Tournament: 1 - Grapevine | Round: 3 | Opponent: Cooper City NR | Judge: Becca Traber
Standards
Predictable limits—The resolution proposes the question the negative is prepared to answer and creates a bounded list of potential affs. This is also vital to rigorous modes of contestation that allow for skill development by navigating the complex field of public policy within a bounded area. De-limiting the topic decimates dialogue – research asymmetry creates a procedural hierarchy which makes dialogical communication impossible – that shuts out ideological flux and reinstates the logic of mastery. Failing to do so creates a colonization of methods and inadequate debates about methodology.
Lewis Gordon 14—professor of philosophy, African and Judiac Studies at the University of Connecticut—2014 ("Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge," Africa Development 39.1: 81-92, 88).
The first is regarding the political significance of this critique. For politics to exist, there must be discursive opposition over relations of power. Such activity involves communicative possibilities that rely on the suspension of violent or repressive forces. In effect, that makes politics also a condition of appearance. To be political is to emerge, to appear, to exist. Colonisation involves the elimination of discursive opposition between the dominant group and the subordinated group. A consequence of this is the attempted elimination of speech (a fundamental activity of political life) with a trail of concomitant conditions of its possibility. It is not that colonised groups fail to speak. It is that their speaking lacks appearance or mediation; it is not transformed into speech. The erasure of speech calls for the elimination of such conditions of its appearance such as gestural sites and the constellation of muscles that facilitates speech – namely, the face. As faceless, problem people are derailed from the dialectics of recognition, of self and other, with the consequence of neither self nor other. Since ethical life requires others, a challenge is here raised against models of decolonial practice that centre ethics. The additional challenge, then, is to cultivate the options necessary for both political and ethical life. To present that call as an ethical one would lead to a similar problem of coloniality as did, say, the problem of method raised by Fanon. European modernity has, in other words, subverted ethics. As with the critique of epistemology as first philosophy, ethics, too, as first philosophy must be called into question. It is not that ethics must be rejected. It simply faces its teleological suspension, especially where, if maintained, it presupposes instead of challenging colonial relations. Even conceptions of the ethical that demand deference to the Other run into trouble here since some groups, such as blacks and Indians/Native Americans, are often not even the Other. This means, then, that the ethical proviso faces irrelevance without the political conditions of its possibility. This is a major challenge to liberal hegemony, which calls for ethical foundations of political life, in European modernity. It turns it upside down. But in doing so, it also means that ethics-centred approaches, even in the name of liberation, face a similar fate.
Fallibility– unlimited topics make assessing the validity of the 1ac's truth claims impossible AND cause concessionary ground which creates incentives for avoidance. Our method of refinement via contestation challenges hegemonic structures which I/L turns their method – it's also key to advocacy skills
Omi, Michael (Berkeley ethnic studies professor). "Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias", Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36.6, Taylor and Francis
In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and
AND
and anti-democratic social movements that are evident in US politics today.
Switch side debate - Nobody really likes the topic, but defending the resolution is good for everyone. Tailoring arguments to the format of switch-side deliberation promotes self-reflexive openness—that's the best way to cause wide-scale opinion shifts over time. Absent normative meta-consensus on procedural terms for debate that guarantee switch-side deliberative testing within mutually-understood constraints, we encourage dogmatism and group polarization, which turn the aff
Vote for Procedural Fairness and Education – allowing the aff to arbitrarily manipulate the debate's content with self-serving interpretations creates a moral hazard. Vote neg because debate is a competitive activity which loses meaning without substantive constraints.