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Interpretation and violation- the aff should be a topical defense of the resolution
This interpretation is grammatically correctResolved before a colon reflects a legislative forum
Army Career College 13 # 12. Punctuation -- The Colon and Semicolon, United States Army, Warrant Officer Career
College, Last Reviewed: December 19, 2013, http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/wocc/ColonSemicolon.asp
The colon introduces the following: A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon)
meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. A long quotation (one or
more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle
[Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) A formal quotation or question : The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we
have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment.
After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon)Dear Madam: (colon) The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock

A formal

resolution, after the word "resolved :" Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.

Should expresses an obligation

Nieto 9 Judge Henry Nieto, Colorado Court of Appeals, 8-20-2009 People v. Munoz, 240 P.3d 311, Colo. Ct. App. 2009
"Should"

is "used . . . to express duty, obligation , propriety, or expediency." Webster's Third New International Dictionary 2104 (2002). Courts [**15] interpreting the
weight of authority appears to favor interpreting "should" in an imperative,
obligatory sense. HN7A number of courts, confronted with the question of whether using the word "should" in jury instructions conforms with the Fifth and Sixth Amendment
protections governing the reasonable doubt standard, have upheld instructions using the word. In the courts of other states in which a defendant has argued that the word "should"
word in various contexts have drawn conflicting conclusions, although the

in the reasonable doubt instruction does not sufficiently inform the jury that it is bound to find the defendant not guilty if insufficient proof is submitted at trial, the courts have squarely rejected
the argument. They reasoned that the word "conveys a sense of duty and obligation and could not be misunderstood by a jury." See State v.
McCloud, 257 Kan. 1, 891 P.2d 324, 335 (Kan. 1995); see also Tyson v. State, 217 Ga. App. 428, 457 S.E.2d 690, 691-92 (Ga. Ct. App. 1995) (finding argument that "should" is directional but
not instructional to be without merit); Commonwealth v. Hammond, 350 Pa. Super. 477, 504 A.2d 940, 941-42 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1986). Notably, courts

interpreting the word

"should" in other types of jury instructions [**16] have also found that the word conveys to the jury a sense of duty or obligation and not
discretion . In Little v. State, 261 Ark. 859, 554 S.W.2d 312, 324 (Ark. 1977), the Arkansas Supreme Court interpreted the word "should" in an instruction
on circumstantial evidence as synonymous with the word "must" and rejected the defendant's argument that the jury may have been misled by the court's use of the word in
the instruction. Similarly, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected a defendant's argument that the court erred by not using the word
"should" in an instruction on witness credibility which used the word "must" because the two words have the same meaning . State v. Rack,
318 S.W.2d 211, 215 (Mo. 1958). [*318] In applying a child support statute, the Arizona Court of Appeals concluded that a legislature's or commission's
use of the word "should" is meant to convey duty or obligation. McNutt v. McNutt, 203 Ariz. 28, 49 P.3d 300, 306 (Ariz. Ct. App. 2002) (finding a statute stating
that child support expenditures "should" be allocated for the purpose of parents' federal tax exemption to be mandatory).

The United States splits sovereignty among federal and state governments
Andrew Power 13 et al, Active Citizenship and Disability: Implementing the Personalisation of Support, Cambridge University
Press, Jan 14, 2013, Page 88
The United States has a unique political and geographical landscape which provides a complex territorial system of administration of disability support
policy. It has an intricate federal-state level relationship , with different institutions and actors who can shape disability support policy in many different
ways and at various different scales. At the federal level the U nited S tates is a constitutional republic in which the president, Congressional and
judiciary share powers reserved for the national government, and the federal government shares sovereignty with the state governments.

Legalize is to make an illegal act lawful

Blacks Law Dictionary 95 What is LEGALIZE? [http://thelawdictionary.org/legalize/]
To make legal or lawful; to confirm or validate what was before void or unlawful; to add the sanction and authority of law to that which before
was without or against law.

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Topical version of the aff The United States should legalize prostitution
This promotes a model of debate, as dialogue- normative restrictions are key to its potential
Galloway 7 DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RE- CONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS
AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE, Ryan Galloway, Assistant Professor and the Director of Debate at Samford University,
Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)
Taking the resolution as an invitation to a dialogue about a particular set of ideas would preserve the affirmative teams obligation to
uphold the debate resolution. At the same time, this approach licenses debaters to argue both discursive and performative advantages.
While this view is broader than many policy teams would like, and certainly more limited than many critical teams would prefer, this approach captures the advantages of
both modes of debate while maintaining the stable axis point of argumentation for a full clash of ideas around these values. Here, I
begin with an introduction to the dialogic model, which I will relate to the history of switch-side debate and the current controversy. Then, I will defend my conception of debate as a dialogical
exchange. Finally, I will answer potential criticisms to the debate as a dialogue construct. Setting the Argumentative Table: Conceptualizing Debate as a Dialogue Conceiving debate as a
dialogue exposes a means of bridging the divide between the policy community and the kritik community. Here I will distinguish between formal argument and dialogue. While formal
argument centers on the demands of informal and formal logic as a mechanism of mediation, dialogue tends to focus on the relational aspects of an interaction. As such, it emphasizes the give-

As
dialogue, the affirmative case constitutes a discursive act that anticipates a discursive response. The consequent interplay does not
seek to establish a propositional truth , but seeks to initiate an in-depth dialogue between the debate participants. Such an approach would
and-take process of negotiation. Consequently, dialogue emphasizes outcomes related to agreement or consensus rather than propositional correctness (Mendelson & Lindeman, 2000).

have little use for rigid rules of logic or argument, such as stock issues or fallacy theory, except to the point where the participants agreed that these were functional approaches. Instead, a
dialogic approach encourages evaluations of affirmative cases relative to their performative benefits, or whether or not the case is a valuable speech act. The move away from formal logic
structure toward a dialogical conversation model allows for a broader perspective regarding the ontological status of debate. At the same time, a dialogical approach challenges the ways that
many teams argue speech act and performance theory in debates. Because there are a range of ways that performative oriented teams argue their cases, there is little consensus regarding the
status of topicality. While some take topicality as a central challenge to creating performance-based debates, many argue that topicality is wholly irrelevant to the debate, contending that the
requirement that a critical affirmative be topical silences creativity and oppositional approaches. However, if

we move beyond viewing debate as an ontologically independent

an invitation to dialogue, our attention must move from the ontology of the affirmative case to a consideration of the
case in light of exigent opposition (Farrell, 1985). Thus, the initial speech act of the affirmative team sets the stage for an emergent
response. While most responses deal directly with the affirmative case, Farrell notes that they may also deal with metacommunication regarding the process of negotiation. In this way, we
monologuebut as

may conceptualize the affirmatives goal in creating a germ of a response (Bakhtin, 1990) whose completeness bears on the possibility of all subsequent utterances. Conceived as a dialogue,
the affirmative speech act anticipates the negative response. A failure

to adequately encourage, or anticipate a response deprives the negative speech act and
the emergent dialogue of the capacity for a complete inquiry . Such violations short circuit the dialogue and undermine the potential
for an emerging dialogue to gain significance (either within the debate community or as translated to forums outside of the activity).
Here, the dialogical model performs as a fairness model , contending that the affirmative speech act, be it policy oriented, critical, or
performative in nature, must adhere to normative restrictions to achieve its maximum competitive and ontological potential.

Two net benefitsFirst, Fairness- they justify an infinite number of potential frameworks, destroying predictable
limits. The community chooses resolutionally divided ground because it is balanced and
educational. Arguments that arent linked to the plan are amorphous and unstable.
A narrow, mutually agreed-upon understanding of the topic is a pre-requisite to meaningful
research and strategy.
Shively 00 Partisan Politics and Political Theory, Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas A&M, p. 181-2
The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The

ambiguists must say no tothey must reject and limitsome ideas and actions. In what
they must recognize the
role of agreement in political contest , or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in
thinking that agreement marks the end of contestthat consen- sus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfectif
there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on
generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting
follows, we will also find that they must say yes to some things. In particular, they must say yes to the idea of rational per- suasion. This means, first, that

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condition of contest and debate . As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been
one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the
premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we

cannot argue about something if we are not com- municating: if we cannot

agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree
about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it . For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with
someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if ones target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the
sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is
meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared
ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagree- ments. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an under- standing of the complaint at hand.
And a demonstrators audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly
contesting it. In other words, contestation

rests on some basic agreement or harmony.

Debates benefits come from arguing against a well prepared opponent- that preparation is the
only way to test the epistemology of the aff
Talisse 5 Deliberativist responses to activist challenges: A continuation of Young's dialectic, Robert B. Talisse, Department of
Philosophy, Vanderbilt University, Philosophy Social Criticism, 2005 31: 423, DOI: 10.1177/0191453705052978
deliberativists accuse activists of adopting the kind of pressure group interest based
politics (106) that deliberativists cite as a prime obstacle to proper democracy . On the other hand, deliberativists charge activists with
unreasonableness. Reasonable modes of political action, the deliberativist contends, consist in willingness to listen to those whom one believes
are wrong, to demand reasons from them and to give arguments oneself aimed at persuading them to change their views (1067). Note that
this pair of criticisms derives from the two components of deliberative democracy outlined above: the deliberativist rejects aggregative or adversarial models of democracy and
adopts a model of reasoned discourse as the proper means to achieving political justice. Taking the criticisms in turn, Youngs activist replies that activism is not an
Young considers two deliberativist criticisms of political activism. On the one hand,

instantiation of the kind of adversarial interest-driven power politics that the deliberativist derides. This is so, the activist maintains, because the activist is committed to a universalist rather than a partisan cause; activism is
not directed by self- or group-interest, but is rather aimed at the redressing of harm and injustice (107). To the charge that he is unreasonable, the activist responds that the deliberative democrat relies on far too narrow an
understanding of reasonableness (107). According to the activist, reasonableness extends beyond orderly reason-giving; properly construed, reasonableness consists in having a sense of a range of alternatives in belief and
action, and engaging in considered judgment in deciding among them and being able and willing to justify ones claims and actions to others (ibid.). Young claims that there is nothing in the activists mode of politi- cal
action that is inconsistent with reasonableness in this sense; there- fore activism as such is not unreasonable.14 Although Young treats these replies as adequate, they are not. The activist has misunderstood the deliberative
democrats criticisms, and so his replies to them cut little ice. Consider first the activists expansion of what he takes to be the far too narrow conception of reasonable- ness countenanced by the deliberativist. There is

deliberativist conception of
reasonableness differs from the activists in at least one crucial respect. On the deliberativist view, a necessary condition for reasonableness is the
willingness not only to offer justifications for ones own views and actions, but also to listen to criticisms , objections, and the justificatory reasons that
nothing in the proposed expansion that the deliberative democrat cannot hold, and in fact many deliberativists characterize deliberation in precisely these terms. Nonetheless, the

can be given in favor of alternative proposals. In light of this further stipulation, we may say that, on the deliber- ative democrats view, reasonable citizens are responsive to reasons, their views are reason tracking.

