nothing more than historically grounded tools to use in present problematic situations that call for our analysis, such as deliberation in establishing public policies or making sense of some concrete injustice. The principles are falsifiable and open to revision as we face situation-specific injustices. In testing their adequacy, we need to consider their function in making us see aspects of injustices we would not otherwise appreciate.15 - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,81 +1,0 @@ 1 -Framework 2 -I value morality as per the evaluative term “ought” in the resolution, which is defined as “used to express duty or moral obligation”. By Merriam-Webster. 3 - 4 -To evaluate ethical judgements we must first discard our pre-disposed ontologies via inclusion of the subject at hand. 5 -Butler 09. Judith Butler, “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?” Jan 1st 2009, Pg.138, http://books.google.com/books/about/Frames_of_War.html?id=ga7hAAAAMAAJ 6 -We ask such normative questions as if we know what we mean by the subjects even as we do not always know how best to represent or recognize various subjects. Indeed, the “we” who asks such questions for the most part assumes that the problem is a normative one, namely, how best to arrange political life so that recognition and representation can take place. And though surely this is a crucial, if not the most crucial, normative question to ask, we cannot possibly approach an answer if we do not consider the ontology of the subject whose recognition and representation is at issue. Moreover, any inquiry into that ontology requires that we consider another level at which the normative operates, namely, through norms that produce the idea of the human who is worthy of recognition and representation at all. That is to say, we cannot ask and answer the most commonly understood normative questions, regarding how best to represent or recognize such subjects, if we fail to understand the differential of power at work that distinguishes between those subjects who will be eligible for recognition and those who will not. 7 - 8 -This inclusion mandates the expression of all voices which necessarily prohibits structural oppression. 9 -Young 74. Iris Marion Young, Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago since 2000, masters and doctorate in philosophy in 1974 from Pennsylvania State University. “Justice and the Politics of Difference”. Princeton University Press, 1990, Digital Copy. 10 -Group representation, third, encourages the expression of individual ¶ and group needs and interests in terms that appeal to justice, that transform an "I want" into an "I am entitled to," in Hannah Pitkin's words. In ¶ Chapter 4 I argued that publicity itself encourages this transformation ¶ because a condition of the public is that people call one another to account. Group representation adds to such accountability because it serves as an antidote to self-deceiving self-interest masked as an impartial or general interest. Unless confronted with different perspectives on social relations and events, different values and language, most people tend to assert their perspective as universal. When social privilege allows some group perspectives to dominate a public while others are silent, such universalizing of the particular will be reaffirmed by many others. Thus the test of whether a claim upon the public is just or merely an expression of self interest is best made when those making it must confront the opinion of others who have explicitly with different, though not necessarily conflicting, ¶ experiences, priorities, and needs (cf. Sunstein, 1988, p. 1588). As a person of social privilege, I am more likely to go outside myself and have ¶ regard for social justice when I must listen to the voice of those my privilege otherwise tends to silence. 11 -Thus the standard is combatting structural oppression. 12 - 13 -Additionally: 14 -1. Only naturalism is epistemically accessible 15 -Papinaeu 11 David Papineau, “Naturalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007 16 -Moore took this argument to show that moral facts comprise a distinct species of non-natural fact. However, any such non-naturalist view of morality faces immediate difficulties, deriving ultimately from the kind of causal closure thesis discussed above. If all physical effects are due to a limited range of natural causes, and if moral facts lie outside this range, then it follow that moral facts can never make any difference to what happens in the physical world (Harman, 1986). At first sight this may seem tolerable (perhaps moral facts indeed don't have any physical effects). But it has very awkward epistemological consequences. For beings like us, knowledge of the spatiotemporal world is mediated by physical processes involving our sense organs and cognitive systems. If moral facts cannot influence the physical world, then it is hard to see how we can have any knowledge of them. 17 -2. Intentions and states of being are non-falsifiable and can only be informed by hypothetical consequences 18 -3. Life is a pre-requisite to agency and freedom – that justifies exceptions to hyper-individualist ethics 19 - 20 - 21 -Plan 22 -Text: The United States federal government should guarantee the Right to Housing by banning forced evictions and promoting legal security of tenure for all persons. 23 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) //SN 24 -In some cases its recommendations, have been very specific. During its review of The Philippines, the Committee, after affirming the general principles, urged the Government to extend indefinitely the moratorium on summary and illegal forced evictions and demolitions, promote greater security of tenure, take the necessary measures, including prosecutions wherever appropriate, to stop violations of laws such as R.A. 7279. 45 It also urged that certain laws criminalising trespass - PD 772 and PD 1818 – be repealed that all existing legislation relevant to the practice of forced evictions should be reviewed so as to ensure its compatibility with the provisions of the Covenant. The Committee also noted that when ‘relocating evicted or homeless persons or families, attention should be paid to the availability of job opportunities, schools, hospitals or health centres, and transport facilities in the areas selected.’ This position was also reflected in the Committee’s General Comment No.4 on Right to Adequate Housing of 1991, which states that: ‘instances of forced eviction are prima facie incompatible with the requirements of the Covenant and can only be justified in the most exceptional circumstances, and in accordance with the relevant principles of international law.’46 This General Comment, an authoritative interpretation of Article 11 of ICESCR, further provided that States are obliged to take immediate measures to confer legal security of tenure upon those persons and households currently lacking such protection. In the same year, the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights, also an expert body, passed a resolution in similar terms and continued to do so until 1998.47 The political arm of the United Nations human rights machinery quickly affirmed these conclusions. The Commission on Human Rights resolved in 1993 that ‘the practice of forced evictions constitutes a gross violation of human rights, in particular the right to adequate housing’.48 The resolution went on to urge governments to eliminate the practice and confer legal security of tenure to all persons and recommend that they provide remedies to those who had been forcibly evicted. The Commission issued a comparable resolution in 2004. Worryingly, the later resolution appears to place more emphasis on states eliminating evictions that are inconsistent with national law. It is clear, nonetheless, from the language of the resolution that states must ensure that national law conforms to international standards. 25 -AND, laws are uniquely key. 26 -http://www.jstor.org/stable/20072726 27 -The biased and male-oriented interpretation of the right to housing is likewise visible in the definition of the seven constituent elements of the right to housing that should be fulfilled in any given context in order to establish adequate housing.21 These features include legal security of tenure; the availability of services, material facilities, and infrastructures; the affordability of housing; its habitability, accessibility, location, and cultural adequacy. These standards theoretically support a broad and interdepen dent interpretation of the right to housing. According to the standards, a shelter turns into a home only if it provides access to basic natural resources and social services, only if the way that housing is constructed is in line with the cultural identity of its inhabitants, and only if it is accessible to disadvantaged groups.22 Further, only safety standards regarding the material structure and the location of the home are addressed, whereas the conditions inside the home are yet again neglected. Here I will analyze the standards of legal security and habitability, which are most infringed upon through domestic violence. The Committee describes the legal security of tenure in the following way: Notwithstanding the type of tenure, all persons should possess a degree of security of tenure which guarantees legal protection against forced eviction, harassment and other threats. States parties should consequently take immedi ate measures aimed at conferring legal security of tenure upon those persons and households currently lacking such protection, in genuine consultation with affected persons and groups.23 This standard is correctly considered the cornerstone of the right to adequate housing. The preliminary requirement for the exercise of the right to housing is the actual possibility for an individual to claim a legally recognized right over tenure, i.e., a right to own and dispose of it. The CESCR Committee explains that legal security should protect the individual from "forced eviction, harassment and other threats."24 Despite the theoretically broad formulation of "other threats," this standard has been consistently interpreted as limited to the protection from "forced evictions, harassment and other threats" carried out by individuals external to the family, as in the case of government officials carrying out forced evictions.25 The legal security of tenure is usually considered a legal document that protects the inhabitants as a cohesive group from any external threat against their possession. However, a more detailed analysis of the most typical family structures, and an examination of who actually enjoys this legal security on paper, demonstrates that throughout the world, security of tenure is most often granted to men, at the expense of womxn, because men are presumed to be the heads of the households.26 In many regions of the world, womxn are de jure or de facto prevented from buying, inheriting, or owning their homes as a result of discriminatory laws and customs regulating matrimonial and inheritance laws, as well as access to property and housing.27 In these situations womxn are clearly denied the main rinciple of the right to housing. The standard of legal security of tenure is of fundamental importance to womxn, and it acquires an essential role for battered womxn. As the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing under lined in his 2003 report, Womxn and Adequate Housing: The attainment of legal security of tenure is of critical importance to womxn; without it they are disproportionately affected by forced evictions, . . . domestic violence, . . . discriminatory inheritance laws, development projects and globalization policies that circumscribe access to productive land and natural resources.28 When battered womxn are prevented by laws, policies, customs or culture from attaining a legally secured tenure, the possibility of leaving an abusive husband is very limited. Shelters for battered womxn are not always available, and womxn who decide to abandon violent households often find no alternative to homelessness, ending up in urban slums.29 This implies that an abused womxn without real access to a legally secured tenure is indirectly forced to stay in an abusive relationship and endure physical and psychological violence. She is forced by the state's laws, or by society's practice, to remain prisoner in her own home or, alternatively, to accept homelessness and its connected risks. The Special Rapporteur drew attention to this phenomenon in the same report, stating: In most countries, whether developed or developing, domestic violence is a key cause of womxn's homelessness and presents a real threat to womxn's security of person and security of tenure. Many womxn continue to live in violent situations because they face homelessness if they resist domestic violence.30 A state's failure to ensure womxn substantial access to property and housing violates womxn's basic human right to adequate housing and indirectly contributes to the persistence of domestic violence. States are therefore required to grant womxn the legal security of tenure as an integral part of their obligation to eradicate domestic violence.31 We should recall the CESCR Committee's recommendation: "States parties should . . . take immediate measures aimed at conferring legal security of tenure upon those persons and households currently lacking such protection, in genuine consultation with affected persons and groups."32 28 - 29 - 30 - 31 -Advantage 1: Forced Evictions 32 -Forced evictions destroy value to life – 4 reasons. 33 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) //SN 34 -The link between the right to adequate housing and other human rights Human rights are interdependent, indivisible and interrelated. In other words, the violation of the right to adequate housing may affect the enjoyment of a wide range of other human rights and vice versa. Access to adequate housing can be a precondition for the enjoyment of several human rights, including the rights to work, health, social security, vote, privacy or education. The possibility of earning a living can be seriously impaired when a person has been relocated following a forced eviction to a place removed from employment opportunities. Without proof of residency, homeless persons may not be able to vote, enjoy social services or receive health care. Schools may refuse to register slum children because their settlements have no official status. Inadequate housing can have repercussions on the right to health; for instance, if houses and settlements have limited or no safe drinking water and sanitation, their residents may fall seriously ill. Forced evictions can have implications for the enjoyment of several human rights, including the right to education and the right to personal security. Forced evictions often result in children’s schooling being interrupted or completely stopped. The trauma experienced following a forced eviction can also impair a child’s capacity to attend classes. During forced evictions, people are frequently harassed or beaten and occasionally even subjected to inhumane treatment or killed. Womxn and girls are particularly vulnerable to violence, including sexual violence, before, during and after an eviction. At the same time, the right to adequate housing can be affected by the extent to which other human rights are guaranteed. Access to housing is most at risk for those denied the right to education, work or social security. Improving housing conditions and protecting against forced evictions are often dependent on claims made by those affected. Where the rights to freedom of expression, assembly or association are not respected, the possibility for individuals and communities to advocate better living conditions is significantly reduced. Human rights defenders working to protect the right of individuals and communities to adequate housing have been subjected to violence, arbitrary arrest, and arbitrary and prolonged detention. 35 -Value to life outweighs because there’s no reason to live if life is repressive and results in continuous suffering 36 - 37 -These evictions operate on discriminatory justifications, targeting marginalized individuals who have been rendered invisible by political calculations and spills over into violations of human rights at large. 38 -UN 14 (UN Habitat for a better urban future and United Nations Human Rights office of the High Commissioner) “Forced Evictions” Fact Sheet No. 25/Rev 1 2014 http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS25.Rev.1.pdf //AG 39 -Forced evictions are generally discriminatory or lead to discrimination. In many instances, the victims of forced evictions are those belonging to specific groups of the population: the poorest, communities facing discrimination, the marginalized and those who do not have the clout to change the decisions and designs of the project leading to their displacement. It is often their very poverty that subjects the poor to displacement and resettlement and being perceived as targets of least resistance. According to the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, “forced evictions intensify inequality, social conflict, segregation and ‘ghettoization’, and invariably affect the poorest most socially and economically vulnerable and marginalized sectors of society, especially womxn, children, minorities and indigenous peoples.”3 Discrimination is frequently a factor in forced evictions. Discrimination means any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of various grounds which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of human rights. It is linked to the marginalization of specific population groups and is generally at the root of fundamental structural inequalities in society. Prohibited discrimination can exist in either the public or the private sphere. Rights can be violated through the direct or indirect action or omission by States, including through their institutions or agencies at the national and local level, as well as in their international cooperation and assistance. Those at heightened risk of forced eviction are often placed in such situations on account of discrimination. For instance, those in informal settlements or otherwise lacking security of tenure are often marginalized groups. Additionally, racial or ethnic groups could be targets of forced eviction specifically because of their race, ethnicity or religion. 40 - 41 -Lack of security of tenure leads to neighborhood purifications emptying out racial minorities and womxn, structurally favoring white male America. 42 -Hartman and Robinson 3 (Chester Hartman is President/Executive Director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council and David Robinson is Senior Staff Attorney for Housing and Special Projects at the Legal Services for New York City Legal Support Unit) “Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem” Housing Policy Debate Volume 14, Issue 4 Fannie Mae Foundation 2003 43 -First, renters, who have far less security of tenure than homeowners, are disproportionately represented among involuntary movers.7 And since, compared with homeowners, renters tend to be disproportionately minority and to have lower incomes, the problem of involuntary moves disproportionately affects the more vulnerable households in our society. Numerous studies have shown that those who are evicted are typically poor, womxn, and minorities. 