Non-traditional debate performancesand their frameworks

MDAW 2015

All debate is performing

Form and content are inseparable.

The norms of debate performance are conditioned by systems (and histories) of oppression. White supremacy and anti-blackness. Heteropatriarchy. To name a few.

Debate rounds are not training spaces but part of a STRUGGLE linked with similar struggles in the world outside. Debate competition is not equal playing field but a field charged with power relations.

Some presuppositions

Standards for evaluating evidence, authority, and argumentationPersonal experience, music, affectHow clash is mapped and evaluated (the flow)Ethos and Pathos as well as Logos

Stylistic norms How you perform in debate has direct bearing on the

value of your argument (form and content inseparable)Conscious and unconscious behaviors within and

outside debate roundsWhat teams said in previous debate rounds

(“adaptation”)Slips of the tongue in speech and cross-xStrike sheet decisions

Performance AFFs question:

Performance AFFs with plans (“Critical AFFs”): Critical framing changes the way judges evaluate

impacts and/ or the desirability of the plan AFFs that change what it means to affirm

resolutional action (e.g. “demand” AFFs)Usually tacitly accept dominant standards of

evidence and argumentation and focus on contentPerformance AFFs without plans (“Performance

AFFs”)AFFs that place their performance within the

resolution in order to undermine its effectsAFFs that reject the resolution in its entirety in

order to discuss a question that comes prior to it.Garner advantages from alternative stylistic and

evidentiary forms

Fort Hays at CEDA, 2002, USFG should increase control over Indian Country topic (“Affirm this topic in its everydayness as transversal dissent. Affirm the topic as a vision.” 10:00-11:06)

The Louisville project 2001 - 2005 (“Who most meaningfully increases black participation in debate”)

Oklahoma CL at CEDA 2014. (“War powers should not be used against niggaz” 52:00-55:00)

A set of (mostly old school) examples from college debate

Emphasis on micropolitics, the molecular, the local, the embodied

Critique of unmarked/neutral/distanced position from which “one” can evaluate what is true and what is good and bad

Emphasizes how debaters themselves are implicated in the resolution

Common tropes

We internalize surveillance subjectivelyRacialized and gendered experience are

structured by systems of surveillance that compel us to act and value ourselves in certain ways. Stop and Frisk. Job interviews. Scholarship applications. “Sex” designation on driver’s licenses. Debate reproduces those behavioral norms

Education, testing, school evaluation, classroom disciplineAnalogies to debate

Possible sites of struggle on the surveillance topic

Style/content. Division of labor in the AFF constructivesOrganize the flow differentlyDerive offense from your performance

Writing/debating performance affs

Frameworks are claims to what should be evaluated in a debate and how

Performance AFFs hold that standards of evaluation can never be neutral or “fair,” but participate in the struggle defined by structures of power. “Fairness is non-unique”

Performance AFFs have explicit or implicit frameworks backed by the AFF thesis

“Who best methodologically liberates the oppressed”

More specific frameworks based on AFFThis is your “counter-interpretation”

“Frameworks” in performance AFFs

1AC proves that the topic itself is the problem. It shouldn’t be accepted without discussion

No neutral interpretation of the topic. 1AC is a built in kritik of neg fairness, education, and jurisdiction standards

Defaults to a framework debate (not about what the topic commands, but about how debaters should debate the topic)

Evaluate topicality as a disad. Case impacts operate on the same plane as T impacts

A2: Topicality

Write your answers specifically based on AFF. Most things a performance AFF critiques have their analogies in debate.

Excludes by definition the local, micropolitical, the embodied (everything that the AFF claims is good and necessary)

Debate as a “research activity” assumes a neutral, unmarked, agent of knowledge and action. That translates as white cisgender and male. But you want to pretend that that’s not the case. (There are other rationales too)

Should not force the USFG grid of political change on everyone. We do not want to talk or walk like you do.

A2: Framework (policymaking education good)

Idea that you need to set the terms of discussion before you can have a discussion (e.g. the resolution). And discussions are good for democracy or whatnot.

But:AFF shows how public sphere of compulsory

USFG advocacy is founded on violence not agreement. Which is why those norms need to be challenged in public. (A link turn to democracy)

A2: Framework – public sphere

There are more than two sides. And there is also an underside. When was the last time you ran our AFF?

A2: Framework – Switch Side debate