Reasonableness, then, entails an acknowledgement on the part of the citizen that her current views are possibly mistaken, incomplete,
and in need of revision. Reasonableness is hence a two-way street : the reasonable citizen is able and willing to offer justifications for
her views and actions, but is also prepared to consider alternate views, respond to criticism, answer objections, and, if necessary, revise or
abandon her views. In short, reasonable citizens do not only believe and act for reasons, they aspire to believe and act according to the best reasons; consequently, they recognize their
own fallibility in weighing reasons and hence engage in public deliberation in part for the sake of improving their views .15 Reasonableness
as the deliberative democrat understands it is constituted by a willingness to participate in an ongoing public discussion that inevitably
involves pro- cesses of self-examination by which one at various moments rethinks and revises ones views in light of encounters with new
arguments and new considerations offered by ones fellow deliberators. Hence Gutmann and Thompson write: Citizens who owe one another justifications for the laws that they seek to impose must take seriously the
reasons their opponents give. Taking seri- ously the reasons ones opponents give means that, at least for a certain range of views that one opposes, one must acknowledge the possibility that an opposing view may be shown

It imposes an obligation to continue to test their own views,

seeking forums in which the views can be challenged, and keeping open the possi- bility of their revision or even rejection .16 (2000: 172) That
Youngs activist is not reasonable in this sense is clear from the ways in which he characterizes his activism. He claims that Activities of protest, boycott, and disruption are more appropriate means for
to be correct in the future. This acknowl- edgement has implications not only for the way they regard their own views.

getting citizens to think seriously about what until then they have found normal and acceptable (106); activist tactics are employed for the sake of bringing attention to injustice and making a wider public aware of

characterizations suggest the presump- tion that questions of justice are essentially settled; the activist takes
himself to know what justice is and what its implementation requires. He also believes he knows that those who oppose him are either the
power-hungry beneficiaries of the unjust status quo or the inattentive and unaware masses who do not think seriously about the injustice of the institutions that govern their lives and so
unwittingly accept them. Hence his political activity is aimed exclusively at enlisting other citizens in support of the cause to which he is tenaciously committed. The activist implicitly holds that there
could be no reasoned objec- tion to his views concerning justice, and no good reason to endorse those institutions he deems unjust. The activist
presumes to know that no deliberative encounter could lead him to reconsider his position or adopt a different method of social action; he declines to
engage persons he disagrees with (107) in discourse because he has judged on a priori grounds that all opponents are either pathetically benighted or balefully corrupt. When one holds
ones view as the only responsible or just option, there is no need for reasoning with those who disagree, and hence no need to be reasonable. According to the
deliberativist, this is the respect in which the activist is unreasonable . The deliberativist recognizes that questions of justice are difficult
and complex . This is the case not only because justice is a notoriously tricky philosophical concept, but also because, even supinstitutional wrongs (107). These

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posing we had a philosophically sound theory of justice, questions of implementation are especially thorny. Accordingly, political philo- sophers, social scientists,
economists, and legal theorists continue to work on these questions. In light of much of this literature, it is diffi- cult to maintain the level of epistemic confidence in ones own views that the activist seems to muster; thus the

deliberativist sees the activists confidence as evidence of a lack of honest engagement with the issues. A possible outcome of the kind of encounter the
activist declines (107) is the realization that the activists image of himself as a David to the Goliath of power wielded by the state and corporate actors (106) is naive. That is, the deliberativist comes to
see, through processes of public deliberation , that there are often good arguments to be found on all sides of an important social
issue; reasonableness hence demands that one must especially engage the reasons of those with whom one most vehemently disagrees
and be ready to revise ones own views if neces- sary. Insofar as the activist holds a view of justice that he is unwilling to put to the
test of public criticism , he is unreasonable. Furthermore, insofar as the activists conception commits him to the view that there could be no rational opposition to his views, he is literally unable
to be reasonable. Hence the deliberative democrat concludes that activism, as presented by Youngs activist, is an unreasonable model of
political engagement. The dialogical conception of reasonableness adopted by the delib- erativist also provides a response to the activists reply to the charge that he is engaged in interest group or adversarial
politics. Recall that the activist denied this charge on the grounds that activism is aimed not at private or individual interests, but at the universal good of justice. But this reply also misses the force of the posed objection. On
the deliber- ativist view, the problem with interest-based politics does not derive simply from the source (self or group), scope (particular or universal), or quality (admirable or deplorable) of the interest, but with the concept
of interests as such. Not unlike preferences, interests typically function in democratic theory as fixed dispositions that are non-cogni- tive and hence unresponsive to reasons. Insofar as the activist sees his view of justice as
given and not open to rational scrutiny, he is engaged in the kind of adversarial politics the deliberativist rejects. The argument thus far might appear to turn exclusively upon differ- ent conceptions of what reasonableness

reasonableness involves some degree of what we may call epistemic modesty . On this view, the reasonable citizen
seeks to have her beliefs reflect the best available reasons, and so she enters into public discourse as a way of testing her views
against the objections and questions of those who disagree; hence she implicitly holds that her present view is open to reasonable
critique and that others who hold opposing views may be able to offer justifications for their views that are at least as strong as her
reasons for her own. Thus any mode of politics that presumes that discourse is extraneous to questions of justice and justification is unreasonable. The activist sees no reason to accept this. Reasonableness for the
entails. The deliberativist view I have sketched holds that

activist consists in the ability to act on reasons that upon due reflection seem adequate to underwrite action; discussion with those who disagree need not be involved. According to the activist, there are certain cases in which
he does in fact know the truth about what justice requires and in which there is no room for reasoned objection. Under such conditions, the deliberativists demand for discussion can only obstruct justice; it is therefore
irrational. It may seem that we have reached an impasse. However, there is a further line of criticism that the activist must face. To the activists view that at least in certain situations he may reasonably decline to engage with
persons he disagrees with (107), the deliberative democrat can raise the phenomenon that Cass Sunstein has called group polarization (Sunstein, 2003; 2001a: ch. 3; 2001b: ch. 1). To explain: consider that political activists
cannot eschew deliberation altogether; they often engage in rallies, demonstrations, teach-ins, workshops, and other activi- ties in which they are called to make public the case for their views. Activists also must engage in
deliberation among themselves when deciding strategy. Political movements must be organized, hence those involved must decide upon targets, methods, and tactics; they must also decide upon the content of their pamphlets
and the precise messages they most wish to convey to the press. Often the audience in both of these deliberative contexts will be a self-selected and sympathetic group of like-minded activists.

Group

polarization is a well-documented phenomenon that has been found all over the world and in many diverse tasks; it means that members of a
deliberating group predictably move towards a more extreme point in the direction indicated by the members predelibera- tion tendencies (Sunstein, 2003: 812). Importantly, in groups that engage in repeated discussions
over time, the polarization is even more pronounced (2003: 86). Hence discussion in a small but devoted activist enclave that meets regularly to strategize and protest should produce a situation in which individuals hold

the activist has proposed

that he may reasonably decline to engage in discussion with those with whom he disagrees in cases in which the requirements of
justice are so clear that he can be confident that he has the truth. Group polarization suggests that deliberatively confronting those with
whom we disagree is essential even when we have the truth. For even if we have the truth, if we do not engage opposing views, but
instead deliberate only with those with whom we agree, our view will shift progressively to a more extreme point , and thus we lose
the truth. In order to avoid polarization, deliberation must take place within heterogeneous argument pools (Sunstein, 2003: 93). This of course does
positions more extreme than those of any individual member before the series of deliberations began (ibid.).17 The fact of group polarization is relevant to our discussion because

not mean that there should be no groups devoted to the achieve- ment of some common political goal; it rather suggests that engagement with those with whom one disagrees is essential to the proper pursuit of justice. Insofar
as the activist denies this, he is unreasonable. These arguments demonstrate that the deliberativists criticisms of activism are more subtle and powerful than Young has supposed. The two quick replies Young puts in the
mouth of her activist are inadequate as they stand. However, the deliberativist cannot let the matter rest here; the view of reasonableness sketched above bids the deliberativist to consider the activists challenges to
deliberative democracy.