1. In New York City, a 1993 study found that close to half of the tenants facing eviction in Housing Court had incomes below $10,000; 86 percent were African American or Latino (Community Training and Resource Center et al. 1993). 2. In Chicago, 72 percent of those appearing in court were African American, 62 percent were womxn (Chadha 1996). 3. A study of rent court in Baltimore found that the vast majority of tenants facing eviction were “poor black womxn” and in “marginal economic circumstances” (Bezdek 1992, 535 and 558). 4. In Philadelphia, a researcher found that 83 percent of the tenants facing eviction were nonwhite and that 70 percent were nonwhite womxn (Eldridge 2001). 5. A Los Angeles study concluded: The analysis of unlawful detainer cases filed in the Municipal Court of the City of Los Angeles in the first six months of 1991... points to one overwhelming finding: the higher the percentage of African American persons and children (persons under 18years of age) belonging to female headed households, the higher the eviction rate….Self-help, extra-legal evictions where the landlord forces the tenant out, may be more common in immigrant communities where new arrivals are less aware of their rights and more susceptible to intimidation. Therefore, the results may understate the eviction rate for immigrant groups. (Heskin and Davidson 1993, i) 6. In Oakland, “Four out of five ‘30-day No Cause’ evictions (78) are minority households” (East Bay Housing Organizations 2002). 7. Another New York City study (Rubel 2001) found that a disproportionate number of evictions take place in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough, which has the highest proportion of low-income tenants. The various market forces that produce evictions are more likely to impact these subpopulations as well. 44 - 45 -The process of eviction itself increases the likelihood of physical abuse and sexual violence 46 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) //SN 47 -While forced evictions have an impact on both men and womxn, womxn tend to be disproportionately affected. Womxn are often exposed to violence and intense emotional stress before, during and after an eviction, because of their close ties to the home and their role as caregivers for the entire family.11 During evictions, verbal abuse, beatings and rape may take place. Following an eviction, womxn are often more vulnerable to abuse, particularly if they have been forced to move to inadequate housing, often in informal settlements. The lack of shelter and privacy in such settlements can lead to increased exposure to sexual and other forms of violence. When housing conditions are inadequate, womxn are often disproportionately affected. For instance, womxn are usually responsible for collecting water if water and sanitation services are inadequate, and often spend up to 4 hours a day walking, queuing and carrying water. Domestic violence has been identified as a major cause of womxn and children becoming homeless, especially when there is insufficient protection by law enforcement officials or by the legal system itself. Conversely, fear of homelessness might compel womxn to remain in abusive relationships. 48 - 49 -Evictions are the leading cause of homelessness; this prevents the realization of every other right. 50 -Desmond 2. (Matthew Desmond, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard University. He is an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty., “Unaffordable America: Poverty, housing, and eviction”, No. 22, Institute for Research on Poverty: University of Wisconsin – Madison, March 2015, http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mdesmond/files/fastfocus2015.pdf) //AD 51 -The consequences of eviction are many and multidimensional. Eviction is a leading cause of homelessness, especially for families with children.15 It also is directly linked to high rates of residential mobility among low-income households—so much so, in fact, that after accounting for forced moves, poor renters do not exhibit higher mobility rates than other renters. Residential instability often brings about other forms of instability—in families, schools, communities— compromising the life chances of adults and children.16 An effective way to decrease residential instability among poor families would be to lower the incidence of eviction. Additionally, involuntary displacement is linked to substandard housing conditions. An analysis of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study data revealed that renters whose previous move was involuntary were almost 25 percent more likely to experience long-term housing problems than matched renters who did not experience a recent forced move.17 One explanation for why some poor families live in substandard housing conditions—which among other things harms children’s health—is that they are compelled to do so in the aftermath of an eviction. Another study found that even after conditioning on a host of important factors, experiencing an eviction is associated with over a third of a standard deviation increase in neighborhood poverty and crime rates, relative to voluntary moves.18 Families involuntarily displaced from their homes often end up in worse neighborhoods. Tenants evicted through the court system carry the judgment on their record. Owing to open record laws, in many states this information is easily accessible and free online. An eviction judgment makes it difficult to secure decent housing in a safe neighborhood, as many landlords reject anyone with a recent eviction.19 Many people think that job loss leads to eviction, but eviction can also lead to job loss. An eviction not only can consume renters’ time, causing them to miss work, it also can consume their thoughts and cause them to make mistakes on the job, and also result in their relocating farther away from their worksite, increasing their likelihood of tardiness and absenteeism. Results from the Milwaukee Area Renters Study found that workers who involuntarily lost their housing were roughly 20 percent more likely subsequently lose their jobs, compared to similar workers who did not.20 These results imply that initiatives promoting housing stability could promote employment stability. Eviction is also negatively associated with mental health. Drawing on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study—a national, longitudinal survey that follows a birth cohort of about 4,900 new parents and their children living in 20 large cities—one study found that the year following an eviction, mothers are 20 percent more likely to report depression than their peers. Moreover, at least two years after their eviction, mothers still experienced significantly higher rates of depression than their peers.21 The same study also documented a large and robust relationship between a recent eviction and increased material hardship.22 Mothers who experienced an eviction in the last year report around one standard deviation higher rates of material hardship than mothers who were matched along many other characteristics but had not experienced eviction. As with depression, mothers’ material hardship may also be affected in the long-term, as significant differences were detected at least two years after the event.23 If material hardship is a measure of the lived experience of scarcity— assessing, say, hunger or sickness because food or medical care was financially out of reach—then these findings suggest that eviction is a driver of poverty 52 - 53 -The psychological impact of homelessness on children is equivalent to that of armed conflict 54 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) //SN 55 -Children’s health, educational advancement and overall well-being are deeply influenced by the quality of housing in which they live. Lack of adequate housing, forced evictions or homelessness tend to have a profound impact on children due to their specific needs, affecting their growth, development and enjoyment of a whole range of human rights, including the right to education, health and personal security. In its State of the World’s Children 2005 report, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) revealed that more than one out of every three children in the developing world—over 640 million children—does not live in adequate housing. Given the pervasiveness and the impact of homelessness and inadequate housing on children, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has emphasized the universal character of the right to adequate housing, stressing that it applies to every child without distinction or restriction of any kind. While the existence of millions of street children is often the most visible sign of children’s lack of shelter, other situations also have specific ramifications for their enjoyment of the right to adequate housing. Cramped, crowded, noisy or run-down housing conditions seriously undermine children’s development and health, as well as their capacity to learn or play. Studies have highlighted that the lack of adequate housing increases mortality rates for children under five, while the most significant form of chemical pollutant affecting children’s health in low- and middle-income countries is indoor pollution resulting notably from poor-quality stoves and inadequate ventilation.12 Access to basic services attached to the home, such as safe drinking water and adequate sanitation, is fundamental to ensuring children’s health. Diarrhoeal diseases claim the lives of nearly two million children every year; 80 to 90 per cent of these cases are the result of contaminated water and inadequate sanitation. Particularly for girls, lack of safe drinking water within or close to the home can mean long journeys to collect water at remote water points, often to the detriment of their education, along with the risk of being subjected to harassment and other threats along the way. The location of housing is also crucial to ensuring children’s access to childcare, schools, health care and other services. If settlements are far away from schools, or if transport is either non-existent or too expensive, it is hard for children to get an education or health care. Homelessness has particular effects on children, compromising their growth, development and security. Homeless children can be vulnerable to a range of emotional problems, including anxiety, sleeplessness, aggression and withdrawal. Their access to basic services, such as health care and education, can also be seriously impaired if they have no fixed address. Children living and working in the street are particularly vulnerable to threats, harassment and violence by private individuals and the police. Forced evictions tend to affect the entire family but have a particular impact on children. Following forced evictions, family stability is often jeopardized and livelihoods threatened. The impact of forced evictions on children’s development is considered to be similar to that of armed conflict.13 56 - 57 -Systemic micro-violence structurally primes macro conflict 58 -Scheper-Hughes, Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely, and Bourgois Professors of Anthropology @ UPenn, ‘4 59 - (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22) 60 -This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization) 61 - 62 -The impact is even larger – eviction data is underreported because of a lack of policies like the RTH 63 -Hartman and Robinson 3 (Chester Hartman is President/Executive Director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council and David Robinson is Senior Staff Attorney for Housing and Special Projects at the Legal Services for New York City Legal Support Unit) “Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem” Housing Policy Debate Volume 14, Issue 4 Fannie Mae Foundation 2003 https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/10950.pdf //AG 64 -Each year, an untold number of Americans are evicted or otherwise forced to leave their homes1 involuntarily. The number is likely in the many millions, but we have no way of gauging even a modestly precise figure for renters, because such data are simply not collected on a national basis or in any systematic way in most localities where evictions take place. (By contrast, reliable data on the number of mortgage foreclosures, which presage the eviction of homeowners—although little beyond sheer numbers—are systematically collected and published by the Mortgage Bankers Association of America.) The problem’s lack of visibility, as well as the lack of attention given to solutions, especially compared with the attention paid to homeowners’ problems, can be partially understood by the lesser favor shown toward renters as opposed to homeowners in American culture and policy. Having good data on this vast, hidden housing problem would seem an essential ingredient for developing housing policies and programs that might decrease the incidence and negative impact of what, for most of those affected, must be a profoundly traumatic experience, both as it occurs and in its later consequences.2 Beyond gross numbers, it is critical to know the demographic characteristics of those being evicted, the reasons for the evictions, and what happens to those who are evicted after forced displacement. (Homeowners experiencing mortgage foreclosure are, as noted, essentially evicted. While we make occasional passing reference to homeowners, their problems and characteristics are somewhat different from those of tenants. A separate article dealing with their issues, another inadequately recognized housing problem, would be a useful complement to our treatment of the tenant displacement problem.)3 65 - 66 - 67 -Advantage 2: Ableism 68 -People with disabilities are often denied access to adequate housing due to lack of security of tenure – leads to homelessness 69 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) //SN 70 -Accessibility remains a key issue. Housing, housing-related facilities and neighbourhoods are traditionally designed for people without disabilities. The frequent exclusion and marginalization of persons with disabilities often mean that they are rarely consulted when new housing structures or neighbourhoods are developed or slums upgraded. They are also vulnerable to associated violations of their rights. For instance, the lack of adequate sanitation facilities in informal settlements can pose severe challenges to them. Security of tenure is another challenge for persons with disabilities, in particular those with an intellectual or psychosocial disability. The frequent lack of recognition of their legal capacity, often coupled with requirements for applications in person, means that persons with such disabilities are rarely able to enter into any type of formal housing contract (lease, ownership, etc.) and, therefore, have to rely on less formal avenues to secure housing. Those arrangements, in turn, make them more vulnerable to forced evictions. In general, where stigmatization remains unaddressed and social or community services are unavailable—including social housing—persons with disabilities continue to face discrimination when seeking housing, or more general challenges in securing the resources necessary for obtaining adequate housing. Such challenges inevitably make them more vulnerable to forced evictions, homelessness and inadequate housing conditions. General comment No. 4 provides that persons with disabilities must be accorded full and sustainable access to adequate housing resources, and that housing law and policy should take into account their special needs. In its general comment No. 5 (1994), the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights reaffirmed that the right to adequate housing includes accessibility for persons with disabilities. The Special Rapporteur on adequate housing has also underlined not only that housing should be physically and economically accessible to persons with disabilities, but that they should be able to effectively participate in the life of the community where they live. 71 -Ableism outweighs – categorization based on normative biological standards justifies every form of discrimination and violence. 72 -Siebers 9. Tobin Siebers; Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism at University of Michigan; October 28; “The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification”; http://disabilities.temple.edu/media/ds/lecture20091028siebersAesthetics_FULL.doc 73 -Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That oppression involves “groups,” and not “individuals,” means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances. Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferiority—what some call “in-built” or “biological” inferiority. Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of the group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics—not only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. One additional thought must be noted before I treat some analytic examples from the historical record. First, despite my statement that disability now serves as the master trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. “Racism” disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. “Sexism” disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and physical inferiority. “Classism” disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status. “Ableism” disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature. As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human inferiority—and the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression—the prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will continue, I expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of disability as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority. 74 -Advantage 3: IPV 75 -IPV Survivors are being evicted and are the people who need housing most 76 -http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/law/files/2013/03/IWHR-Gendered-Housing-Perspective.pdf 77 -A. Domestic Violence and Homelessness Homeless Womxn All of these problems unique to womxn are exacerbated by the leading cause of homelessness for womxn, gender-based violence.277 A 2007 survey of twenty-three United 269 UNCESCR, General Comment 4, supra note 70 at ¶ 13. 270 Id. at ¶¶ 12, 13. 271 UDHR, supra note 188 at art. 3,; ICCPR, supra note 170 at art. 9,; Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), art. 16., Dec. 10, 1984. 1465 U.N.T.S. 85, 272 See CEDAW, supra note 112; CRC, supra note 73 at art. 19,; CRPD, supra note 72 at art. 16; Convention Against Torture, General Comment 2,.¶ 22. CAT/C/GC (2008). 273 CEDAW, General Recommendation No. 19, supra note 112 at ¶ 4. 274 Id. at ¶ 9; Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR), General Comment No. 16, ¶ 27. E/C.12/2005/4 (2005). 275 CEDAW, General Recommendation No. 19, supra note 112 at ¶ 1; UNCESCR General Comment No. 16, supra note 274 at ¶ 27. 276 CEDAW, General Recommendation No. 19, supra note 112 at ¶ 23; Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR), General Comment No. 14, ¶ 12. E/C.12/2000/4 (2000). 277 See Homelessness and United States Compliance with Human Rights Obligations, supra note 244. 44 States’ cities found that thirty-nine percent identified domestic violence as the primary cause of local homelessness for womxn.278 Around the country, twenty-two to fifty-seven percent of homeless womxn report that domestic violence was the immediate cause of their homelessness.279 Chicago: • In 2003, 56 of homeless womxn reported being victims of domestic violence • In 2003, 36 of homeless womxn reported experiencing physical or sexual abuse as children • In 2003, 23 of homeless womxn reported that domestic violence was the immediate cause of their homelessness Los Angeles: • In 2007, 70 of homeless womxn reported experiencing domestic violence, sexual assault and/or child abuse in their lifetime • In 2004, 58 of homeless womxn who had experienced domestic violence in the past year reported becoming homeless as a direct result of fleeing New York City: • In 2002, Almost 50 of all homeless heads of households experienced domestic violence • In 2005, 25 of all homeless heads of households cited domestic violence as the direct cause of their homelessness Washington D.C.: • In 2002, 50 of family members in shelters were estimated to have experienced domestic violence National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Some Facts on Homelessness, Housing, and Violence Against Womxn, p. 1-2. The estimated 1.3 million victims of domestic violence per year often must make the difficult decision to remain in the abusive relationship or risk homelessness for themselves and their children.280 As a result of either having to quickly flee the situation or years of isolation caused by the abuser, domestic violence victims have barriers to securing alternative housing. These individuals have limited, poor, or no financial resources, employment or rental histories, credit records, or social supports.281 Combined with a lack of affordable housing and long waiting lists for assisted housing, it is no wonder that sixty-three percent of homeless womxn have been victims of intimate partner violence as adults and twenty-eight percent of families are homeless as a result of domestic violence.282 Even when a domestic violence victim manages to leave an abusive relationship and gather the resources necessary to obtain housing, landlords often discriminate against those with orders of protection or other signs of domestic violence.283 278 National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty,. Some Facts on Homelessness, Housing, and Violence Against Womxn,. p. 2. http://www.nlchp.org/content/pubs/Some20Facts20on20Homeless20and20DV.pdf (last visited October 10, 2009). 279 Homelessness and United States Compliance with Human Rights Obligations, supra note 244 at pp. 9-10. 280 National Coalition Against Domestic Violence,. Domestic Violence and Housing, p.1. http://www.ncadv.org/files/DomesticViolenceFactSheet(National).pdf (last visited Oct. 5, 2009). 281 The Characteristics and Needs of Families Experiencing Homelessness, supra note 91, at 3. 282 Domestic Violence and Homelessness, supra note 95, at 1. 283 Id. at 2. 45 The UN has recognized domestic violence as both a form of gender discrimination284 and a can be in certain circumstances a type of torture unique to womxn.285 Under CEDAW, states are required to “pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating discrimination against womxn.”286 Furthermore, states must take measures to modify social and cultural patterns that create a system of inferiority of womxn to men.287 A number of policies in the United States are aimed at ending discrimination against womxn, beginning with constitutional protections under the Fourteenth Amendment. Further protections come from the Violence Against Womxn Act of 2005 and the Fair Housing Act, both of which prohibit housing discrimination against domestic violence victims.288 While all of these measures are positive steps in the right direction, the United States government still has not fully complied with international human right. On a single day in 2007, emergency shelters in the United States had over 25,000 requests for emergency assistance from domestic violence victims. On that same day, 7,707 requests for domestic violence services, sixty-one percent of which were for housing, went unmet.289 Though the number and conditions of domestic violence shelters has improved, most shelters do not allow victims to stay more than ninety days despite the fact that the average amount of time it takes for a family to secure alternative housing is six to ten months.290 In fact, in a 2004 survey, twenty-seven cities reported a thirty-five month average wait time for Section 8 housing and a twenty month wait time for public housing. Clearly, the United States must take additional measures to end gender-based violence so that womxn are not only guaranteed their right to security but also so they may fully realize other human rights. Homeless Children The following chart illustrates that domestic violence not only affects womxn, but also plays a large role in the lives of homeless children. 284 CEDAW, General Recommendation No. 19, supra note 112 at ¶¶ 1, 6. 285 CAT, General Comment No. 2, supra note 272 at ¶ 18. 286 CEDAW, supra note 112, at art. 2. 287 Id. at art. 5(a). 288 The Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County: The Fair Housing Project,. Fair Housing Protections for Domestic Violence Victims, pp. 2-3. http://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/PIRC/DocumentsAbstracts/Legal-Aid- Society-of-Palm-Beach-County-Inc-R4/LASPBC-Domestic-Violence/FH-Domestic-Violence-Pub.pdf (last visited October 25, 2009). 289 Some Facts on Homelessness, Housing, and Violence Against Womxn, supra note 278, at 4. 290 Domestic Violence and Housing, supra note 228, at 1. 46 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Violence Experienced by Homeless Children 35 24 15 11 8 4 8 3 Physically Abused Sexually Abused Subject of Child Protection Investigation Witnessed Violent Acts w ithin Their Family Saw Father Hit Mother Saw Mother Abused by a Male Partner Homeless Children Housed Children Homeless Children: America’s New Outcasts, The National Center on Family Homelessness Violence committed against children is specifically addressed in Article 19 of the Convention the Rights of the Child. States are obligated to protect children from “all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, and maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse.” Both homeless and housed children in the United States are at risk of experiencing violence as a child. As the chart above demonstrates, homeless children are at least twice as likely to be victims of physical or sexual abuse. The United States must take additional measures to protect all children from violence. 78 -AND, federal managers of subsidized housing often discriminate against womxn because their names appear in police reports. 79 -Lapidus 80 -http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1398andcontext=jgspl 81 -III. OTHER FORMS OF HOUSING DISCRIMINATION AGAINST VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE In addition to evictions, battered womxn face housing discrimination in a variety of other ways and at various stages of the housing process.42 They may face discrimination at the time they apply for housing. Often, landlords, particularly managers of subsidized housing, conduct criminal record checks of individuals who apply to rent an apartment. These record checks generally indicate the names of both the individual convicted of the crime and the complaining victim. Advocates have discovered that housing authority managers frequently reject rental applications from womxn who have been victims of domestic violence as indicated by the complaining victim’s name appearing in the criminal record checks. In addition, as a result of mandatory arrest policies and courts issuing mutual orders of protection, battered womxn may actually show up on these record checks as the perpetrator of the violence.43 A second problem that battered womxn face at the admissions stage is that as a result of the domestic violence, they may not have solid work histories, credit, or references because the batterer has prevented them from holding a steady job, from maintaining a bank account, or from developing relationships with others, each of which may be a strike against them in the application process and may lead landlords to decline their applications.44 Those battered womxn who are able to obtain apartments may face difficulties maintaining them.45 Problems of continued occupancy include discrimination in the terms and conditions of the tenancy, such as a requirement that no violence occur in the future, a condition that is not imposed on other tenants.46 Further, in many cases only the husband’s name is listed on the lease, leading the housing authority to assert that it cannot evict the abuser and allow the victim to continue her occupancy.47 Finally, the victim is often held accountable for the acts of the abuser and is required to pay for property damage that he caused.48 Obtaining a transfer from one public housing complex to another also poses problems for victims of domestic violence.49 Public housing authorities do not have policies that accommodate the needs of residents fleeing domestic violence and lack flexible rules that would allow a battered womxn to leave the district in which she is residing and obtain public housing elsewhere.50 To address these various housing problems, landlords and housing authorities must give more attention to the circumstances of battered womxn and adopt policies that do not punish them for the acts of their abusers. Feminist lawyers and advocates are working to bring these circumstances to light and to develop strategies to alter current practices by housing authorities.51 - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,58 +1,0 @@ 1 -1AC – Chronically Homeless 2 -1AC 3 -Framework 4 -Mitigating structural violence precludes all other ethics – it has seeped in and structured educational spaces to exclude marginalized bodies. 5 -Trifonas 3. Peter Trifonas, 01-23-2003, " Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Change ," RoutledgeFarmer, https://books.google.com/books?hl=enandlr=andid=ti_IDPOjC10Candoi=fndandpg=PP9anddq=Pedagogies+of+Difference+Rethinking+Education+for+Social+Change+Trifonasandots=9B1s4XCdafandsig=ArUOV8y7EQ-lEkUgTSe77eYPvRY#v=onepageandq=Pedagogies20of20Difference20Rethinking20Education20for20Social20Change20Trifonasandf=false RS 6 -Domination and subordination, I imply that they are relations of power. In an educational context, the exercise of power is accomplished in interactions (i.e., in a social organization), manifesting itself as acts of exclusion, marginalization, silencing, and so forth. Thus, paying attention to how power operates along axes of gender, race, class, and ability (that is, recognizing that social differences are not given, but are accomplished in and through educational settings) is a step toward educational equity. What does the above discussion mean in the educational context? It means that in the interactions of teachers with students in the classroom, or in other contexts, attention needs to be directed toward how dominant and subordinate relations (be they based on race, gender, class, or ability) permeate these contexts and intersect in complicated ways to produce inequality and marginalization. The frequently used and well-meaning phrase, “I treat everyone the same, ” often used by teachers and administrators to indicate their lack of bias in a diverse educational setting, in fact masks unequal power relations. Similarly, educational policies that assume that people are the same or equal may serve to entrench existing inequality precisely because people enter into the educational process with different and unequal experiences. These attempts, well meaning though they may be, tend to render inequality invisible, and thus work against equity in education. In her exploration of white privilege in higher education in the United States, Frances Rains (1998), an aboriginal-Japanese American woman, states emphatically that these benign acts are disempowering for the minority person because they erase his or her racial identity. The denial of racism in this case is in fact a form of racism. Thus, in moving toward equity in education that allows us to address multiple and intersecting axes of difference and inequality, I recommend that we try to think and act “against the grain” in developing educational policies and handling various kinds of pedagogical situations. 5 To work against the grain is to recognize that education is not neutral; it is contested. Mohanty puts it as such: … Education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. It is a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political positions. (Mohanty 1990:184) We need to develop a critical awareness of the power dynamics operative in institutional relations-and of the fact that people participate in institutions as unequal subjects. Working against the grain is to take a proactive approach to understanding and acting upon institutional relations, whether in the classroom, in other interactions with students, or in policy development. Rather than overlooking the embeddedness of gender, race, class, ability, and other forms of inequality that shape our interactions, working against the grain makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process. In her exploration of feminist pedagogy, Linda Briskin (1990) makes a clear distinction between nonsexist and antisexist education critical to our understanding here. She asserts that nonsexism is an approach that attempts to neutralize sexual inequality by pretending that gender can be made irrelevant in the classroom. Thus, for instance, merely asserting that male and female students should have equal time to speak-and indeed giving them equal time-cannot adequately rectify the endemic problem of sexism in the classroom. One of Briskin's students reported that in her political science tutorials that when the male students spoke, everyone paid attention. When a female student spoke, however, the class acted as if no one was speaking (13). Neutrality is an attempt to conceal the unequal distribution of power. An against the grain approach would acknowledge explicitly that we are all gendered, racialized, and differently constructed subjects who do not participate in interactional relations as equals. This goes beyond formulating sexism, racism, abilism, and class privilege in individualist terms and treating them as if they were personal attitudes. Terry Wolverton (1983) discovered the difference between nonracism and antiracism in her consciousness-raising attempt: I had confused the act of trying to appear not to be racist with actively working to eliminate racism. Trying to appear not racist had made me deny my racism, and therefore exclude the possibility of change. (191) Being against the grain means seeing inequality as systemic and interpersonal (rather than individual), and combatting oppression as a collective responsibility, not just as a personal attribute (so that somehow a person can cleanse herself or himself of sexism, racism, abilism, or class bias). It is to pay attention to oppression as an interactional property that can be altered (see Manners 1998). Roger Simon (1993) suggests, in his development of a philosophical basis for teaching against the grain, which shares many commonalities in how I think about an integrative approach to equity in education, that teaching against the grain is fundamentally a moral practice. By this he does not mean that teachers simply fulfill the mandate and guidelines of school authorities. He believes that teachers must expose the partial and imperfect nature of existing knowledge, which is constructed on the basis of asymmetrical power relations (for instance, who has the power to speak and whose voices are suppressed?). It is the responsibility of the teacher or educator to show how dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing constrict human capacities. In exposing the power relations integral to the knowledge construction process, the educator, by extension, must treat teaching and learning as a mutual and collaborative act between teachers and students. What may this ideal look like in practice? Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) also explores the notion of teaching against the grain in her research on how teachers and students worked together in a preservice program in the Philadelphia area. Borrowing from Gramsci's formulation that action is everyone's responsibility, she asserts that teaching is fundamentally a political activity. In practical terms, she outlines what it may mean to teach against the grain in an actual teaching and learning situation. Her succinct articulation is worth quoting at length: To teach against the grain, teachers have to understand and work both within and around the culture of teaching and the politics of schooling at their particular schools and within their larger school system and communities. They cannot simply announce better ways of doing things, as outsiders are likely to do. They have to teach differently without judging the ways other teach or dismissing the ideas others espouse…. They are not at liberty to publicly announce brilliant but excoriating critiques of their colleagues and the bureaucracies in which they labor. Their ultimate commitment is to the school lives and futures of the children with whom they live and work. Without condescension or defensiveness, they have to work with parents and other teachers on different ways of seeing and measuring development, connecting and dividing knowledge, and knowing about teaching and schooling. They have to be astute observers of individual learners with the ability to pose and explore questions that transcend cultural attribution, institutional habit, and the alleged certainty of outside experts. They have to see beyond and through the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising unanswerable and often uncomfortable questions. Perhaps most importantly, teachers who work against the grain must name and wrestle with their own doubts, must fend off the fatigue of reform and depend on the strength of their individual and collaborative convictions that their work ultimately makes a difference in the fabric of social responsibility. (Cochran-Smith 1991:284-85) For me, to be against the grain is therefore to recognize that the routinized courses of action and interactions in all educational contexts are imbued with unequal distribution of power that produce and reinforce various forms of marginalization and exclusion. Thus, a commitment to redress these power relations (i.e., equity in education) involves interventions and actions that may appear “counter-intuitive.” 