Second decision-making skills- we make choices every day that affect those around us. We have
an obligation to the people affected by our decisions to use debate as a method for honing these
critical thinking and information processing abilities.
Stasis fostered by topical advocacy creates better decisions
Galloway 7 DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RE- CONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS
AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE, Ryan Galloway, Assistant Professor and the Director of Debate at Samford University,
Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)
Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy. A Sirens Call: Falsely
Presuming Epistemic Benefits In addition to the basic equity norm, dismissing the idea that debaters defend the affirmative side of the topic encourages
advocates to falsely value affirmative speech acts in the absence of a negative response. There may be several detrimental
consequences that go unrealized in a debate where the affirmative case and plan are not topical . Without ground, debaters may fall
prey to a sirens call, a belief that certain critical ideals and concepts are axiological, existing beyond doubt without scrutiny . Bakhtin
contends that in dialogical exchanges the greater the number and weight of counter-words, the deeper and more substantial our
understanding will be (Bakhtin, 1990). The matching of the word to the counter-word should be embraced by proponents of critical
activism in the activity, because these dialogical exchanges allow for improvements and modifications in critical arguments. Muir

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argues that debate puts students into greater contact with the real world by forcing them to read a great deal of information (1993, p. 285). He continues, [t]he constant consumption of

Through the
process of comprehensive understanding, debate serves both as a laboratory and a constitutive arena. Ideas find and lose adherents.
Ideas that were once considered beneficial are modified, changed, researched again, and sometimes discarded altogether. A central
argument for open deliberation is that it encourages a superior consensus to situations where one side is silenced. Christopher Peters contends,
The theory holds that antithesis ultimately produces a better consensus, that the clash of differing, even opposing interests and ideas in the
process of decision making...creates decisions that are better for having been subjected to this trial by fire (1997, p. 336). The
combination of a competitive format and the necessity to take points of view that one does not already agree with combines to
create a unique educational experience for all participants. Those that eschew the value of such experience by an axiological
position short-circuit the benefits of the educational exchange for themselves, their opponents, as well as the judges and observers of
such debates.
material...is significantly constitutive. The information grounds the issues under discussion, and the process shapes the relationship of the citizen to the public arena (p. 285).

A switch-side format it require students see both sides of an issue

Bile 00 REASONING TOGETHER AS DIALECTICAL PARTNERS! "BEYOND PERSUASION" TOWARD "COOPERATIVE
ARGUMENTATION, Jeffery Thomas Bile, PhD candidate in the School of Interpersonal Communication at Ohio, Contemporary
Argumentation and Debate, http://www.cedadebate.org/CAD/index.php/CAD/article/viewFile/254/238
In our contentious culture, we surely need better ways to begin to discuss the issues without one side being against another (Griffin 101). If we took this approach, we could have discussions
that center on the complexity of issues, what their implications are, who might be affected and in what ways, and on how one choice over another changes the issue itself. So, I think the issue
of the "resolution" needs to be reconsidered from an invitational framework as well. (Griffin 101). l agree completely that these are worthwhile goals. Certainly, contemporary social problems
are not as simple as our dualistic debates often imply. Before

discarding binary topics too quickly, however, we should consider their contextual effects .
When combined with the requirement of switching sides, two-sided topics expand the possibilities for discovering that those with
whom we disagree might have tenable positions after all. Empathic learning is encouraged, then, when students agree to disagree in
the context of debate tournaments. A related issue, deserving much further exploration, is the problematic of counter-attitudinal advocacy created by mandatory side switching. l
sympathize with the view that students should not be "forced" to advocate a position that they do not believe. As a practical matter, I believe that most topics are ambiguous
enough to allow considerable opportunity to find positional comfort . But, more fundamentally, I'm not sure that l ultimately accept the contention that academic
counter-attitudinal advocacy is undesirable. The counter-attitudinal switch-sides structure of intercollegiate debate asks the student to imaginatively enter into
another's world and to try to understand why they might see it as they do. This convention may yield invitational dividends. Foss and Griffin recognize value
in asking communicators to seriously consider "perspectives other than those they presently hold and they encourage them to try to "validate those
perspectives even if they differ dramatically from the rhetor's own" (5). It seems to me that counter-attitudinal advocacy might be an excellent technique for encouraging just that. Debate
tournaments ask students to agree to model open-mindedness , empathy , and personal validation of multiple views. No one should be forced
to debate, but for those making the choice, agreeing to disagree encourages a consideration of the fallibility of one's own constructions of the
world as well as empathy for other ways of seeing things.

Through discussing paths of government action, debate teaches us to be better organizational

decision makers
William J. Kinsella 2 is Associate Professor of Communication @ North Carolina State University, Problematizing the
Distinction between Expert and Lay Knowledge, https://www.academia.edu/297063/Kinsella_W._J._2002_._Problematizing_the_Distinction_Between_Expert_and_Lay_Knowledge._New_Jersey_Journal_of_Communication_10_2_191-207, DOA:
3-3-14, y2k
As active and equal participants in policy discourse with an undeniable technical dimension , members of the public must
listen to , evaluate , and contribute to conversations with substantial technical content . Here Frank Fischers analysis complements that of Walter Fisher. Fischer (2000)
maintains that public participation is valuable in three ways: it cultivates democratic politics and thereby counters the trend toward technocratic control and
individual alienation , it provides legitimation for particular decisions as well as for public institutions, and it enhances the relevance and validity of technical analysis at all levels
of decision making . It is the third of these motives that Fischer examines most closely and most effectively, focusing on citizens abilities to contribute as well as on the usefulness of their contributions in particular policy decisions
Drawing on examples from Europe, Asia, and the United States, Fischer argues that many citizens are much more capable of grappling with
complex technical and normative issues than the conventional wisdom would have us believe (p. 260). His examples include cases of popular epidemiology
(Brown & Mikkelsen, 1990), successful citizen panels and juries (Crosby, 1995), the widely-acclaimed European consensus conferences (Joss & Durant, 1995), and the participatory research movement ( Cancian & Armstead, 1992; Laird, 1993; Reason,
1994). His goal is to identify viable mechanisms for substantive public participation in environmental decisions, as a step toward what Dryzek (1990, 1996) calls discursive democracy. As a leader in the argumentative turn or communicative turn in the

successful policy flows from a broad and comprehensive dialog in which citizens
articulate, interrogate, and transform each others perspectives . Within this dialog, the local knowledge of ordinary citizens and the abstract knowledge of technical experts interact synergistically
to provide more complete analyses and more effective decisions. Fischer provides considerable evidence that citizens are capable of direct participation , and that such participation is essential both
public policy discipline (Fischer & Forester, 1993; Healey, 1993), Fischer maintains that

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to democratic politics and to successful decision making. Nevertheless, reviews of existing approaches to public participation, especially as practiced in the United States, suggest that these often fall far
short of Fischers ideal (Chess & Purcell, 1999; Fiorino, 1990, 1996; Laird, 1993; McComas, 2001; Rowe & Frewer, 2000). In the realm of environmental policy making, Fiorino (1996) has described this deficit as a participation gap. Acknowledging the limits
of technocratic decision making and responding to calls for more openness, U.S. federal and state agencies have developed a variety of public involvement methods including public meetings and hearings, citizen advisory boards, and citizen panels and juries.
Meanwhile, ballot initiatives and referenda have become increasingly influential in state and local environmental politics. These approaches are certainly valuable, and represent progress toward a more dialogic model. Nevertheless, they all have significant
limitations related to real or perceived limits on the abilities of ordinary citizens to participate in debates with substantial technical dimensions. Public meetings, widely utilized by many government agencies, are attempts at direct democracy but typically provide
only limited opportunities for citizen engagement with issues and decision makers. In many cases, this engagement is brief and comes only after the issues have been framed and a narrow menu of policy choices has been developed. In the worst cases, meetings
provide hollow participation in which citizens merely make noise in some political ritual rather than real influence over outcomes (Laird, 1993, p. 348). As Fiorino (1996) notes, in most public hearings the agency defines the agenda and establishes the
format. The hearing itself provides limited time for citizens to understand the technical or policy issues and to take a substantive part in the discussion. Indeed, the reliance on public hearings as a mainstay of public participation is one of the weaknesses of the
administrative process in the United States, in part because of the unequal relationship of citizens to government officials....Public hearings typically do not give citizens a share in decision making. Although they provide mechanisms for public views to come to
the attention of administrators, they do not directly engage citizens in the process of making policy choices or cede to citizens any control over the decision process itself (p. 202). Panels, juries, and advisory boards provide small numbers of citizens with
opportunities for more extended engagement, but these more highly involved individuals do not necessarily represent the larger public that remains distanced from the issues. Appointments to such bodies often emphasize interest group politics over direct
democracy (Fiorino, 1996; Laird, 1993; Williams & Matheny, 1995). Additionally, public interest representatives who serve in these bodies for extended time periods run the risk of going native by becoming specialized experts themselves. As these individuals
increasingly identify with their formal roles, they may lose contact with the communities and values that they are presumed to represent. In Fischer s view, [i]nterest group politics are not to be misconstrued with citizen involvement in the sense at issue here.
Although they speak in the name of large numbers of people, such groups are typically run by a small group of people at the top of their organizations. Indeed, interest group politics has seldom proven to be participatory democracy in action....Many grassroots
environmentalists in the United States, especially those identified with the environmental justice movement, strongly complain that the big environmental Washington-oriented organizations have lost touch with the local citizenry. Having become caught up in socalled Beltway politics, such organizations increasingly represent their followers only on paper (Fischer, 2000, pp. 33-34). Similarly, ballot initiatives are often developed by interest groups and brought to the polls based on popular support of their perceived or
claimed purposes, rather than close scrutiny and broad substantive participation. Understanding the full implications of a ballot measure often requires a substantial familiarity with the underlying technical and policy issues; as a result voters rely heavily on
opinion leaders and media representations to interpret the meanings of ballot measures. Furthermore, in this mode of action the influence that any one person can have is small. One of the many weaknesses of initiatives is that they force people to make
dichotomous choices, which offers them a very limited kind of decision authority (Fiorino, 1996, p. 202). The participation gap manifested in these practices has multiple roots. One of these is the sheer complexity, pace, and breadth of contemporary society,
which seems to offer individuals no alternative to reliance on specialists in myriad technical fields (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990). Apathy, political alienation, and the many distractions of the consumer society are additional and related factors, although democratic
theorists argue that these are products of a thin political culture as much as they are causes of it (Barber, 1984). As Williams and Matheny (1995) have pointed out, prevailing notions of liberal politics offer few conceptual alternatives to a 8 dichotomous choice
between technocratic or managerial approaches and pluralist or interest group models. Both of these paradigms assumewhether correctly or incorrectlythat ordinary citizens lack the competencies required for deep engagement with policy issues. The
managerial approach, objectivist in its premises, seeks to solve this problem by delegating decision making to experts who can use objective analytical methods to identify optimum solutions. The pluralist model, relativist in its premises, seeks to do so by
facilitating competition and compromise among affected interest groups. Neither approach allows for the broad public dialog that would characterize the communitarian alternative suggested by Williams and Matheny, a form of strong democracy (Barber,
1984) in which ordinary citizens participate directly and have substantial influence. In this practical and discursive context, Fischer (2000) acknowledges that participation is a challenging and often frustrating endeavor...collective citizen participation is not
something that just happens. It has to be organized, facilitated, and even nurtured (p. 260). In support of that goal Fischer and others (Kleinmann, 2000; Sclove, 1995; Williams & Matheny, 1995) seek to enlarge the repertoire of available participation methods,
drawing in part on Western European models. These scholars are primarily concerned with institutionalizing new approaches that allow for participation by greater numbers of citizens, over longer periods of time, in greater depth, and with increased authority

Ordinary citizens need not acquire the same depth of technical knowledge as specialists; indeed, their doing so would entail becoming specialists themselves and would impair
their status as representative members of the public. In this regard, Fiorino (1996) emphasizes the importance of direct participation of amateurs... as citizens engaged
in governance ...rather than professionals doing a job (p. 200). Nevertheless, to succeed as amateur experts members of the public must possess basic technical competencies. At the
most general level, these include a working vocabulary of scientific terms and concepts, and an overall understanding of how technical
reasoning operates . Understood as technical literacy these competencies are among the recognized goals of formal education, but the rapid
changes characteristic of contemporary society require that they be strengthened and continually refined. Basic technical knowledge of this sort enables citizens to follow evolving
policy issues , increases the likelihood that they will take an active interest in these issues, and prepares them for more successful
involvement with particular issues. If lay citizens are to participate more fully in public technical decisions , then their relationships with specialists must become
more dialogical. Technical professionals must not only be providers of prepackaged information and analysis ; such finished products lack
the contributions of the broader public while providing a misleading appearance of argumentative closure . Instead, specialists must serve as
advisors, counselors, or educators, helping rather than supplanting laypeople in the interpretation and use of technical findings. Laird (1993) remarks, [P]articipation must be meaningful. Part of that requirement is that citizens be educated about the issues at hand
and what they can do to influence policy decisions....In part, this criterion means that relevant information must be provided to citizens, but information is not enough. Inundating the people with mountains of raw data is not a democratic exercise. Rather, citizens

information, facts, and data are now more available

than ever before. However, to make use of these citizens must understand them in both their technical and their policy contexts : [I]t is not
enough that participants simply acquire new facts . They must begin, at some level, to be able to analyze the problem at hand. At the simplest level,
this means understanding the different interpretations that one can draw from the facts and trying to think about ways to choose
among those interpretations. At a more sophisticated level, it means beginning to learn how and when to challenge the validity of the asserted
facts, where new data would be useful, and how the kinds of policy questions being asked influence the type of data they
seek. Perhaps more important, analyzing a problem means being able to challenge the formulation of the problem itself, that is, for people to
decide for themselves what the most important questions are (Laird, 1993, pp. 353-354). Here Laird is calling for a type of citizen competency which extends beyond basic technical literacy. To
participate effectively, and to integrate the results of technical analysis with their own local knowledge and evaluative criteria, citizens also require a broader and more critical understanding of the
rhetoric and sociology of technical discourse. Fischer (2000) and others have assembled substantial evidence that this kind of citizen understanding is possible , but
must be given information and analysis that are genuinely educative. Citizen understanding must improve (pp. 347-348). As Laird recognizes,

to achieve this goal citizens, technical specialists, and policy specialists must collaborate closely. Fischer, like Laird, emphasizes the educational role that specialists must play as part of that collaboration:

These skills solve a laundry list of problems

Lundberg 10 Tradition of Debate in North Carolina in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century, Christian O.
Lundberg, Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2010, p311
The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities

debate builds capacity for critical thinking , analysis of public claims, informed decision
making , and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative

built by debate are not limited to speechas indicated earlier,

politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue
that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change,

Debate provides an
indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to
research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to son rhroueh and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of
arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly infonnation-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of
debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary
which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154).

failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context,
but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediatcd information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the
benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to
effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the
effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional [debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access
information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong

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support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt
more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases.

debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the

kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was
(Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that

written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a
topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms

the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the
classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities . The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and
information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly
contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving
the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged , open-minded and self-critical
students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we
produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of
democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges , including:
domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change;
emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of
rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed
and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective
democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy [in an]
increasingly complex world.
of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively,

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2
Post-modern identity politics collapse into competition between proliferating identity groups
the struggle against the institutional basis of oppression, such as class, is discarded in favor of
political fragmentationturns the aff.
Smith 10Jeremy is a member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective in the Australian Socialist Alliance and a lecturer in social sciences at the University of
Ballarat. The rise and malaise of postmodernism http://links.org.au/node/32 accessed date: 6-14-12 y2k
What kind of politics can this philosophical framework generate for its adherents The withdrawal of its major proponents from political commitment is well known, but
this in itself is hardly a cutting criticism. Many postmodernists bid for the mantle of radical politics on the grounds that all universalist

ideologies that have emerged from Europe are inescapably bound up in the dominant discourses of capitalism and imperialism. This
includes Marxism, social democracy, many forms of feminism and even antiracisms. Instead, political action must mean resistance. Resistance is most
effective at the margins, whether through the use of irony or deconstruction in art, literature, film or media or in localised struggles of some social movements that
confront marginalisation. Terry Eagleton characterises this as "cultural politics" in which culture is reduced to politics. In turn, he calls for a politics of culture.22 While
this is a forceful argument, it is also the case that politics, as it is recast in cultural politics, also falls prey to reductionism. The post-structuralist

focus on culture reduces politics to aesthetics and presumes that this is the major battleground. The fully fledged version of this argument is Baudrillard's,
which aestheticises a social world in which meaning is simulated so often that reality is no longer relevant. In this vision of culture, any capacity for more generalised
critique is annulled, and the obvious conclusion must be that critique and praxis are futile. If there is any power in this prescription at all, then the very least that can be
said in response is that this unacceptably narrows the range of critical politics. Identity politics flows logically from this broader censure of

universalism. It is derived from the postmodern condition of fragmentation and decentring , according to postmodernists. At the level of
description, this basic argument does have some force. Capitalism drives towards totalisation (as some postmodernists might put it) in its pursuit of unlimited capital
growth, markets and resources. It unifies different societies and spheres of human endeavour by subsuming them under capital's rule. Yet, it is quite clear that the major
fluctuations of late capitalism-unemployment, the roller-coaster ride of global markets-are experienced by their victims as fragmenting and decentring. The destabilising
effects of capitalism result from its central contradictions, and yet these contradictions impact on everyday lives in ways that seem incoherent. This appearance is most
visible in the OECD countries where, not by coincidence, postmodernism has flourished. It is in the most developed zones of world capitalism that the penetration of all
spheres of human life by capitalist social relations is at its greatest. However, fragmentation is not due to the dominance of the text, discourse or the Hyper-reality of
postmodern life. There are other causes. While there is some validity in the description of contemporary life as seemingly volatile and
disconnected, this

condition should not be taken for granted. The underlying and complex reasons for it, and not just its surface
effects, must be pursued. However, identity politics is much more than just the experience of late capitalism's instability. It is also a
personal assertion of identity based on a condition of marginality . The assertion of identity is no longer part of political activity; it can constitute
the entire arena of activity. Politics becomes a matter of "style" and a contest of competing and proliferating identities . This risks political
impotence, if the sole emphasis is on difference at the expense of any principle of equality. Under those circumstances, identity politics becomes
hostile to any idea of a universal basis for social justice and a revolutionary transformation of society. But not all identities are treated equally. The more
traditional identity of class is disavowed. It has always been interpreted as a foundation for solidarity, rather than fragmentation. The "new" identities have emerged in
such a way that they displace this traditional category, according to the postmodernists.23 The Marxist notion of class rests ultimately on a theory of

exploitation that assumes that the social formation has an underlying logic or coherence. In contrast, identity politics assumes
multiple bases of power that generate multiple forms of oppression. These are seen as the sites in which power is contested, but rarely in forms of alliance or
with reference to a broader political vision. As the category of class is discarded, so also are forms of political organisation and the
connections between struggles that it implies. Indeed, even many of the grassroots campaigns of social movements that combated marginality in the 1970s and
1980s become suspect for the broad fronts that they entered. The institutional basis of marginalisation (racism, sexism, heterosexism) is
neglected in this style of politics. Postmodern concerns with body, identity and difference displace the focus of theory, analysis and
action from the institutional sites of power, such as the family, the state, work and school. All that remains, as a political orientation, is the mobilisation of identity in
an ironic stance towards the institutions of power. The use of irony and a certain attitude to life is pitched as a gesture in itself towards power, one that avoids forming a
counter-power. If this view has any value at all, some political judgment as to why one ironic posture is more potent or effective than any other would have to be
exercised. But, it is not clear how postmodernists might do this, when the possible foundations of judgment debated by philosophers are themselves held in contempt.