6 Undoing inequality and achieving equity in education is a risky and uncomfortable act because we need to disrupt the ways things are “normally” done. This involves a serious (and frequently threatening) effort to interrogate our privilege as well as our powerlessness. It obliges us to examine our own privilege relative though it may be, to move out of our internalized positions as victims, to take control over our lives, and to take responsibilities for change. It requires us to question what we take for granted, and a commitment to a vision of society built on reflection, reform, mutuality, and respect in theory and in practice. Teaching and learning against the grain is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It is protracted, difficult, uncomfortable, painful, and risky. It involves struggles with our colleagues, our students, as well as struggles within ourselves against our internalized beliefs and normalized behaviors. In other words, it is a lifelong challenge. However, as Simon (1993) puts it, teaching against the grain is also a project of hope. We engage in it with the knowledge and conviction that we are in a long-term collaborative project with like-minded people whose goal is to make the world a better place for us and for our children. 7 -The Role of Ballot is to resist institutional ableism. The specter of the disabled body permeates our cultural imaginary and foundationally informs our epistemology, makes the aff a prior question 8 -Snyder and Mitchell 1 (Sharon L. Snyder (assistant professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago), and David T. Mitchell (associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Ph.D. in Disability Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago), “Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment”, Public Culture 13(3): 367–389, 2001, http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/13/3/367.full.pdf 9 -Consequently, disability studies has formulated the problem of the medicalized body in a manner similar to that undertaken earlier in body studies, taking up medical institutions (and the ancillary administering of diagnosis, sequestration, and case study) as the primary locus of its critique. The pathologization of human differences is theorized as an imposition on the body—a regulatory effort to standardize inherent dynamism. But while body studies provided a foundation for a more general model of critique around the categories of illness, health, pathology, and even bioethics, disability studies moves beneath these terms to encounter disability directly in the experiences of human populations which were merely referenced euphemistically by those more general terms. Disability studies narrows the focus of its investigation to the social implications for bodies deemed excessively aberrant. In doing so, scholars have expanded the domain of cultural understandings about disability beyond the walls of its scientific management. For disability studies, the disabled body is neither a matter of individual malfunction—as cast by medicine—nor an effect of the abstraction of the body within the health professions. Instead, disability translates into a common denominator of cultural fascination (if not downright obsession)—one that infiltrates thinking across discursive registers as a shared reference point in deciding matters of human value and communal belonging. In this emergent field, the able body is no longer characterized as merely a false quantitative ideal, as it had been in body studies, but rather as an aesthetic product of cultural forces that oppress those categorized as disabled. This subtle shift in emphasis allows humanities scholars in disability studies to extend the discussion of bodily deviance from the context of rehabilitative institutions to that of wider ranging cultural locations. For instance, Lennard J. Davis (1995) analyzes the role of institutions for the Deaf in the historical development of disability activism and community in eighteenth-century Europe. Martin Pernick (1996) analyzes the influential role of public health films in the promotion of eugenics in Chicago prior to World War II. Through readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literary texts and cultural spectacles such as the freak show, Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) argues that disabled people’s bodies have been represented as unassimilable within a normalizing biological ideology that marks the disabled body as the inferior contrast to an able-bodied, white, masculine citizenry. Paul K. Longmore (1997) assesses television genres, such as disease-of-the-week movies and telethons, to dissect mainstream representations of disability as tragedies in need of eradication or overcoming. In our own Narrative Prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2000), we theorize the pervasive utility of disability to literature in Europe and the United States by discussing the longstanding artistic recourse to disability as a staple feature of characterization. Disability studies scholars have also analyzed the opportunistic use of corporeal metaphors to emblematize societal weaknesses in literary and philosophical figurations of disability. Ultimately, these analyses of the pervasive dependency upon textual and visual representations of disability in various cultural media have forced a reformulation of a theory of marginality itself within disability studies. This is one site at which disability studies diverges from the approach established by other civil rights–based programs. While many minority movements have argued that their social devaluation occurs as a result of their marginal presence in representational media, disability studies has formulated an analysis of social depreciation targeting the perpetual recourse to images of disability in narrative and visual mediums. As a result, disability studies follows a figuration of marginality as the expression of an “overheated symbolic organism” that conveys potent meanings as a result of its palimpsest-like discursive history (cf. Stewart 1993). Theaters of Repression The work of disability studies scholars consolidated the argument that bodily and cognitive differences were integral to various registers of meaning-making within culture. While the earliest research in the field kept returning to a denunciation of three prominent literary figures—Shakespeare’s Richard III, Melville’s Captain Ahab, and Dickens’s Tiny Tim—the growing body of historical research called for wider ranging methodologies. As with later developments in race and gender studies, disability studies outgrew its denunciations of stereotypes; instead, theorists began to argue that disability represented a deep-seated, yet uninterrogated, cultural conflict. If the able body proved a utopian fiction of abstract bodily norms, disabled bodies occupied the phantasmic recesses of the cultural imaginary. The different body was more than a site for public scapegoating—cognitive and physical aberrancies acted as reminders of Others in our midst who challenged beliefs in a homogeneous bodily order. Out of these efforts to elucidate the constructed nature of disabled bodies in history, disability studies set out to diagnose the investments of an ableist society in disability’s various incarnations. Cultural efforts to medicalize or domesticate disability effectively repressed the power of aberrancy to unmoor notions of the body as a matter of norms, averages, and deviations. Locating disabled bodies as rare examples of extraordinary deviance essentially cordoned off disability from the differences that characterize typical biological diversity. For disability studies, the impersonal was the political. Such a sequestration evidenced the mainstream desire to reduce the different body’s (or mind’s) ability to destabilize normative models of health. 10 - 11 -Advantage – Ableism 12 -The current US housing system is grossly inefficient 13 -Foscarinis et al 04 (Maria Foscarinis, Executive Director, National Law Center on Homelessness and Policy, “The Human Right to Housing: Making the Case in U.S. Advocacy,” Clearing- house Review Journal of Poverty Law and Policy, July-August 2004.)JA 14 -Legislation, policies, and programs related to development of adequate housing to ensure universal housing access is a significant concern of the draft Bangkok guidelines. This area addresses planning, the regulation of building construction, the housing finance system, and freedom of movement to choose one’s residence. In the United States, on both the federal and state levels, governmental commitment to financing and subsidizing affordable housing for low-income people has declined precipitously in recent years. Between 1976 and 2002 budget authority for federal housing assistance dropped by $28.1 billion. In January 1977 the Ford administration submitted to Congress a budget request for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that would have funded 506,000 additional low-income housing units. Subsidized housing commitments dropped to 60,590 in 1982, to 33,491 in 1995, and to 8,493 in 1996. HUD has been increasing funding for housing units since 1996 but to nowhere near the level of the late 1970s. Average time on waiting lists for public housing has grown steeply.28 While the commitment to create new subsidized units has tapered off to nearly zero, the stock of federally subsidized housing is being rapidly depleted as owners of privately owned but publicly subsidized housing stock prepay government-insured mortgages or opt out of government contracts. Since 1996, an estimated 120,000 affordable units have been lost in this manner, and 1.4 million HUD-subsidized units are in jeopardy.29 This retreat from government commitment to develop affordable housing has led to a precipitous decrease in the availability of affordable housing. In central cities almost five very-low-income households are vying for every three unsubsidized units that they can afford; in the suburbs two very-low-income households are vying for every afford- able unit on the market.30 Even amidst the prosperity of the 1990s the stock of housing available to the poorest decreased. Units affordable to renters of very low income (below 50 percent of area median income) fell by almost 900,000 from 1993 to 1995, and over 300,000 affordable units were lost for low income (below 80 percent of area median) renters between 1997 and 1999. 15 - 16 -People with disabilities are often denied access to adequate housing and more likely to be forcibly evicted 17 -UHCHR 09 (UHCHR, November 2009, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The Right to Adequate Housing”, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FS21_rev_1_Housing_en.pdf) SN 18 -Accessibility remains a key issue. Housing, housing-related facilities and neighbourhoods are traditionally designed for people without disabilities. The frequent exclusion and marginalization of persons with disabilities often mean that they are rarely consulted when new housing structures or neighbourhoods are developed or slums upgraded. They are also vulnerable to associated violations of their rights. For instance, the lack of adequate sanitation facilities in informal settlements can pose severe challenges to them. Security of tenure is another challenge for persons with disabilities, in particular those with an intellectual or psychosocial disability. The frequent lack of recognition of their legal capacity, often coupled with requirements for applications in person, means that persons with such disabilities are rarely able to enter into any type of formal housing contract (lease, ownership, etc.) and, therefore, have to rely on less formal avenues to secure housing. Those arrangements, in turn, make them more vulnerable to forced evictions. In general, where stigmatization remains unaddressed and social or community services are unavailable—including social housing—persons with disabilities continue to face discrimination when seeking housing, or more general challenges in securing the resources necessary for obtaining adequate housing. Such challenges inevitably make them more vulnerable to forced evictions, homelessness and inadequate housing conditions. General comment No. 4 provides that persons with disabilities must be accorded full and sustainable access to adequate housing resources, and that housing law and policy should take into account their special needs. In its general comment No. 5 (1994), the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights reaffirmed that the right to adequate housing includes accessibility for persons with disabilities. The Special Rapporteur on adequate housing has also underlined not only that housing should be physically and economically accessible to persons with disabilities, but that they should be able to effectively participate in the life of the community where they live. 19 - 20 -Ableism operates as the fundamental tactic of oppression—the naturalization of social inferiority as a biological difference 21 -Siebers 9 (Siebers, University of Michigan, Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism, Tobin, “The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification”, Oct 28, 2009, Lecture, Google Books.) 22 - 23 -Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That oppression involves “groups,” and not “individuals,” means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances. Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferiority—what some call “in-built” or “biological” inferiority. Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of the group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics—not only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. One additional thought must be noted before I treat some analytic examples from the historical record. First, despite my statement that disability now serves as the master trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. “Racism” disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. “Sexism” disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and physical inferiority. “Classism” disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status. “Ableism” disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature. As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human inferiority—and the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression—the prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will continue, I expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of disability as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority 24 - 25 -Plan 26 - 27 -Plan Text: The United States federal government should ensure the right to housing for the chronically homeless via the Housing First model 28 -Semuels 16 (Alana Semuels is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was previously a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. April 25, 2016. How can the US End Homelessness? https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/end-homelessness-us/479115/)//JA 29 - 30 -On any given night in the United States, half a million people are homeless. Some of them sleep in shelters, others on the streets; roughly one-quarter are children. About 15 percent are so-called chronically homeless, which means they haven’t had a permanent home in years, and often cycle through jails, hospitals and homeless shelters in search of a place to lay their heads. The government has tried to tackle the problem of homelessness on nearly every level, but comprehensive solutions have proven elusive, despite billions spent over time. The federal government has set a series of goals of ending homelessness for veterans by 2015, chronic homelessness by 2017, and homelessness for families with children and youth by 2020. But reaching these benchmarks appears to be much further off. Can we count on that as a long-term solution? Shelters are certainly useful in that they provide beds and roofs to people who don’t have them, especially on cold and rainy nights where sleeping outside could be fatal for some. But shelters are incredibly expensive to operate. Nationally, the average monthly cost of serving a family in an emergency shelter is $4,819. Providing them with a voucher for housing, on the other hand, is just $1,162. Shelters might be good for emergencies, but does having a bed to sleep in mean that someone has a home? And quality can be an issue for these shelters: Many homeless people have told advocates trying to get them off the streets that they avoid shelters if they possibly can. They’ve heard about bad experiences there, or have themselves suffered through violence, theft, or other trauma in these ostensibly safer spaces. There were 826 “violent incidents” in New York City homeless shelters last year, including sexual assault and domestic violence, according to the New York Daily News. People often have to leave food and other belongings behind when they check into a shelter, making it hard to accumulate anything of sentimental or material value. Plus, shelters don’t allow residents to develop a sense of permanency—and it’s permanency that helps people get a job or stay sober, as numerous studies have indicated. Affordable housing would be a longer-term solution. Let’s just increase the number of these units overall. If more people can afford housing, they won’t be homeless. If it were that easy to add more affordable housing, cities like New York and San Francisco would be very different than they are now, and far less expensive. It’s costly to build new apartments and homes in cities where land is pricey, and developers want to recoup their investment as soon as possible, which means they have to charge a lot for rent. That’s not to say cities, states, and the federal government haven’t tried out a few strategies for hastening the construction of affordable housing. Have any of them been effective? There are federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits that help certain developers build 100 percent affordable housing. But developers compete for those tax credits, and there aren’t enough to held build affordable housing for all the people who need it, much less for those who don’t have homes in the first place. Inclusionary zoning policies can help create more affordable housing; in places such as Montgomery County, Maryland, for instance, all new apartment buildings with more than a certain number of units have to set aside a few of them to be designated as affordable housing, priced much lower than market rent. But then developers usually have to pass the costs of that lost rent onto the other tenants, which increases market-rate rent. In most municipalities, inclusionary zoning is voluntary, which means that developers who include affordable units can skirt some regulations, allowing them to build higher, for instance, or make their buildings denser. Making this kind of zoning mandatory can be tricky, though, because developers argue that they can’t charge enough for market-rate units in low- and middle-income neighborhoods to subsidize the affordable units. In March, New York City made inclusionary zoning mandatory in some neighborhoods, and developers are already complaining that it’s become harder to build affordable housing in the city. Okay, so if we can’t rely on affordable housing units alone, it sounds like we should find other methods to give homeless people special access to permanent homes. That would be better in terms of lasting success, boosting their chances of landing and keeping a job, and maybe helping those who struggle with addiction to stay sober. This is what’s called a housing-first approach, and numerous studies have found it’s much more effective than relying on shelters. Housing-first places homeless people in long-term housing without asking them to get sober or hang onto a job first. After they’re settled in a stable home, they gain access to services such as drug and alcohol treatment, an assigned social worker, or job training. They don’t have to take advantage of those services, but most people chose to do so. Through housing-first, Utah reduced its chronically-homeless population 72 percent between 2005 and 2014. And housing-first isn’t cheap—though tenants pay a small portion of their rent, the state or city usually picks up much of the tab. A voucher for a housing program, like Section 8, can cost $1,162 a month, and spending that money means fewer people get rental assistance overall. When long-term housing is hard to come by, people desperate for help often get abused. As The New York Times pointed out in a heartbreaking story last year, cities such as New York with a large homeless population have seen the growth of three-quarters houses, which cram multiple people into one bedroom while purporting to help them. Often, they’re just collecting these peoples’ money without giving them any services or even a clean place to live. Not every homeless person will thrive just because they have a place to live. Some have mental or physical problems that make it difficult for them to stay off the streets after getting a home. Others may never be able to support themselves completely without a community to keep them afloat. Jeffrey Nemetsky, who runs Brooklyn Community Housing and Services, says having a social worker knock on the door once a day to say hello can mean the difference between a tenant staying or heading back out onto the streets. So that’s the answer: provide the homeless with permanent, affordable housing, and wraparound services. Permanent supportive housing might solve this for us. True, permanent supportive housing can be very effective at helping the chronically homeless get off the streets and stay stable. But is it legal? Many people who need permanent supportive housing are battling mental problems or drug and alcohol abuse, and would have once ended up in institutions. But since the deinstitutionalization movement began in the 1960s and ’70s, the number of in-patient beds at state or county mental health facilities has declined from more than 400,000 to fewer than 100,000. Though some institutions still exist, the practice of putting the mentally ill into segregated buildings falls into a gray area. In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled that the segregation of people with disabilities violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Though the case was about people on Medicaid, homeless advocates interpreted it to apply to some chronically homeless with disabilities. Isolating those homeless people from the rest of society is akin to institutionalizing them, advocates say, and it violates the law. That’s why some housing developments provide both permanent supportive housing and low-income housing, so that homes can be made available to a larger swath of the population. This kind of mixed-use housing helps create communities; in one building in Harlem, single moms living in affordable housing helped out the ex-cons living in supportive housing, and vice versa. Though the building’s developers worried that low-income moms wouldn’t want to live with the mentally ill, some 2,000 people applied for just a few dozen units when the building opened. This and other experiences suggest that integrating supportive and low-income housing can be successful. But still, agencies and advocates all over the country are struggling to serve the homeless people with mental illness and addiction. It often takes years for case workers to get people to try out permanent supportive housing and abandon the lives they’ve known on the streets. Some cities and states have started allowing judges to order people who cycle through the system to receive treatment for their illnesses, an approach that’s controversial. Across the country, experts on homelessness have solutions they think will work best. The problem is, housing in many cities is getting more expensive every month, and as prices rise, so do the costs of programs to combat homelessness. Meanwhile, federal funds for affordable housing have stayed at the same levels for years. So as housing costs go up, those funds are spread more thinly and help fewer people. But if homelessness is really a problem the country wants to solve by 2020, why not increase the amount of money overall that the government spends on programs to help the homeless? Where could that money come from? Why not stimulate the creation of affordable housing so to assist both the chronically homeless and those who are homeless temporarily? Such housing could be available to people below certain income levels, and they could qualify whether they are on the streets or are in an apartment they can’t afford. For some, it’s hard to imagine carving out more money from the country’s budget to address these issues. But solving homelessness can help fix a lot of other problems too, including truancy from schools, food insecurity, drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment. Is it possible that directing more resources toward solving homelessness could actually save society money by helping to fix its other ills at the same time? 31 - 32 -Multiple studies confirm – Housing First model reduces municipal costs 33 -Snyder 15 (Kaitlyn Snyder. Study Data Shows that Housing Chronically Homeless Saves Money, Lives. June 30, 2015. http://www.endhomelessness.org/blog/entry/study-data-show-that-housing-chronically-homeless-people-saves-money-lives)//JA 34 -Homelessness costs taxpayers a lot of money. Take, for example, the infamous case of Murray Barr, aka “Million Dollar Murray,” a chronically homeless man in Reno, Nevada who accrued more than a million dollars in emergency room, substance abuse treatment, police, jail, ambulance, shelter and other costs. Despite all these costly interventions, Barr ultimately died homeless on the streets. His tragic case highlights the need for a cost-effective solution to chronic homelessness. Cost studies demonstrate that Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) is that solution. Based on the Housing First philosophy, PSH reduces the need for costly public services by providing chronically homeless people with permanent housing at a subsided rate, along with supportive services to help them maintain their housing. Research has shown that it’s more effective than shelters and transitional housing systems at housing the ‘hardest to serve’ individuals, who often struggle with complex and overlapping health, mental health, and substance abuse disorders. In Denver, PSH saved $15,733 per year, per person in public costs for shelter, criminal justice, health care, emergency room, and behavioral health costs. The savings were enough to completely offset the cost of housing ($13,400) and still save taxpayers $2,373. Researchers have already conducted cost studies like this one in communities across the country. The map below shows the PSH cost studies that we at the Alliance are currently aware of. The majority of these studies show significant savings that completely or nearly offset the cost of housing. Has your community conducted a cost study? If so, the Alliance wants to hear from you. We advocate for increased investment in PSH, because we know it ends chronic homelessness. By demonstrating how this intervention saves taxpayers money, we can convince lawmakers that such investment will benefit their communities and constituencies. Spending millions of dollars on emergency costs does little, if anything, to solve the problem of homelessness. Instead, we could be using those same millions to fund PSH and prevent premature deaths, like those of Murray Barr and countless others. 35 - 36 -Housing first paradigm specifically key to solving chronic homelessness 37 -Kunkle 15 (Frederick Kunkle runs the Tripping blog, writing about the experience of travel. Freddy's also covered politics, courts, police, and local government. Before coming to The Washington Post, he worked for the Star-Ledger and The Bergen Record. “Housing first” approach works for homeless, study says. March 4, 2015)JA 38 -A new Canadian study lends backing for a commonsense approach to moving people off the street that has been used in the District and other U.S. cities since the 1990s: Ensure that the homeless receive permanent shelter first, and their chances of achieving stability will increase. Known as the “housing first” approach, the program offers social support as well. But it emphasizes finding secure shelter in the community first, in contrast to homeless programs that insist on preconditions such as sobriety or psychiatric care and moving through transitional housing. The study, carried out by researchers at the Centre for Research on Inner City Health of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, found that giving mentally ill homeless people financial help to secure free-market rental housing and mental health support services enhanced their chances of achieving stability. Over a 24-month period, those with both supports had stable housing nearly 63 to 77 percent of the time, compared with about 24 to 39 percent of those who received “usual care” or even “housing first” programs that also require more assertive social service help. “Housing first is not housing only. It is housing with support,” lead author Vicky Stergiopoulos, who is psychiatrist in chief at St. Michael’s, said in a telephone interview late Tuesday. “And a lot of the individuals, or most of them, would not be able to keep their housing without support.” The study appeared Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). 39 -Methodology: The study involved about 2,000 people enrolled in a program called At Home/Chez Soi, a research program that takes a “housing first” approach in five Canadian cities. (The study drew data involving people recruited to the program between October 2009 and July 2011 in four cities: Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal.) Participants were randomly assigned to one group where they received independent rental housing that cost up to 30 percent of their income. A rental supplement of up to $600 was also provided. The participants had some choice over the neighborhood and type of housing they desired. Participants also were required to meet once a week or more with a case manager. The case managers could help them locate employment, mend family relationships, seek medical care or plan for other goals. Those in the group who received “usual care” were not without assistance, but it was less intensive, Stergiopoulos said. They received no financial help to find adequate housing in the community, and their housing and social services care were not coordinated. “They didn’t have rent supplements. They couldn’t access housing in the community,” she said, adding that as a result they had fewer housing options. Other studies have demonstrated the benefit of the “housing first” approach, she said. But this study also shows that the program is effective even when the social services offered are less intense than those in similar programs. Those more intensive programs – what the authors call Assertive Community Treatment – involve an interdisciplinary team that includes a psychiatrist and others, and small caseloads. The approach taken by Chez Soi is also less expensive than the more intensive approach, costing about $14,177 per participant per year, compared with $22,257. “Our findings thus highlight that scattered-site housing with intensive case management is effective in reducing homelessness among a broader spectrum of the homeless population who may have a severe mental illness but do not require Assertive Community Treatment support, best reserved for a smaller group of homeless adults with high needs for mental health and other support services,” the study says. There are about 150,000 homeless people in Canada and about 1.5 million in the United States. 40 - 41 -Increased construction is unnecessary; oversufficiency of units in the status quo 42 -Olsen 16 (Edgar Olsen. We Don’t Need More Housing Projects. Edgar Olsen is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Virginia. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/10/11/we-dont-need-more-housing-projects/?utm_term=.ed94bd2ed348)//JA 43 -Many poor households are not offered low-income housing assistance in the form of a voucher or a spot in a housing project, and many of these households spend high portions of their modest incomes on housing because they value more desirable neighborhoods, convenient locations and higher-quality homes more than other goods that must be sacrificed to live where they choose. These households already have housing. We don’t need to build new housing for them. If we think that their housing is unaffordable, the cheapest solution is for the government to pay a part of the rent, and the housing voucher program — the system’s most cost-effective tool — does that. This program also ensures that its participants live in units that meet minimum standards. Building new units is a much more expensive solution to the affordability problem. The best study of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s largest program subsidizing the construction of privately owned housing projects indicated an excess taxpayer cost of at least 72 percent compared with housing vouchers that provide equally good housing at the same cost to tenants. Publicly owned housing projects have an even larger excess cost. Furthermore, it is not necessary or desirable to construct new units to house the homeless. In the entire country, there are only about 600,000 homeless people on a single night and more than 3 million vacant units available for rent. All homeless people could be easily accommodated in vacant existing units, which would be much less expensive than building new units for them. The reason that people are homeless is not a shortage of units but lack of money to pay the rent for existing units. A housing voucher would solve that problem. A major HUD-funded random assignment experiment called the Family Options Study compared the cost and effectiveness of housing vouchers and subsidized housing projects for serving the homeless. Subsidized housing projects were far less effective and more than twice as expensive. People who want to provide housing assistance to more of the poorest households should support expansion of the housing voucher program rather than subsidizing the construction of additional housing projects. 44 - 45 -Pre-Fiat 46 - 47 -Underview 48 - 49 -Ask if I will meet your interp in cx; this avoids unnecessary theory- we can work something out; this allows for greater substantive debate which is the only form of education which is unique to debate. Grant me an auto I meet on T/theory if the interp isn’t checked to discourage nonchecking. 50 -2. Fairness isn’t a voter – portable education is the only impact 51 -Branson 07 Josh, NDT/TOC winner from Northwestern and St. Marks, Harvard Law school Graduate, Current lawyer; http://osdir.com/ml/education.region.usa.edebate/2007-11/msg00295.html 52 -There is no such thing as unfairness. If you respond to this and don’t make an argument about the terminal value of debate, then you have not thought about this enough. Overlooking the issue of big/small school and coaching resources (another topic for another time), I think all teams start at the same point. Everyone has access to the resolution, everyone has access to the same literature base, and everyone has the same speech time to fill. Whenever one side makes a move, it closes some doors strategically and opens others. Your job is to find it. I think whining about unfairness is almost always lame and untruthful. Think about the classic unfairness arguments: insert K team is unfair because they don’t have a plan we’re ready for. You know, it?s funny, but thinking back over my college debate career, I spent more time agonizing about and arguing with coaches over these far-left teams than I did the other top-5 quality teams. And, while I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: I think that exact process is one of the main benefits of debate. Forcing yourself to adapt to circumstances in which you’re not comfortable, being made to alter your thinking on the run when you don’t have your same old stale blocks, when you have to make new cognitive connections and investigate literature bases which you are not familiar? I think THAT is the value-added of debate. I’ve written about this extensively before, but debate does not train people to be policy experts. Hell, if I’d wanted to have a sweet career in the policy world, I would have been better served quitting debate and learning Chinese. I’m not going to repeat everything I’ve said previously, but, at least for me, debate taught me to be more intellectually versatile and flexible than almost anyone outside of debate that I know. That is something I think is extremely valuable both intellectually (to the debater) and socially.And, you see, it’s things that are 'unfair' that encourage this type of adaptation. Take yourselves off your theory clitche-ridden blocks for a while, and actually think about it: how many things make it IMPOSSIBLE to win. None. How many things make it harder? A lot. But again, almost any time someone makes a good argument, it becomes harder for the other side to win. That’s what debate is. It’s about making things hard on the other side and not letting them make it hard for you. That’s what learning is. Fairness claims are bad because they contravene the idea of debate. If I’m right that fairness impacts really just conceal an assumption about what the value of debate is, then I think just directly making counter-arguments about the role of debate and cutting out the rhetoric of fairness is profoundly beneficial. I barely even need to point out that life isn’t fair. I think it's way more helpful to conceive of theory arguments in terms of routing debate towards productive ends than it is to maintain some pedantic obsession with fairness. I think the rhetorical message kids should be getting is that they should react to what they perceive of as ‘unfair’ practices by adapting, not whining. Because, when we are honest with ourselves and take ourselves off our oft-repeated theory cliches, is anything really THAT unfair I can’t really think of a single time in debate that would meet that test. I will tell you something though; right along with the shitty quality of evidence, theory arguments are at the top of the list of things that marginalize debate as a good training device. It's something that people outside debate don't really understand, and it's by far the most boring thing to judge, and, just as a matter of empirical observation, the people that do it a lot tend to be the laziest ones. 53 -3. The state is inevitable – their departure from the state cedes hegemony to the Right. 