Capitalism promotes a dehumanizing alienation that kills value to life This prevents authentic
relationships with others turns the aff
Gasper 10 [Phil Gasper, philosophy professor in Madison, Wisconsin, "Capitalism and Alienation," International Socialist Review,
isreview.org/issue/74/capitalism-and-alienation]cd

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Capitalism is a system that endlessly promises people happy and self-fulfilled lives . In the United States this vision even has a name:
the American Dream. But when we look around us, reality falls far short. We see this reflected in everything from divorce rates, child abuse,
domestic violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, stress, mental illness, and general feelings of isolation and frustration that so many people
experience. Rather than achieving self-realization and living meaningful and fulfilling lives, many people experience some degree of
alienation, and the ones that dont are quite likely engaged in some form of self-deception, perhaps sustaining a sense of meaning and
self-worth only with the help of illusions about themselves or their circumstances. Quite a few thinkers, including existentialist philosophers like Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus, have argued that alienation is an unavoidable feature of the human condition, but this is not Marxs view. Instead, Marx argues that alienation is largely a
product of class society in general and of capitalism in particular, and that we could end a society characterized by pervasive
alienation if we radically reorganized our economic system. Marxs most detailed discussion of alienation is in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which
he wrote in 1844 but which were not published until the 1930s. In this work, Marx focuses on what he calls alienated labor, because he sees alienation at
work as the central form of alienation. This is based on the assumption that the need to engage in free, creative labor is a central part
of human nature. Its precisely because capitalism systematically frustrates that need, that it is an alienating system. One of Marxs main
claims in the 1844 Manuscripts is that for most people most of the time, work is a frustrating, unpleasant experience. Thats something that most of us
would agree with. In fact its such a commonplace that there are endless popular songs about waiting for the weekend or Saturday
night to arrive. Theres even a national restaurant chain named for the relief people feel when they get out of work at the end of the week. (By contrast, no one has opened an eatery
named TGI Monday.) When Marx was writing in the 1840s, he was thinking primarily of the monotonous brutality of factory labor. But what Marx wrote about blue-collar
work in the mid-nineteenth century remains true of much white-collar work at the beginning of the twenty-first . In her book The Overworked
American, the sociologist Juliet Schor reports the following: Thirty percent of [American] adults say that they experience high stress nearly every day;
even higher numbers report high stress once or twice a week Americans are literally working themselves to deathas jobs
contribute to heart disease, hypertension, gastric problems, depression, exhaustion, and a variety of other ailments. Now a lot of
people think that this is an unavoidable necessity, because work is intrinsically unpleasant. But Marxs argument is that it doesnt have
to be this way. Work can beor could bemeaningful, creative and self-expressive. And if it were like that for us all or most of the
time, then our lives could be fulfilling and satisfying. The problem is that under capitalism work doesnt have these characteristics for most
people. Marx emphasizes two reasons why capitalism robs workers of all life content. The first is that it is an economic system that
accentuates the division of labor, breaking production into a series of smaller and smaller, more specialized tasks, each performed by a
different kind of worker, because this will increase profitability. As a result, the individual laborers are appropriated by a one-sided function and annexed to it for
life, depriving them of the well-rounded variety of powers and activities that they need to be full human beings. The second reason why capitalism generates
alienation is that it is an economic system in which a small minority controls the means of production, and in which most people can
survive only by selling their own labor power. Workers under capitalism have to work for someone else. As a consequence, Marx argues that work has little or no
intrinsic worth for the worker as he puts it, it is not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. More generally, we find our lives dominated by
impersonal powers, from labyrinthine bureaucracies to economic forces, which we are unable to control, even though they are ultimately human creations. In The German Ideology, Marx and
Engels describe alienation as the positing of social activity, the consolidation of our product as a real power over us, growing out of our control. Capital describes the conditions of wage labor
as alienated from labor and confronting it independently, and of capital as an alienated and independent social might, which stands over against society as a thing. But if we could abolish
capitalism and replace it with a society in which workers collectively and democratically control production, then work itself could be transformed into an activity that we would find rewarding
for its own sake. It would become a way of exercising our individual creativity and talents, and of contributing to the common good not only a means of life but lifes prime want, as Marx
put it in Capital. While

capitalism continues, however, labor will continue to be alienated. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx discusses various
workers are alienated from their product. What they produce does not belong to them, and the particular
characteristics of what they produce are of little concern to them. All that matters is that they get paid a wage. Second, workers under
capitalism are alienated from their own productive activity. They typically have no control over that activity, and it doesnt express
their own goals or projects. Third, workers are alienated from what Marx (following Feuerbach) calls their species-being, in other words from
those qualities that make them distinctively human. What distinguishes humans from other species is our capacity to engage in free,
conscious, and creative work. But alienated labor reduces humans to the level of animals. Earlier philosophers had seen the distinctive
characteristic of humans as our capacity for rational thought. But for Marx it is the application of rational, conscious thought to
productive activity that distinguishes us from other creatures . As he says in The German Ideology, Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by
religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence. Unlike other species,
we can step back from activity we perform to remain alive (our life activity), consciously assess it, and improve it. As Marx says, The animal is
immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from this activity. By contrast, a human beings activity is not a determination with which he
immediately fuses. Unlike other animals, the human being makes his life activity an object of his will and consciousness. But
under capitalism, labor doesnt get the opportunity to exercise this distinctively human ability. Thats why Marx says that in his human functions [i.e.
work], [man] is nothing more than animal. He adds that alienated labor estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists outside him, from
his spiritual essence, his human existence. The final aspect of alienated labor is that, as a consequence of these other forms of alienation, workers are alienated
from each other. Marx writes: the proposition that man is estranged from his species-being means that each man is estranged from the
others and that all are estranged from mans essence.
aspects of this alienation. First,

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The alternative is to reject the aff in favor of historical materialism historical materialism links
social praxis to a decisive judgment on capitalist oppression.
Lukacs in 67 (George, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification
and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He
served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, History and Class Consciousness)
<224-225>

Historical materialism has, therefore, a much greater value for the proletariat than that of a method of historical research. It is one of the
most important of all its weapons. For the class struggle of the proletariat signifies at the same time the awakening of its class
consciousness. And this awakening followed everywhere from an understanding of the true situation , of the actually existing historical
connections. And it is this that gives the class struggle of the proletariat its special place among other class struggles, namely that it obtains its
sharpest weapon from the hand of true science, from its clear insight into reality. Whereas in the class struggles of the past the most
varied ideologies, religious, moral and other forms of 'false consciousness' were decisive, in the case of the class struggle of the proletariat,
the war for the liberation of the last oppressed class, the revelation of the unvarnished truth became both a war-cry and the
most potent weapon . By laying bare the springs of the historical process historical materialism became, in consequence of the class
situation of the proletariat, an instrument of war. The most important function of historical materialism is to deliver a precise
judgement on the capitalist social system, to unmask capitalist society . Throughout the class struggle of the proletariat, therefore, historical
materialism has constantly been used at every point, where, by means of all sorts of ideological frills, the bourgeoisie had concealed the true situation, the state of
the class struggle; it has been used to focus the cold rays of science upon these veils and to show how false and misleading they were
and how far they were in conflict with the truth. For this reason the chief function of historical materialism did not lie in the
elucidation of pure scientific knowledge, but in the field of action . Historical materialism did not exist for its own sake, it
existed so that the proletariat could understand a situation and so that, armed with this knowledge, it could act accordingly.

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Case
The role of the survivor-activist in debate is to engage the political. This is not a form of
humanitarian distance critiqued by Hartman but rather a third perspective challenging the
limits of political expression and providing the best model for responsible activism and critique
Murphy 2014 (Laura T. Murphy , Asst. Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, (2014): The New Slave Narrative
and the Illegibility of Modern Slavery, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, DOI:
10.1080/0144039X.2014.977528)
Whether these identificatory schemes actually mobilize readers to action beyond a mere momentary empathy is debateable. Elaine Scarry remarks that those generous imaginings of others are
difficult to attain and inadequate to the task of ensuring rights.89 There is the risk, in promoting this sentimental education that structures of power that have marginalized the voices of the
enslaved will be replicated, that the armchair activist will merely feel a false or fleeting affinity for those who suffer around the world, that such imaginative identifications more often reiterate
the com- fortable distance between a Western, privileged us and an underdeveloped suffering other. There is the problematic basic premise that the most widely circulated human rights
narratives are written specifically for American and British audiences by people who are largely not of those cultures, and that their stories thus become spectacles of otherness, sedimenting
notions of natural difference and inequality. Hartman