54 -Mouffe 9 (Chantal Mouffe, Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the State”, What is Radical Politics Today?, Edited by Jonathan Pugh, pp. 233-7) 55 -In both Hardt and Negri, and Virno, there is therefore emphasis upon ‘critique as withdrawal’. They all call for the development of a non-state public sphere. They call for self-organisation, experimentation, non-representative and extra-parliamentary politics. They see forms of traditional representative politics as inherently oppressive. So they do not seek to engage with them, in order to challenge them. They seek to get rid of them altogether. This disengagement is, for such influential personalities in radical politics today, the key to every political position in the world. The Multitude must recognise imperial sovereignty itself as the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its power. Whereas in the disciplinary era I spoke about earlier, sabotage was the fundamental form of political resistance, these authors claim that, today, it should be desertion. It is indeed through desertion, through the evacuation of the places of power, that they think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are, for these important thinkers, a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity. According to Hardt and Negri, and Virno, radical politics in the past was dominated by the notion of ‘the people’. This was, according to them, a unity, acting with one will. And this unity is linked to the existence of the state. The Multitude, on the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable because it is an active self-organising agent that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage. It can never converge in a general will, because the present globalisation of capital and workers’ struggles will not permit this. It is anti-state and anti-popular. Hardt and Negri claim that the Multitude cannot be conceived any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is representative of the people. They therefore argue that new forms of politics, which are non-representative, are needed. They advocate a withdrawal from existing institutions. This is something which characterises much of radical politics today. The emphasis is not upon challenging the state. Radical politics today is often characterised by a mood, a sense and a feeling, that the state itself is inherently the problem. Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and Negri’s view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital and by labour. To put it another way, they deny the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in which meaning is given to institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as ‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally destructive’. We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers’ struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and have influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society. There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’ struggles. I submit that it is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’ struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of control. They use the term ‘artistic critique’ to refer to how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive revolution’. This refers to a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by satisfying them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we can understand it as a hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in Marx’s sense of the term. Rather, there have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices. It is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ practices, radical politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing institutions. Rather, we have no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge them. This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave the door open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical (and not so historical) examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to take over the state. The strategy of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in common between the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political subject. But in both cases the state is seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If my approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’ by many, it is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As far as politics is concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic parameters of social life. A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through which a given conception of reality is established. However, such a result is always contingent, precarious and susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by antagonisms. A properly political intervention is always one that engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to challenge the existing order, so that it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order. Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics lies in establishing linkages between various demands (such as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist groups), so as to transform them into claims that will challenge the existing structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves engagement, rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that exist in our societies are often in conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated politically, which obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires the determination of a ‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an ‘ensemble of differences’, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such as when different groups from many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models of development and progress. In these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like ‘Empire’, or for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead contingent upon the particular circumstances in question – the specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged. Put another way, the construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create the conditions for a new hegemony. This is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as withdrawal’, but ‘critique as engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’ that needs to be launched, often across a range of sites, involving the coming together of a range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links between social movements, political parties and trade unions, for example. The aim is to create a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and often institutions, with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of radical politics. 56 - 57 -3/10/17 58 -SaveDeleteEdit - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,23 @@ 1 +====A~~ Interpretation: They negative may read a maximum of one conditional advocacy and the status quo.==== 2 + 3 + 4 +====B~~ Violation:==== 5 + 6 + 7 +====C~~ Net Benefits==== 8 + 9 + 10 +====1~~ Sandbagging 11 + 12 + 13 +====2~~ Real world 14 + 15 +====Frame offense through diminishing returns—one condo gets them all the skills they need, but 2 just exacerbates the skew—they have to isolate a reason they need 2 condo.==== 16 + 17 + 18 +====D~~ Reject the debater 19 + 20 +====Competing Interps over Reasonability:==== 21 + 22 + 23 +====No RVIs:==== - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,19 @@ 1 +Interpretation: Debaters with access to internet that run pre-typed pre-fiat K impacts must disclose all parts of their position on an internet-based public forum an hour before the round and leave it up. 2 +Violation: they run a K with a pre-fiat impact without disclosing it 3 +Standards: 4 +1. My interp promotes higher quality clash: Disclosed arguments allow the aff to card responses increasing substantive engagement which is key to education because it’s the foundation for all debate. Also, disclosure encourages deep learning about arguments by incentivizing debaters to read articles and understand the context and entirety of arguments to formulate better responses. Turns the K because it allows for better discussion about the problem the K addresses. 5 +2. Pre-fiat impacts assume widespread knowledge about their impacts is important because they attempt to promote change. Debating this round won’t change the way their impact are perceived but disclosure widens the scope of access to their arguments and permits time for reflection and recognition of the significance of the issue, which is rarely done in round with time constraints and a sole incentive to win. 6 +Voter: 7 +Substantive engagement 8 +Only reason we debate is for argument interaction, thus comes first. 9 +You can get education from school 10 +If debate were about being fair, we’d just flip a coin because that’d be the fairest scenario, but no one does that means fairness isn’t a voter. 11 +Drop the debater – ensures debaters can’t exercise illegitimate practices. 12 + 13 +Competing interps: 14 +Race to the bottom – debaters keep being barely reasonable 15 +Norm setting – competing interps ensure a stable norm for future debates – focuses debate on substance. 16 + 17 +No RVI’s 18 +1. Real world applicability- Winning defense on theory just means that they are being fair, that’s not a reason to vote them up 19 +2. RVIs center the debate on theory instead of substance because it’s the only place the round can be decided. substance clash is important—it’s the only education unique to debate and outweighs on time frame; we only get two months to talk about the topic. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,39 @@ 1 +Framework 2 +Currently, difference equals the other. This mantra is regurgitated by neoliberal elites, incessantly committing acts of violence on marginalized populations. This equivocation of difference destroys subjectivities and justifies violence. The role of the judge is to resist the conversion of difference to otherness. 3 +Schoolman 8 Morton Schoolman is Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany, and the author of The Imaginary Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse. “The new pluralism: William Connolly and the contemporary global condition”. Duke University Press, 2008. Page 1-2//roman 4 +That generous and warm feeling for living Nature which flooded my heart with such bliss, so that I saw the world around me as a Paradise, has now become an unbearable torment a sort of demon that persecutes me wherever I go... There is not one moment which does not consume you and yours, and not one moment when you yourself are not inevitably destructive; the most harmless walk costs the lives of poor, minute creatures; one step of your foot annihilates their painstaking constructions, and stamps a small world into its ignominious grave. My heart is worn out by this consuming power latent in the whole of Nature which has formed nothing that will not destroy its neighbor and itself... I see nothing but an eternally devouring monster. —GOETHE, The Sorrows of the Young Werther GOETHE'S THOUGHT OF AN INELIMINABLE violence plaguing life, a violence intrinsic to the human condition, haunts political theory after the Second World War. It invites reflection on the possibility that genocide may be the raison d'étre of violence organized by states which, as dupes of generic human drives, act to destroy the "other" as they organize those drives to serve systemic ends. Following this reflection is unavoidably another. Perhaps all "ordinary/' and everyday constructions and punishments of difference as otherness also may be driven by what is human, all too human. Political theorists drawn to this pessimism by the horror of holocaust could be drawn to theoretical schools under the spell of such thought as Goethe's and prone to the despair that it would induce. Thus was I drawn to the work of Max Horkheimer and of Theodor Adorno, whose Dialectic of Enlightenment seemed to support Goethe's claim. Seeking antidotes to the disease of reason diagnosed in this great work, I have found several, though they do not abound. Two in particular offer relief, in different ways, from the violence toward difference that Horkheimer and Adorno relentlessly track through their dark, genealogical history of reason. Both antidotes recognize violence that is not less embedded in modernity and not less ubiquitous than the violence that Goethe fears. Yet because neither antidote agrees with his premise that violence is the nature of human and nonhuman being, they both avoid the impotency attached to a trajectory of endless violence that is, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, aided and abetted by global capital without opposition. One antidote, an approach to the problem of violence toward difference that is thoroughly historical and political, is the politics and vision of a democracy of "agonistic respect" theorized by William Connolly. Agonistic respect promises an end to violence, though Connolly makes no such claim explicitly. A second approach to the problem of violence toward difference is developed in my own work, in which I turn to aesthetic theory to conceptualize a form of democratic individuality resistant to pressures to convert difference to otherness.l Having been influenced by George Kateb, my approach to violence perhaps is less political than Connolly's, indebted as it is to an ensemble of different democratic workings whose formative impact on the private sphere has been conceptualized in Kateb's The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture,2 a work whose contributions to my efforts I have gratefully recorded.3 5 +The role of the ballot is consistency with agonistic democracy. Respect and critical responsiveness create coherent discussions. Agonistic democracy allows for minorities to have a safe discursive environment. 6 +Bleiker 8 Roland Bleiker grew up in Zürich, Switzerland, where he was educated and worked as a lawyer. He then studied international relations in Paris, Toronto, Vancouver and Canberra. Bleiker worked for two years in a Swiss diplomatic mission in Panmunjom, the Korean DMZ. He held visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Bleiker’s current research focuses on the role of images and emotions in world politics. He coordinates an interdisciplinary Research Program on Visual Politics, which brings together several dozen scholars from across UQ. He is also collaborating with Emma Hutchison and David Campbell on an ARC-funded project that examines “how images shape responses to humanitarian crises.” “The new pluralism: William Connolly and the contemporary global condition”. Duke University Press, 2008. Page 114//roman 7 +Two civic virtues are necessary, Connolly believes, to render a journey toward a pluralist notion of democracy feasible in practice. The first is agonistic respect among multiple groups or individuals. This respect is necessary even when—indeed precisely when—these groups or individuals passionately disagree. Whereas the liberal notion of tolerance assumes a majority that occupies an authoritative center and bestows tolerance upon minorities, agonistic respect is operating when numerous interdependent minorities coexist and interact in a safe and respectful environment thus generating and sustaining a form of common governance.3-l These interacting units share a number of rights and duties, chief among them a willingness to respect each other's different faith or value system. Accepting difference, Connolly believes, should even include the recognition that each such value system, including one's own, is and should in principle be contestable.e-2 The second of Connolly's virtues in a world of deep pluralism is critical responsiveness: the willingness to listen carefully to others, particularly those who have not yet achieved sufficient recognition in the prevailing political and social setting. Not all demands by a new constituency should necessarily be accepted, but and Connolly admits this is the difficult part —existing norms or laws cannot necessarily serve as a base for judgment. A critical response must go beyond these foundations because they are often part of the problem itself. Whatever form it takes, the new, more critical attitude should involve cultivating a private disposition and the courage to express and defend this disposition in public.33 8 +Contention 9 +Thus the advocacy, public colleges and universities ought not restrict constitutionally protected free speech. 10 + 11 +Restriction on free speech are common, and more are coming now. 12 +Lukianoff 16, Greg Lukianoff, 1-4-2016, "Campus Free Speech Has Been in Trouble for a Long Time," Cato Unbound, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2016/01/04/greg-lukianoff/campus-free-speech-has-been-trouble-long-time //AD 13 +2015 will be remembered as a year in which campus free speech issues took center stage, receiving extensive coverage in outlets like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and Salon. Even President Obama voiced concerns about the lack of debate on college campuses. For those of us who have been fighting campus censors for years, it’s hard not to ask: “Where has everyone been?” My organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has been defending freedom of expression on campus since 1999. We can attest that free speech, open inquiry, and academic freedom have always been threatened on campus by one force or another, even long before we were founded. Most people are familiar with the supposed heyday of political correctness of the 1980s and 90s, but there is a popular misconception that speech codes and censorship were defeated in the courts of law and public opinion by the mid-90s. In reality, the threats to campus speech never went away. Before examining what has changed to alarm the public—rightfully—about the state of open discourse in higher education, it’s important to note what hasn’t changed. Speech Codes and Political Correctness Never Went Away Scholars, including First Amendment expert Robert O’Neil, claim that politically correct speech codes were given a “decent burial” in the mid-90s. But despite being repeatedly defeated in court, speech codes became the rule rather than the exception on campus. FIRE has been tracking and rating speech codes at hundreds of colleges and universities since 2006. Eight years ago, 75 percent of the institutions we surveyed maintained policies worthy of FIRE’s “red light” rating, meaning they clearly and substantially restricted freedom of speech. Since then, the percentage of schools with red light speech codes has steadily declined each year. This good news is due, at least in part, to FIRE’s aggressive campaigning and lawsuits. Over the past few years, the number of campuses with red light policies decreased from 62.1 percent (2013) to 55.2 percent (2015). And, in FIRE’s 2016 speech code report, that figure is below 50 percent (49.3 percent) for the first time. Unfortunately, this may be only a temporary high-water mark; pressure from students and the federal government makes the resurgence of speech codes almost inevitable. The past 15 years are rife with examples of speech-policing. There are the classic political correctness cases, such as the 2004 incident in which a University of New Hampshire student was evicted from his dorm for posting flyers joking that freshman women could lose the “Freshman 15” by walking up the dormitory stairs. In 2009, Yale University students were told they shouldn’t quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Bucknell University students were forbidden from handing out “Obama Stimulus Dollars.” But many cases do not follow the “PC” mold and just involve old-fashioned abuses of power. Examples include the University of Wisconsin-Stout’s censorship