argues that this kind of humanitarian distance has historically led even the abolitionist to feel for
himself instead of for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach .90 It is clear, despite these anxieties, that the NGOs, lawyers and political
figures who encourage the publication of these narratives believe, with Rorty, that a sentimental education leads to significant shifts in public opinion (or at least a donation). They seek out and mobilize the first-person narrative precisely because the kinds of detailoriented, fact-based, research-heavy reports they otherwise produce lack the human face that has proven so often to generate empathy among donors.91 The authors of the new slave narratives themselves also often inscribe their expectations for a sentimental
education into their narratives. Bok, Lloyd, Nazer and Beah all end their narratives with accounts of the powerful influence of their storytelling on others. Bok recalls his early experience on the lecture circuit, I not only managed to get the audiences to understand what
I was saying. I was able to move them,92 and he celebrates the fact that his testimony played a role in getting the American Pre- sident to speak out against Sudan for the first time ever.93 Lloyd reflects on a presen- tation she gave with the clients of her Girls
Education Mentoring Service programme, which she indicates was all about survivor voices, survivor achievements, survivor lea- dership that acted as a stunning affirmation that offers a rebuttal to all the people who didnt believe in us, in me, in any girl who has
been sexually exploited.94 The slave narrators describe themselves as human rights ambassadors and their narratives are often characterized by this optimistic purposiveness. In the process of resisting the spectacle, the bodily detail, the flesh and blood, in writing
narratives that at times seem underwhelmingly sober and distant, however, the narrators revise the curriculum for the sentimental education. If we consider these autobiographies as guides to the legibility of modern slavery, as instruction manuals in the interpretation of
the signs of modern slavery, then the new slave nar- ratives can be understood as teaching the reading lessons necessary for an informed sentimental education. Through these narratives, a powerful imaginative identification is attempted, as the use of the first-person I
of the enslaved speaker in the narrative is shared with the identity of the audience in the practice of reading. As Bok recalled, Simply by telling what happened to me I could make an emotional connection with the audience. My feelings became their feelings. My
passion became theirs.95 The power of his nar- rative lies in his having experienced slavery and his willingness to share that experi- ence, even partially, with an audience. Even as the narrators turn away from explicit scenes of their own pain, the first-person narrative
works to make readers feel impli- cated in the suffering of the narrator so that they are mobilized against suffering. Readers recognize the humanity of the other through imagining themselves in the sur- vivors position, however imperfect the identification may be.
However, when the narrators employ the strategies of displacement described here, which, instead of providing bodily evidence, prove that the narrators individual experience is representative of a much larger group of suffering humans (whether they be other sexually
exploited children, or all the estimated 30 million enslaved people, or perhaps even the whole of suffering humanity), they effect an identification displacement as well. While Scarry warns us that it is nearly impossible for humans to imagine vast numbers of others, the
new slave narrative attempts to bridge the gulf between the single human face of slavery and all those who remain enslaved.96 As Bok described it, To them, slavery had been something that happened in a far-off place in Africa they rarely gave a moments thought to.
After my speech, slavery had become a person they had seen, a young Sudanese whose hand they had actually shaken.97 This synechdocal expansion links the survivors singular experience to the entire concept of slavery, and through that identificatory process the

At the same
time, their narratives provide readers with interpretative lenses that make their experiences legible not merely as victims or exploited
masses but as survivor-activists. Here, a third level of identification is produced. As the narrator becomes an activist in the narrative,
readers are not only interpellated as humans who suffer, but they are also privileged to identify with the one who can eradicate
suffering. Joseph Slaughter calls the humanitarian the third actor in the drama of suffering, between both the violator and the victim as well as between the one who suffers and the one who reads of suffering.98 This
reader, too, is connected to all those suffering under bondage. This strategic displacement promotes a sense of world citizenship and responsibility that exceeds the bounds of the personal identifi- cation with the solitary narrator who suffers.

intermediary position transforms and reroutes that pathetic force into a metonymical relation between the reader and huma- nitarian figure who is an exemplary extension of our better angels.99 In third-person narratives of
suffering or in narratives of humanitarians called to aid others, the identi- fication is with the one who responds to suffering, with the saviour figure who inserts himself between violence and the violated. In the new slave narrative,

the role of survivor activist

unites the slave and the liberator, the victim and the
humanitarian, in one identity
This slave-liberator
identification allows the reader to empathize with the beneficent and responsible citizen servant while still eliding the distance
between the reader and the one who suffers It continues to foreground the suffering inherent in slavery and makes a claim to the
responsibility we all have as global citizens to respond
it defies the slave-liberator dichotomy
It marks the survivors narrative as the source of the greatest expertise on the subject and thus provides a model for
responsible activism and engagement that is not top-down from the distant abolitionist perspective but from one who has been slave,
witness and liberator himself or herself. The new slave narrative represents an avenue through which survivors challenge the limits of
political expression, combat the structures that maintain slaverys illegibility and promote social justice activism among the
reading public. Read in this light, the new slave narrative challenges us to transform our critical reading practices into the NGO avant la lettre
that Wai Chee Dimock describes, which employs analytic and political powers derived from the transhistorical, transnational, nongovernmental potentials of scholarship.100 The time, cultures and conventions of the new slave nar- rative are our own and reading generically unveils the contexts and political ideologies from which human rights conventions
emerge. These narratives empower us as readers and scholars to engage in contemporary political discourse through our practices of
close reading. Through that scholarship, we amplify the challenges marginalized people make against the normative rhetorics
to which they are subject. Critical readings can be a source of that necessary and incessant pressure of culture and the world- wide
activities of literature on human rights thinking and practice that Slaughter describes, and can have real (though likely less measurable) influence on the way
forced labourers around the world are read and regarded.
is not located in the in- between of the humanitarian that Slaughter describes, but instead

. While the reader is instructed to imagine the greatest depths of bondage with the narrators, they are quickly brought to what is often figured in humanitarian literature as the greatest height the saviour.

. More crucially,

to eradicate it.

that so often characterizes both slavery and the abolitionist movements that seek

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There is nothing innocent about the affs position in relation to power failing to confront the
complex and contradictory situation, in favor of retreat naturalizes imperial metaphysics and
eliminates any subversive potential strategy or hope in challenging social death
Mitchell 2014 (Nick Mitchell, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. A Riff on the Concept of the (Critical Ethnic Studies) Intellectual. Antiracism Inc.: Intersections.
10/30/2014 - http://acc.english.ucsb.edu/ACGCC%2014-15/Mitchell%20-%20CESA%20-%20Intellectual.pdf)

the intellectual
with
a sense of heroic
even messianic, potentiality
one in which the gap between the intellectual and the leader collapsed This collapse was
inevitable result of a philosophy of
struggle that insisted on the inseparability of representation in
the curricular structures of the university with
representation in politics and privileged the intellectual as
capable of holding these two
in
proximity
As knowledge and power came to be understood as reflective of one another,

in these inaugural moments of Ethnic Studies could not but be cathected

and as

, occasionally

the domain of legitimated knowledge (i.e.

the figure

perhaps an

forms of representation

the most intimate

(Chiang 2009). The racialized

intellectuals body plays a crucial role in stabilizing such a representational calculus insofar as it can be said to double as the person doing the representing and the group being represented (Chow 2002), whether that group is understood as a natal community or one constituted by explicit political solidarity (Third World peoples, women
of color, etc.). But the movements for Ethnic Studies were not the sole origin of such an investment in the figure of the intellectual-as-representative-of-racialized-community as much as they opened up a space for the radical reinterpretation of the intellectual as a figure of

the historic mandate for the black

intellectual to be a race leader, has been encompassing enough to accommodate efforts that cross the political spectrumto say
nothing of a great deal of intra-elite conflict between black intellectuals themselves on the questions of what equality and
liberation ought to look like and how they might be achieved. But it is an elitism that, while always contested, has never strayed far from the fraught and problematic consensus
race leadership that, as Erica Edwards (2012, 11) writes, had solidified as a classed and gendered concept. The elitism, in the context of Black Studies, of what Joy James (1997, 6) calls

that singular male leadership (Edwards 2012, 10) constitutes a necessary precondition for black empowerment. The patriarchal implications that underwrite such an understanding of the intellectual as leader rely on an implicit analogy between the race and the

Since the naturalization of this intellectualprivileging analogy gives it a taken-for-granted quality, it can reproduce itself by way of habits, concepts, and frameworks that give
it a more innocuous appearance. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the now commonsense invocation of black community such that the latter supplies as an idealized, univocal conglomeration of collective interests (Reed
1999a, 134), a community that can be invoked as such because it is not internally riven by socially structured differences. What all of this suggests is that the critical Ethnic Studies intellectual
does not simply intervene into or transform epistemologies; but that her position as intellectual is the complicated outcome of
historically sedimented epistemologies and relations of power. It suggests, moreover, that our theories of intellectual work are
problematically incomplete if we do not confront the extent to which we are made by that which we seek to oppose. There is
nothing about our position in the academy, however marginal, that is innocent of power, nor is there any practice that will afford
us an exteriority to the historical and geopolitical determinations of the place from which we speak, write, research, teach,
organize, and learn. No longer can Ethnic Studies stake its institutional life on the promise that it will be a site for the production of
organic intellectuals intellectuals who, rather than working to consolidate the hegemonic order of things, represent an
emergent and potentially revolutionary class. Rather, it is from here, from within a particular position of and in complicity, from
within constitutive contradiction, that our work necessarily begins. This lesson seems particularly important to stress in a context such as Ethnic Studies,
bourgeois family in which the latter provides an idealized, naturalized asymmetry of power and privilege that obtains between the leader and the led, the speaker and the spoken for.

where the intellectuals investment in her own work is performed in and routed through the belief that such work can, or at least should, be of world-transformative value, and where the

What kind of intellectual

practitioner is produced, we need to ask, when the political is situated as a normative figure in this way? If critique is to be for
Ethnic Studies a field-defining practice, it is also necessarily a site where our most extravagant fantasies about the meaning and
possibilities of intellectual work are staged. Indeed, critique opens powerfully onto scenes that narrativize the power of knowledge through individual and collective
political orientation of intellectual work is regularly utilized as an implicit, if not explicit, criterion for evaluating what work is and isnt valuable.

transformation, onto scenes in which the intellectual knowingly moves away from complicity in order to adopt, knowingly once again, a position of oppositionality to dominant modalities of
power.