of a professor’s “Firefly” poster, Central New Mexico Community College’s shutdown of a student newspaper for publishing a “Sex Issue,” and former Valdosta State University student Hayden Barnes’ unjust expulsion for protesting a parking garage (which led to an eight-year-long legal battle that finally concluded in 2015). Federal Antidiscrimination Law as the Secret Engine of Campus Censorship Some trends that long precede (and may explain) the current threats to campus free speech include the massive expansion of the bureaucratic class at universities, which officially began outnumbering the number of full-time instructors in 2005, and the rise of the “risk management” industry, which makes a fortune teaching universities how to avoid lawsuits by regulating almost every aspect of student life. This brings us to the institution that is perhaps most responsible for exacerbating the problems of speech codes and hair-trigger censorship: the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). By the late 1980s, colleges were adopting “anti-harassment” codes that restricted protected speech. In the mid-1990s, the campus speech code phenomenon converged with the expansion of federal anti-discrimination law by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). OCR encouraged and even required harassment codes, and although its guidance tried to “balance” the need for these codes with the First Amendment, by the time FIRE was founded in 1999, universities were using the “federal government made me do it” excuse to justify even the most laughably unconstitutional speech codes. In 2003, in perhaps its most redeeming moment, OCR issued a letter clarifying that it has no power to mandate that universities—public or private—police speech that is protected under the First Amendment. OCR explained that public universities, which are bound by the First Amendment, cannot ban merely offensive speech. And if private universities, which are not bound by the First Amendment (except in California through the Leonard Law), pass such speech codes, OCR made clear that they can in no way argue that the federal government forced their hand. This message was never fully accepted by campus administrators, who wanted expansive speech codes, or by risk managers, who believed it was safer to discourage offensive speech than face a lawsuit. Nonetheless, the 2003 letter did help defuse an old excuse. Unfortunately, the Department of Education under the Obama administration has been much more aggressive, granting itself new powers and redefining harassment in such broad language that virtually any offensive speech could be considered a matter of federal oversight. In May 2013, OCR and the Department of Justice (DOJ) entered into a resolution agreement with the University of Montana that the agencies deemed “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country.” This “blueprint” mandates an extraordinarily broad definition of sexual harassment: “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal conduct”—i.e., speech. The blueprint holds that this conduct need not be “objectively offensive” to constitute sexual harassment. This means that if a listener takes offense to any sex- or gender-related speech, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker has engaged in sexual harassment. Additionally, the final UM policy reviewed and approved by OCR and DOJ as part of their resolution agreement goes beyond policing sex-related speech by also prohibiting discriminatory harassment on the basis of 17 different categories, including “political ideas.” Treating this resolution agreement as a “blueprint” puts public universities in an impossible situation: violate the First Amendment or risk investigation and the possible loss of federal funding. OCR backed away from its characterization of the Montana agreement as a “blueprint” in a November 2013 letter to me. But unlike the clarification it issued in 2003, OCR has never communicated this to universities. As a result, as universities revise their sexual misconduct policies, they now include the blueprint’s definition of sexual harassment. There can be little doubt that the number of institutions doing so will only increase until OCR clarifies that it cannot require universities to adopt such a definition. OCR is unlikely to forego unconstitutional speech-policing any time soon. In October, OCR announced that it would open a Title IX investigation into the University of Mary Washington after students filed a complaint about the school’s handling of sexist and racist Yik Yak posts. If this investigation leads to new federal “guidance” on colleges’ responsibility to police students’ social media activity, even more protected campus speech could be threatened. What Has Changed: Students Using Their Free Speech to Limit Free Speech The biggest and most noticeable change in campus censorship in recent years has been the shift in student attitudes. Today, students often demand freedom from speech rather than freedom of speech. Media coverage of the campus free speech crisis exploded in 2014 after a rash of “disinvitations”—student and faculty attempts to disinvite controversial speakers from campus, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde. Attention from the media has increased as more student-led efforts have gained popularity, such as demands for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces,” and efforts to police so-called “microaggressions.” Critiquing PC culture is nothing new for conservative outlets, but even left-leaning authors at the New Republic, The Nation, New York Magazine, and The New York Timeshave been writing extensively about how these trends reflect very new, often alarming student attitudes about open discourse. In my 15 years at FIRE, students have historically been the most reliably pro-free-speech constituency on campus. Students often showed more common sense than the professoriate, and certainly much more than the administrators. But when stories about campus race-related protests inundated the news in the fall of 2015, I knew something had changed. It began when students at Wesleyan University demanded that the school’s primary student newspaper be defunded after it published a student op-ed that was critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. Shortly after, Wesleyan’s student government unanimously approved a resolution that will tentatively cut the paper’s printing budget by half. Things escalated when I saw firsthand that Yale students were demanding the resignations of two faculty members for sending out an email that questioned whether universities should tell students what they should or shouldn’t wear as Halloween costumes. Then, just days later, student protests at the University of Missouri soured when protesters manhandled a student journalist. These protests put First Amendment defenders and free speech advocates like me in a somewhat difficult position. Of course, I’m supportive of students exercising their free speech rights. Indeed, I find it refreshing that students have overcome their oft-diagnosed apathy towards serious social issues. However, it’s distressing that many of the protesters are using their free speech to demand limitations on others’ free speech. The irony of these demands was particularly prominent at the University of Missouri, where FIRE recently helped pass a state law making it illegal to limit free speech activities on public university campuses to tiny zones. This new law helped make the Mizzou students’ protests possible. But in a twist, the protesters created their own free speech exclusion zone to prevent media from covering the protest. Now student protestors at at least 75 American colleges and universities have released lists of demands “to end systemic and structural racism on campus.” Although this is a laudable goal, a troubling number of these demands would prohibit or chill campus speech. For example, many of the demands try to make the expression of racial bias, which is generally protected speech, a punishable offense. At Johns Hopkins University, protesters demand “impactful repercussions” for anyone who makes “Black students uncomfortable or unsafe for racial reasons.” Similarly, protesters at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University demand “strong repercussions and sanctions” for those who commit “racist actions and racial bias on campus.” And Emory University protestors want a bias response reporting system and sanctions for even “unintentional” acts or behaviors, including “gestures.” Others go as far as to mandate that universities forbid “hate speech.” At Missouri State University, protesters demand that administrators announce a “commitment to differentiating ‘hate speech’ from ‘freedom of speech.’” Protesters at Dartmouth College want “a policy with serious consequences against hate speech/crimes (e.g. Greek house expelled for racist parties).” Similarly, student protesters at the University of Wyoming demand that the code of conduct be revised to hold students accountable for hate speech, complete with “a detailed reporting structure.” The evidence that today’s students value freedom of speech less than their elders is not just anecdotal. In October, Yale University’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program released a survey that found that 51 percent of U.S. college students favor campus speech codes, and that 72 percent support disciplinary action against “any student or faculty member on campus who uses language that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive.” These troubling results were echoed by a November 2015 global survey from Pew Research Center finding that a whopping 40 percent of U.S. millennials ages 18–34 believe the government should be able to punish speech offensive to minority groups (as compared to only 12 percent of the Silent generation 70–87 year-olds, 24 percent of the Boomer generation 51–69 year-olds, and 27 percent of Gen Xers 35–50 year-olds). Conclusion Thankfully, through old strategies and new ones, we can improve the climate for free speech on campus. Just one student or professor can protect free expression for thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, by filing a lawsuit against his or her school with the help of FIRE’s Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project. SUFS is undefeated so far and has resulted in seven settlements that send the clear message to institutions that it will be expensive to ignore their obligations under the First Amendment. What’s more, with every speech-protective judgment, it becomes harder for administrators to defend themselves with “qualified immunity,” which shields individuals from personal liability where the law isn’t clear. Litigation might also be our best shot at forcing OCR to step back from its efforts to coerce institutions into adopting unconstitutional policies. Clearer and narrower policies than OCR’s May 2013 definition of “sexual harassment” have been struck down in court on numerous occasions. But until institutions see a real threat of an expensive judgment against them for overbroad harassment policies, they’ll continue to be motivated by the threat of OCR pulling their funding for what it seems to consider underbroad policies—i.e., colleges will err on the side of prohibiting protected expression. And because money talks, alumni should withhold donations to institutions that break the law or renege on promises to respect students’ and professors’ rights. And of course, anyone can contact his or her legislators and ask them to support bills—like the ones FIRE helped enact in Missouriand Virginia—that ensure students may fully exercise their free speech rights on public campuses statewide. These strategies may motivate schools to make quick changes, but free speech advocates know that long-lasting progress comes through cultural change. How do we teach a generation about the value of free expression when speech is too often presented as a problem to be overcome, rather than part of the solution to many social ills? This is our great challenge, and it must be faced with both determination and creativity if the always-fragile right of freedom of speech is to endure. 14 +Free speech is contestation – protests facilitate learning and expose problems within institutions. Specifically on universities, contestation is important to foster discussions and learning. 15 +ACLU 16. American Civil Liberties Union. For almost 100 years, the ACLU has worked to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States., “Hate Speech on Campus”, ACLU, 2016. https://www.aclu.org/other/hate-speech-campus//AD 16 +Many universities, under pressure to respond to the concerns of those who are the objects of hate, have adopted codes or policies prohibiting speech that offends any group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. That's the wrong response, well-meaning or not. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content. Speech codes adopted by government-financed state colleges and universities amount to government censorship, in violation of the Constitution. And the ACLU believes that all campuses should adhere to First Amendment principles because academic freedom is a bedrock of education in a free society. How much we value the right of free speech is put to its severest test when the speaker is someone we disagree with most. Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible: When one of us is denied this right, all of us are denied. Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has fought for the free expression of all ideas, popular or unpopular. That's the constitutional mandate. Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech ~-~- not less ~-~- is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance. College administrators may find speech codes attractive as a quick fix, but as one critic put it: "Verbal purity is not social change." Codes that punish bigoted speech treat only the symptom: The problem itself is bigotry. The ACLU believes that instead of opting for gestures that only appear to cure the disease, universities have to do the hard work of recruitment to increase faculty and student diversity; counseling to raise awareness about bigotry and its history, and changing curricula to institutionalize more inclusive approaches to all subject matter. 17 +Conservative flights of neo-liberalism have corrupted micropolitical sites – the 1AC’s engagement with the micropolitical motivates change which ruptures macropolitical exclusion. 18 +Campbell 08 (David Campbell insert quals. “The new pluralism: William Connolly and the contemporary global condition”. Duke University Press, 2008. Page 280-281) //WW JA 12/16/16 19 +In Connolly’s terms, what Hardt and Negri have failed to allow for with this either/ or logic is the relationship between micropolitics and macro-politics that animates large parts of Connolly’s recent writings. Micro-politics— related to arts of the self, and techniques of the self in some formulations— involves those practices that work on us or are drawn on by us to establish us, individually or collectively. They are techniques through which existing identities can be stabilized, new identities permitted, or new formations enabled. They can be located in a multitude of cultural and social sites (clubs, families, neighborhoods, the media, the military, religious groups, and the like) though they always work at numerous “in-between” points, nodes, and lines of the network state. Micropolitics flows from the paradoxical relationship of identity\ difference and is vital to a deep, multidimensional pluralism. 33 Notwithstanding the term and its examples, micropolitics cannot be confined to a sense of the local, regional, or substate. It is not a conception that translates into the idea of a confined space or particular scale. Instead, micropolitics indicates the significance of the transversal rather than the transnational, highlighting how the global is simultaneously local and the local necessarily global. As Connolly maintains, therefore, there is a constitutive relationship between the micropolitical and the macropolitical, with the latter understood in more formal political and institutional terms. As he writes, “micropolitics operates below the threshold of large legislative acts and executive initiatives, even as it ranges widely and sets conditions of possibility for these more visible actions. Technique and micropolitics form connective links joining practices of memory, perception, thinking, judgment, institutional design and political ethos.” 34 Although far from being the only transversal links—“market, antimarket practices (such as oligopolies, monopolies, and command systems), state decrees, and interstate agreements also play critical roles”— they do play an especially important role “below the threshold of political visibility inside every domain of life.” What the emphasis on the micropolitical points to is the significance of the visceral for contemporary thought and politics. In contrast to the epistemological register of intellectualism, where a sometimes narrow and shallow conception of reason governs thinking, the visceral is the densely layered register of political thought where affect— those dispositions to perceive, believe, associate, and decide— gives “texture and direction” to the “level of refined intellectuality.” Although it is infused with ideas and not antithetical to the intellectual, the visceral register is “not susceptible to modification by argument, dialogue or conversation alone.” 35 This is why methodological contests are often bitterly fought in the humanities and social sciences— each represents a question of faith as much as it does method. 36 Addressing the visceral register therefore means coming to terms with “the importance of relational techniques of the self and micro-politics. Such tactics mix image, movement, posture, concept and argument to new effect, simulating the process by which the habit in question became embodied the first time around.” 37 Paying attention to the affective and the visceral requires a new understanding of causality. Intellectualism implies a sense of what Connolly calls “efficient causality,” in which “you first separate factors and then show how one is the basic cause, or they cause each other, or how they together reflect a basic cause.” 38 In contrast— though not in place of efficient causality— there is emergent causality, whereby elements have effects at multiple levels, infusing areas and issues beyond their domain, and then, through adaptations, circuits, and feedback, themselves changing in response to these effects. Emergent causality thus refigures causation as resonance, whereby the elements affected fuse, “metabolizing into a moving complex.” 