Hartmans universalizing analysis of subjectivity fosters a dangerous justification and omission

of historical violence that re-creates an official curriculum of white supremacy affecting the
material reality of blacks in the here and now.
King 2014 (LaGarrett J. King, Assistant Professor of Secondary Social Studies Education in the Department of Teacher Education at Clemson University. More
Than Slaves: Black Founders, Benjamin Banneker, and Critical Intellectual Agency. Social Studies Research and Practice. http://www.socstrpr.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/01/MS06613King.pdf)

the official curriculum is still problematic, aligns largely with

Eurocentric perspectives, and is filled with convenient silences that distort history (Loewen, 1995). Scholars [Anderson, (1988); Banks, (2004); J. E. King, (2004); McCarthey,
While some may argue the presentation of Black history is more comprehensive than described by Ladson-Billings,

(1988); McLaren, (1994); Trouillot, (1995)], warned that quantitative renderings of Black history (or multicultural histories) should not be an acknowledgment that the subject has transformational value. Instead, the official

curriculum resembles Joyce Kings (2004) notion of marginalizing knowledge that includes selected multicultural curriculum content that
simultaneously distorts both the historical and social reality (p. 274) of Black people. Black historical voices are silenced within these
representations because the official social studies curriculum attempts to construct safe and noncontroversial frameworks that do not disrupt
power and racial hierarchy. In other words, Failure to pay attention to [racial matters in the curriculum] simply helps reproduce past
dominations...and ensures that the White experience is normative (Mills, 1998, p. 108). The official social studies curriculum helps acknowledge White
historical characters or ideas as the apex of U.S. citizenship and democracy, while non- Whites humanity is questionable because their
social studies

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history continues to be on the periphery. This clearly denotes an inequitable history curriculum. It is imperative for social studies teachers concerned with historical equity to
rethink how U.S. history is constructed and their own historical biases. This requires they rethink the traditional narration and alter the
trajectory of history by moving curriculum past both a Eurocentric framework of history and its racially liberal discourse . Eurocentric
frameworks promote ideas of Whiteness as the only legitimate form of knowledge. Ignored are multiple perspectives and the intersections of race or racism (as well as ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality) and
their influences on historical actors and communities . What social studies educators often know as the current structure of U.S. history contrasts with and sometimes
significantly opposes, the Black experience. Quoting Bennetts (1993) words that the White Founding Fathers were not the Black Founding Fathers and that the
White beginning was a Black negation, helps us understand certain aspects in U.S. history were not applicable to Black people. In others words, what
was historically important to Whites and their institutions may not be of any benefit to understanding the historical plight of Black
Americans and other historically marginalized groups. Black history should alter the trajectory of traditional U.S. history in classroom.
The enslavement population in the U.S.A came mostly from west and central Africa and since 1619, their material realities do not align with voluntary immigrants from Europe (Franklin, 1947; Gates, 2011 Harding, 1981;
Takaki, 2008). The individual and cultural experiences of enslavement cultivated a unique Black American identity and perspective that is neither totally American nor African. This dual consciousness (Dubois, 1994) ignited
the desire for Black Americans to not only prove their humanity but to also reclaim and define it. If one of the purposes of history is to understand who we are, then is the single story of Black Americans as agentless and
oppressed slaves a cultural sustaining practice? When Black American history is omitted or given superficial coverage, what is left is not only a half-truth, but also a completely misleading and a potentially destructive story
for whoever embraces it (Woodson, 2000; King, 2006; King & Womac, 2014; Wynter 1992). This type of curricular misinformation leads to students learning and perpetuating misconceptions for life. As Randall Robinson
(2000) surmised: Far too many American of African decent believe their history starts in America with bondage and struggle...How can we be collectively successful if we have no idea or, worse, the wrong idea of who we were and, therefore, are? We are history
amnesiacs fitted with the memories of others. Our minds can be trained for individual career success but our group morale, the very soul of us, has been devastate by the assumption that what has not been told about ourselves does not exist to be told. (p. 7) What

The juxtaposition of the narratives of White

Founders as heroic, steadfast, and innovative and Black Africans as oppressed, victimized, and submissive indicates a certain
ontological lack or total absence of true (human) beingness (King, 2006, p. 347). In the work, Afterlife of Slavery, Saidiya Hartman (2007) states: Slavery had
established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political
life of Black Americans...it is because Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that
were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery (p. 6). When Black Americans in history are only constructed as slaves, it
implies a specific ontology that rejects intellectualism and promotes an idea that Black people were relatively insignificant to the
growth of the United States (Ladson-Billings, 2003). The exposure of these primary narratives have contemporary consequences that can
influence some Whites to have overbearing notions of paternalistic responsibility, deficit thinking, and over surveillance of Black
bodies. To be clear, I am a proponent of a critical teaching of enslavement that helps students understand and think about how U.S.
institutions created and accepted the racial state and the egregious actions permitted by citizens. Teaching slavery should
question and explore racialization and include how Black Americans fought the system through various strategies. What I am
concerned about, however, is the single narrative of slavery and the belief that Black Americans had no intellectual value, only physical.
These slave narratives focus largely on oppression without understanding varied aspects of agency. The primary discourse, nonetheless, is aligned with a passive victimized narrative . It is arguable that
the constructs of oppression and victimization explain why Black Americans are reduced to enslaved servants to Whites and Black Founders are
neglected within the official curriculum, which struggles to find Black American humanity. What the Black Founders narrative does
is alter our conceptions of Black Americans at the genesis of the U nited States. In many respects, one can argue the ideas of U.S. egalitarianism would
not be fully developed if Black Founders did not display agency. Black Founders were the progenitors of modern multiracial
democracy (Newman, 2008a, p. 5) and should be recognized alongside White Founders because they generated a creative dialogue over the very essence
of American freedom (Newman, 2008a, p. 5). Juxtaposed with traditional slavery narratives, Black Founders discourse amends Black
history from, how does it feel to be a problem (Dubois, 1994, p.1) to how does it feel to be the solution. The Black Founders narrative
humanizes the Black historical experiences through showing that Black communities were sites of agency, epistemologically diverse,
and contributed to U.S. nation building by holding White Founders accountable to ideas of freedom.
Randall stated is based on the principle that Blacks as only slaves has some serious implications for the psychological development of all students.

The 1AC turns Hartmans work into an extension of the master's prerogative
Hartman and Wilderson 2013 (Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III, THE POSITION OF THE UNTHOUGHT. Source: Qui Parle,
Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 183-201. Published by: University of Nebraska Press. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686156)
F.W.- And he's suggesting that what it means to be a slave is to be subject to a kind of complete appropriation, what you call "property of enjoyment." Your book illustrates the "myriad and nefarious uses of slave property"
and then demonstrates how "there was no relation to blackness outside the terms of this use of, entitlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for even the status of free blacks was shaped and compromised by the
existence of slavery" (S, 24). So. Not only are formally enslaved blacks property, but so are formally free blacks. One could say that the possibility of becoming property is one of the essential elements that draws the line

not only is the slave's performance (dance, music, etc.) the

property of white enjoyment, but so is - and this is really key - the slave's own enjoyment of his/her performance: that too belongs to
white people.13 S. V.H. - Right. You know, as I was writing Scenes of Subjection, there was a whole spate of books on nineteenth-century culture and on minstrelsy in particular. And there was a certain sense in
which the ability to occupy blackness was considered transgressive or as a way of refashioning whiteness, and there were all these
radical claims that were being made for it.14 And I thought, "Oh, no, this is just an extension of the master's prerogative." It doesn't
matter whether you do good or you do bad, the crux is that you can choose to do what you wish with the black body. That's why
thinking about the dynamics of enjoyment in terms of the material relations of slavery was so key for me.
between blackness and whiteness. But what's most intriguing about your argument is the way in which you demonstrate how

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Their ontological framing of blackness dooms the aff. Placing Blackness as oppositional denies it
any existence independent of white supremacy and makes identity reliant on oppression
Pinn, Macalester College Professor of Religious Studies, 4
(Anthony, Dialog: A Journal of Theology, Volume 43, Number 1, Spring 2004, 'Black Is, Black Aint: Victor Anderson, African
American Theological Thought, and Identity', pg.57-58, Wiley online Library, accessed 11-10-12 TAT)

This connection between ontological blackness and religion is natural because: ontological blackness signifies the totality of black
existence, a binding together of black life and experience. In its root, religio, religion denotes tying together, fastening behind, and
binding together. Ontological blackness renders black life and experience a totality.13 According to Anderson, Black theological
discussions are entangled in ontological blackness. And accordingly, discussions of black life revolve around a theological
understanding of Black experience limited to suffering and survival in a racist system. The goal of this theology is to find the
meaning of black faith in the merger of black cultural consciousness, icons of genius, and post-World War II Black defiance. An
admirable goal to be sure, but here is the rub: Black theologians speak, according to Anderson, in opposition to ontological
whiteness when they are actually dependent upon whiteness for the legitimacy of their agenda. Furthermore, ontological
blacknesss strong ties to suffering and survival result in blackness being dependent on suffering, and as a result social
transformation brings into question what it means to be black and religious. Liberative outcomes ultimately force an identity crisis,
a crisis of legitimation and utility. In Andersons words: Talk about liberation becomes hard to justify where freedom appears as
nothing more than defiant self-assertion of a revolutionary racial consciousness that requires for its legitimacy the opposition of
white racism. Where there exists no possibility of transcending the blackness that whiteness created, African American theologies of
liberation must be seen not only as crisis theologies; they remain theologies in a crisis of legitimation.14 This conversation becomes
more refined as new cultural resources are unpacked and various religious alternatives acknowledged. Yet the bottom line remains
racialization of issues and agendas, life and love. Falsehood is perpetuated through the hermeneutic of return, by which
ontological blackness is the paradigm of Black existence and thereby sets the agenda of Black liberation within the
postrevolutionary context of present day USA. One ever finds the traces of the Black aesthetic which pushes for a dwarfed
understanding of Black life and a sacrifice of individuality for the sake of a unified Black faith. Yet differing experiences of racial
oppression (the stuff of ontological blackness) combined with varying experiences of class, gender and sexual oppression call into
question the value of their racialized formulations. Implicit in all of this is a crisis of faith, an unwillingness to address both the glory
and guts of Black existencenihilistic tendencies that, unless held in tension with claims of transcendence, have the potential to
overwhelm and to suffocate. At the heart of this dilemma is friction between ontological blackness and contemporary postmodern
black lifeissues, for example related to selecting marriage partners, exercising freedom of movement, acting on gay and
lesbian preferences, or choosing political parties.15 How does one foster balance while embracing difference as positive?
Anderson looks to Nietzsche.