39 For Connolly this recasting of causation as resonance is the basis for a trenchant political critique of contemporary American politics at home and abroad. Seeing the country governed by a “theo-econopolitical machine”— the result of cowboy capitalism, evangelical Christians, the electronic news media, and the Republican Party forming an assemblage— Connolly offers a radical new way of explaining how (among other degradations) “state practices of torture,” “an international climate of fear and loathing against the Islamic world,” and “the Guantánamo Gulag” have come to be accepted, with lies and distortions about alternatives and those who promote them made equally acceptable. In large part, the power of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine” is established by “media presentations that do much of their work below the level of explicit attention and encourage the intense coding of those experiences as they do.” 40 So while the objects of concern are micropolitical and American (at least in the first instance), the effects of concern are macropoliti-cal and global. Connolly’s jeremiad is an appeal to “citizens who refuse to have their thinking placed under the automatic purview of the regime in which they reside, of religious authorities tied to the state, or corporate interests linked to either.” 41 The task for those citizens— both in and beyond America, united in cross-state, non-national movements— is to engage in their own “micropolitical work on the subliminal register.” 42 This is an especially challenging task, because given the idea of emergent rather than efficient causality, and the techniques of the self employed below the level of conscious politics by the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, it is not clear how this micropolitical resistance can be undertaken consciously and deliberately toward a desired outcome. 20 +Pluralism is a pre-requisite to societal change because it enables a re-orientation of values, but discourse must be paired with material change to be effective. 21 +Schoolman and Campbell 08 Morton Schoolman Morton Schoolman is Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany, and the author of The Imaginary Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse. David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the chairperson of the political science department. “Introduction: pluralism “old” and “new”’.//roman 22 +Thus, in Connolly's view, and in the view of other theorists whose work defined the critical temper, conventional pluralist theory is biased, burdened by normative assumptions, and top- heavy with methodologies masking an ideological and institutional infrastructure that organizes socioeconomic and political power to favor certain interests and groups. For Connolly and other theorists who share a critical temper, however, the burden of proof does not end with the demonstration of the biases of conventional pluralist theory. It is dedicated equally to developing alternative models of pluralist practice and to devising strategies for reform that bring democratic politics into conformity with the theory and practice of these models—although not entirely. As Connolly emphasizes, while proponents must be clear about the normative commitments embedded in their empirical models, their expectation and the expectation of their political allies and supporters must not be that the alternatives envisioned be fully attainable in practice. Practice always lags behind. Rather, alternative models are to provide bases for appraising the performance of the established pluralist system, including grounds to appreciate the achievements of existing pluralist practices, and they are to assist in setting goals for reform. Alternative models can also spur impulses for political reform and, importantly, create opportunities for reform by dramatizing future possibilities that can be realized through the political reorganization of already developed cultural and material resources. Put differently, alternative models can help to avoid the contented attitude toward the established political system that conventional pluralist theory often appears to encourage. Finally, alternative models also bring "the critical temper into sharper focus," which is to say that the critical temper has not completed its work until it turns back reflexively to appraise and revise as necessary every theoretical and practical aspect of critique. Such were the intended purposes of two alternative models of pluralism developed by Connolly in new works published not long after Political Science and Ideology and The Bias of Pluralism. In The Terms of Political Discourse (1974) Connolly explored how key concepts in politics are constructed from a normative point of view, and how normative differences among concepts can make them essentially contestable. "2 Connolly's larger intention here was to develop an alternative model of inquiry to the reigning positivist of modern pluralism and alternative models of pluralist politics. Indeed, in The Politicized Economy (1976) he and his coauthor Michael Best introduce an analysis of consumption distinguishing between consumer goods that expand inequality as they are generalized and consumer goods that reduce inequality as they are expanded to become inclusive goods.3 Their intention with this analysis was to construct an alternative model of pluralism able to reduce inequality and instruct political efforts to that end. Of course, the responsibility that the critical temper assumes is to move through political engagement at the theoretical level to political engagement at the practical level. This conventional way to formulate the relationship between theory and practice is somewhat misleading, though, for Connolly considers political theory generally a form of political practice, and in this context the critical temper itself instructs political strategy, for example by demonstrating the need and potential for reducing social and economic inequality. Connolly agrees with several of the theorists whose ideas fuel the critical temper that because its work broaches the political realm, the social science community can, like intellectuals as a whole, become an agent for political change and a pluralizing force within a political system whose barriers to democratic pluralism the critical temper understands well. The critical temper's political role grows out of its academic functions. It would help to "educate a larger public to the deficiencies of a biased pluralism," reopen "forgotten debates among social scientists, challenging the complacency of some and activating the latent concerns of others," and exert "constructive pressures on liberals in and around government. "4 Connolly is neither sanguine, nor cavalier, nor highly optimistic about improving the prospects for political reform through the allied agencies of the critical temper and its public. He recognizes that political strategy is the greatest challenge faced by the critics of conventional pluralist theory, because its theoretical advocates and the modern pluralist system of politics both work to define and limit the terms of political discourse. Yet he also recognizes that the challenge cannot be left to the routine politics of modern pluralism, to the positivist model of inquiry at one time dominant in the academy, or to the belief that the promise of a democratic pluralism will be redeemed by historical forces whose objectivity is vulnerable to the same criticism brought to bear on all other forms of positivism. 23 +They continue 24 +This is not to say that for Connolly conceptual revision is sufficient to produce political change. It is to insist that conceptual revision is a precondition for political change that prefigures it by alleging its necessity, suggesting its possibility, and opening opportunities and inferring strategies for change. Connolly’s many examples from the political life of the modern democratic world bear out this plurality of ways in which conceptual revision and political change are connected. To cite one, his consideration of “institutional racism” highlights the connection between revisions in the terms of our political discourse and the prefigured political changes that ensue. The claim that private and public institutions systematically discriminated against racial minorities was an interpretation of racism contesting established understandings that had underscored individual responsibility for racism. No sooner did the new concept of institutional racism enter into political life than members of the polity could not avoid considering the charge, even as they resisted it, that institutions in which they were implicated and that they believed to be legitimate unwittingly promoted inequality and lagged behind democratic progress achieved in other quarters of society. They were compelled to entertain the possibility that reform should be introduced through political strategies that solicited their support. If they were to abstain from involvement they now ran the risk of being implicated in racist beliefs from which they thought they were free. “Institutional racism” exemplifies how reflection on established concepts can call into question long-standing practices in which everyone is implicated, where reform supposes political action that depends upon antecedent conceptual revision. Politics— in this instance political struggle surrounding claims about discriminatory policies for which institutions are responsible— is bound up with struggles over the application and revision of familiar concepts. 25 +Unstable politics provides the chaos needed to generate ideas – proceduralism cedes public spaces to private institutions. 26 +Honig 13 (Bonnie Honig is a political, feminist, and legal theorist specializing in democratic theory. In 2013-14, she became Nancy Duke Lewis Professor-Elect of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, succeeding Anne Fausto-Sterling in the Chair in 2014–15. Honig was formerly Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. “The optimistic agonist: an interview with Bonnie Honig,” OpenDemocracy. March 7, 2013. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/nick-pearce-bonnie-honig/optimistic-agonist-interview-with-bonnie-honig) //WW JA 12/15/16 27 +BH: Most liberal and deliberative democratic theory treats proceduralism as a substitute for political engagement or as exhaustive of proper modes of political engagement. So when one reads the written work of these thinkers, often one can find (as with Habermas) that there’s a way in which the procedural mode of politics is, in a subtle or hidden way, dependent upon other modes of politics, but these other modes are not treated in the same honorific terms as proceduralism or discourse ethics because these other modes are unstable, or frightening or marginal. They are sometimes allowed to inform politics but they must be translated into the stable forms that institutionalisation requires. Habermas talks about the sluices through which issues move from the streets into more formal channels. But unstable and marginal political movements or tumults conjure up the passion and loyalty that fidelity to procedure postulates. And they also provide the imagination and fantasy of possible and alternative futures that bring people into politics, sweep them up into movements or give them a reason to participate. That is why I say in my book Emergency Politics that, without the events that proceduralists want to marginalise – like the crowd protests in the streets of Philadelphia (discussed by Jason Frank inConstituent Moments) – for example, the idea of attachment to a constitution is about as ‘attractive as kissing a typewriter.’ In short, the secret lifeblood of the constitutional patriot is connected to things that are destabilising of orderly constitutionalism or proper proceduralism and therefore are defined out of the centre. But that centre of orderly politics is actually deeply dependent on the energy and animation and frankly, the fun, that come from gathering together around issues that are affectively charged. Arendt once asked, while sitting on a panel debate on feminism, ‘What would we lose if we win?’ For the proceduralist that’s a good question to think about. If you actually succeeded in turning politics into mere proceduralism – completely procedural practices with none of the tumult and chaos that attend democratic forms of life – you lose the things you need for a democratic form: first, the tumult and spontaneity and even surprise that attend entry into the public sphere, and, second, public things. Admittedly procedures themselves are public things, but you also need parks and schools, prisons, armies and land and all the kinds of things people can struggle and fight over. In the US now, many of these are privatised or subcontracted out by the government to private industry. For proceduralists, such public things are what the procedures are there to manage. What we’ve seen over the last 20 years of neo-liberalism is a tendency to privatise or undercut those public things. So Hannah Arendt’s great and annoying question about feminism, ‘What would we lose if we win?’ is poignant in the context of proceduralists’ struggle with neo-liberalism. If the proceduralists won we’d have great procedures, but we would have little need of them because we would have nothing to distribute, as all the public things would be privately owned or managed. NP: With regards to public objects, are you saying that democracy requires objects of engagement, affection, ownership and contest that, in some sense, must be public in order to exist? BH: Yes. I mean that democracy postulates not just a demos, the people, about which we debate so much when it comes to the politics of immigration, multiculturalism and assimilation. And it requires more than procedures, for reasons I just alluded to. Those are important dimensions of democratic theory and practice, but the other term which is talked about less, is objects, whose ‘thingness’ creates a sense of publicity beyond the so-called public sphere, and whose finitude creates friction. Public things, to borrow from Wittgenstein, cannot be anything or nothing. They are something, and if a thing is something, it has a kind of definiteness to it. This isn’t to reduce things to pure materialism – everything has a life in language – but in their thingness, public things have a kind of finitude to them, and the friction that comes of fighting over finite things, that friction can be seen as the electricity of political life, or one source of its charge. When we focus on the demos and on procedure, we take our eye off what we should see as the important ball in the game – having public objects. Under neo-liberalism it’s become quite clear that we can drown in proceduralism – there’s no problem keeping people busy with paperwork and accountability, or in the case of deliberative democrats for example, we can have important debates about how to redraw and then defend the borders of a democratic country legitimately – but if all those things take up all our time, we’ll look up from our papers and our borders one day, and see that there isn’t anything left to fight over. What democracy has always been about is fighting over the public thing. These could be airwaves, as in public broadcasting, or water or climate, or national history or education or parks, prisons, or the military and its codes, membership and responsibilities. 28 +Optimistic agonism is necessary for political action. Proceduralism and political withdrawal fail – they’re self-defeating, unrealistic, and ineffective. 29 +Honig 2 (Bonnie Honig is a political, feminist, and legal theorist specializing in democratic theory. In 2013-14, she became Nancy Duke Lewis Professor-Elect of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, succeeding Anne Fausto-Sterling in the Chair in 2014–15. Honig was formerly Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. “The optimistic agonist: an interview with Bonnie Honig,” OpenDemocracy. March 7, 2013. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/nick-pearce-bonnie-honig/optimistic-agonist-interview-with-bonnie-honig) //WW JA 12/15/16 30 +BH: Optimism is the agonist’s greatest asset. People who would like to be able to withdraw from politics, who are tempted by the pleasures of private life untouched by contestation – in other words, who don’t think the private sphere is infused with power relations that need to be addressed – may feel put upon by the claims made by agonistic politics. It seems to refuse to them the withdrawal they seek. From their perspective, then, the claim that political contestation is unending seems to be quite pessimistic because, if your goal is withdrawal to a private life untouched by political engagement, the argument that engagement is inescapable seems pessimistic. But if you aspire to forms of life in common constellated around public things, in affectively charged ways that are both pleasurable and sometimes infuriating, built around finding, promoting and building shared public objects, engaged in some common cause, but not disciplined into oppressive forms of normalisation, then agonistic politics is very optimistic. Moreover, if you crave withdrawal but find waiting for you in the so-called private sphere, accretions of power and privilege that signal your impotence in a world beyond your control and influence, then agonism’s commitment to action in concert is for you, and its screams optimism. We have talked a lot about publicity and public things, but to be really clear it is around these things that equality and liberty and justice take shape. When they become merely procedural values, or when the form they take has to do with targets or indicators, they become shapeless and unrewarding values. They can only do the work that makes us value them if they are situated in the material life of citizens and residents together. And that I think is the optimism of agonistic politics. There is always an ongoing contestation, some of it in defence of historical achievements such as the welfare state, but agonism is not per se always oppositional or inherently contestational. It just anticipates resistance to all efforts to institute and maintain equality or justice. I argued in my first book that even the best of such efforts always generate remainders and so we agonists must also be attentive to those and aware that a further politics must follow to redress that. Thus, agonists hope that we can experience political engagement with pleasure and joy as well as the attending frustration that always comes with the friction of life in common. 31 +Underview 32 +Interpretation: Negative debaters may read counterplans as long as they don’t specify a right or permutations of rights to be restricted. 33 +To clarify, you can read a counterplan, but it cannot be like “restrict revenge porn and keep everything else”. 34 + 35 +Standards: 36 +Prep skew – I can’t research and prepare for every possible right that can be restricted. Explodes aff burden because we need to predict what counterplan you will read and independently prepare for that, whereas you only have to prep for a single aff. 37 + For example, you can say “restrict revenge porn” and I need to specifically find reasons why revenge porn is good because you still access the rest of the 1AC offense because we necessitate all free speech is allowed. 38 + 39 +Time Skew – You steal all of 1AC offense by reading the CP. Forces a 1AR restart and explodes structural time burden because we have to reformulate offense. Also kills our strategy because we need to find new ways to win the round because we cannot leverage the aff. Outweighs because we cannot have planes of contestation if you kill our ability to formulate concepts. Also controls internal link to clash-based education- we cant learn if our arguments don’t interact - EntryDate
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