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2NC

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Overview
Our interpretation promotes a model of debate as a dialogue- this looks at the resolution as an
invitation to a dialogue about a particular set of ideas. Normative restrictions are key to effective
dialogue- ensuring full clash over a stable axis point
There are two net benefits to this modelFairness- topical advocacy best preserves predictable limits and neg ground. This is a prior
question because we must agree what we are debating about before we debate it. Debate is a
game and people wont start if the game seems rigged.
Decision-making skills- debate is a laboratory for skills development. It does not seek to establish
a propositional truth but just to have an in-depth dialogue. These skills are best fostered under a
stasis point, discussing political issues and a switch-side debate format. These skills are necessary
in daily life and are solve complex existential problems.

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2NC A2: The Prostitute

They may be no stable definition of prostitute but there is a stable definition of prostitution
Kissil and Davey 10 Karni, Ph.D, Family Therapy, Maureen, Associate Professor Couple and Family Therapy Department The
Prostitution Debate in Feminism: Current Trends, Policy and Clinical Issues Facing an Invisible Population Journal of Feminist
Family Therapy, 22:121, 2010, http://christinedecleene.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/prostitution-debate.pdf
WHO IS A PROSTITUTE? Defining

who is a prostitute is a difficult task, as it is socially constructed and has changed in different eras, states, investigations, and social agenWorld Health Organization (WHO) defined prostitution as a process that involves a transaction between a seller and
buyer of a sexual service (World Health Organization. 1988). This definition is unique since it is the only one that includes the customer and the prostitute. In
cies. For example, the

contrast, as far as police records are concerned, a prostitute is a person who has been charged, arrested, or convicted of prostitution. This definition ignores the customers as well as some of the
more "successful" prostitutes who have never run afoul of the law (Bullough ik Bullough, 1996). Some investigators exploring prostitution have argued that the best way to determine whether
an individual is a prostitute is the emotional involvement and the pleasure she has gained from the client. Traditionally it has been suggested that most prostitutes are emotionally uninvolved
with their clients and experience little physical pleasure themselves, but current studies have suggested that this might not always be the case (Lucas. 2005).

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T Version EXTN
Extend the topical version of the aff The United States should legalize prostitution
JMU BWs aff legalizes prostitution and explores the relations between trauma, wound, and
injury
Theres a number of topical versions of your aff you can legalize organ sales and do a
geneaology of henrietta lacks to discuss the fungibility of black female bodies without consent .
All of these affs ask provocative questions about race, gender, violence, and consent while
simultaneously upholding a plan - And all of their Ks of these T versions are kritiks we should
be able to read on the negative solves their offense.

Legal reform is a step in the right direction- recognizes the complexity of the issue
Filipovic 14 We need smarter prostitution laws, Jill Filipovic, lawyer and writer, January 21, 2014,
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/why-we-need-smarterprostitutionlaws.html
decisions about how to regulate sex work are not about any birds-eye-view philosophical objections that I (or others) might hold. It is
about protecting actual sex workers. It is also about recognizing that we live in a vastly complex world. And in this world, there are
women and men who feel empowered by sex work, for whom it is fulfilling, lucrative and enjoyable. There are those for whom sex work is a temporary
choice . And there are women, men, boys and girls for whom the sex industry is a living hell, who are not at all served by theoretical
discussions or laws that privilege ideals over reality. This is why, despite my philosophical objections to the purchase of sex and my personal feelings of disgust aimed at those who
buy sex, I nevertheless think people absolutely must have the right to sell sexual services without fearing abuse, incarceration,
marginalization or stigma. The Canadian case offers an opportunity for progressive reform . The courts affirmation of the human and
constitutional rights of sex workers is a huge first step . The legislature must now craft a law that regulates the sex industry while keeping workers safe and upholding their rights. That
Ultimately,

does not just require reforming the law on prostitution. It requires looking at associated policies focused on public health, social services, addiction treatment, poverty, immigration and gender equality. It is not an easy task.
The best thing the Canadian government can do is take the armchair analysis of people like me with a grain of salt and invite a variety of sex workers, past and present, to the table, along with researchers, human-rights

Since sex workers are no more a monolith than women generally, the government will surely hear a wide spectrum
of suggestions, ranging from full illegalization to decriminalization with no governmental oversight at all. But a law informed by the voices
of those most impacted by it will at least be a step in the right direction .
advocates and legal experts.

Institutional macro-political engagement is vital to solve

Orly Lobel 7, Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego, THE PARADOX OF EXTRALEGAL ACTIVISM: CRITICAL
LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS, Harvard Law Review, Vol. 120
transformative
politics that is, attempts to produce meaningful changes in the political and socioeconomic landscapes. The suggested alternatives produce a new image of social and political action. This vision rejects a
shared theory of social reform, rejects formal programmatic agendas, and embraces a multiplicity of forms and practices. Thus, it is described in
Both the practical failures and the fallacy of rigid boundaries generated by extralegal activism rhetoric permit us to broaden our inquiry to the underlying assumptions of current proposals regarding

such terms as a plan of no plan,211 a project of pro- jects,212 anti-theory theory,213 politics rather than goals,214 presence rather than power,215 practice over theory,216 and chaos and openness over order and

the contemporary message rarely includes a comprehensive vision of common social claims, but rather engages in the
description of fragmented efforts. As Professor Joel Handler argues, the commonality of struggle and social vision that existed during the civil rights movement has disappeared.217 There is no unifying
discourse or set of values, but rather an aversion to any metanarrative and a resignation from theory. Professor Handler warns that this move away from grand narratives is self-defeating
precisely because only certain parts of the political spectrum have accepted this new stance: [T]he opposition is not playing that
formality. As a result,

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game . . . . [E]veryone else is operating as if there were Grand Narratives . . . .218 Intertwined with the resignation from law and policy, the new bromide of neither left
nor right has become axiomatic only for some.219 The contemporary critical legal consciousness informs the scholarship of those who are interested in progressive social activism, but less so that of those who are interested,
for example, in a more competitive securities market. Indeed, an interesting recent development has been the rise of conservative public interest lawyer[ing].220 Although public interest law was originally associated

This
growth in conservative advocacy is particularly salient in juxtaposition to the decline of traditional progressive advocacy. Most recently, some
exclusively with liberal projects, in the past three decades conservative advocacy groups have rapidly grown both in number and in their vigorous use of traditional legal strategies to promote their causes.221

thinkers have even suggested that there may be something inherent in the lefts conception of social change focused as it is on participation and empowerment that produces a unique distrust of legal expertise.222

Although the new extralegal frames present themselves as apt alternatives

to legal reform models and as capable of producing significant changes to the social map, in practice they generate very limited
improvement in existing social arrangements. Most strikingly, the cooptation effect here can be explained in terms of the most profound risk of
the typology that of legitimation. The common pattern of extralegal scholarship is to describe an inherent instability in
dominant structures by pointing, for example, to grassroots strategies,223 and then to assume that specific instances of counterhegemonic activities
translate into a more complete transformation. This celebration of multiple micro-resistances seems to rely on an aggregate
approach an idea that the multiplication of practices will evolve into something substantial . In fact, the myth of engagement obscures
the actual lack of change being produced, while the broader pattern of equating extralegal activism with social reform produces a false belief in the potential of change. There are few
instances of meaningful reordering of social and economic arrangements and macro-redistribution. Scholars write about decoding what is really happening, as
though the scholarly narrative has the power to unpack more than the actual conventional experience will admit.224 Unrelated efforts become related and part of a whole through mere reframing. At the same time,
the elephant in the room the rising level of economic inequality is left unaddressed and comes to be understood as natural and
inevitable.225 This is precisely the problematic process that critical theorists decry as losers self-mystification, through which marginalized groups come to see systemic losses as
the product of their own actions and thereby begin to focus on minor achievements as representing the boundaries of their willed
reality. The explorations of micro-instances of activism are often fundamentally performative, obscuring the distance between the descriptive and the prescriptive. The manifestations of extralegal activism
the law and organizing model; the proliferation of informal, soft norms and norm-generating actors; and the celebrated, separate nongovernmental sphere of action all produce a fantasy that change
can be brought about through small-scale, decentralized transformation. The emphasis is local, but the locality is described as a
microcosm of the whole and the audience is national and global. In the context of the humanities, Professor Carol Greenhouse poses a comparable challenge to ethnographic studies
from the 1990s, which utilized the genres of narrative and community studies, the latter including works on American cities and neighborhoods in trouble.226 The aspiration of these genres was that each
individual story could translate into a time of the nation body of knowledge and motivation .227 In contemporary legal thought, a corresponding gap opens
between the local scale and the larger, translocal one. In reality, although there has been a recent proliferation of associations and grassroots groups, few new local-statenational federations
have emerged in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the existing voluntary federations that flourished in the mid-twentieth century are in decline.228 There is,
therefore, an absence of links between the local and the national, an absent intermediate public sphere, which has been termed the
missing middle by Professor Theda Skocpol.229 New social movements have for the most part failed in sustaining coalitions or producing
significant institutional change through grassroots activism. Professor Handler concludes that this failure is due in part to the ideas of contingency, pluralism, and localism that are
so embedded in current activism.230 Is the focus on small-scale dynamics simply an evasion of the need to engage in broader substantive
debate? It is important for next-generation progressive legal scholars, while maintaining a critical legal consciousness, to recognize that not all extralegal associational life is
transformative. We must differentiate, for example, between inward-looking groups, which tend to be self- regarding and depoliticized,
and social movements that participate in political activities, engage the public debate, and aim to challenge and reform existing
realities.231 We must differentiate between professional associations and more inclusive forms of institutions that act as trustees for larger segments of the community.232 As described above, extralegal activism tends
to operate on a more divided and hence a smaller scale than earlier social movements, which had national reform agendas. Consequently, within critical discourse there is a need to
recognize the limited capacity of small-scale action. We should question the narrative that imagines consciousness-raising as directly
translating into action and action as directly translating into change. Certainly not every cultural description is political. Indeed, it is questionable whether forms of activism that
are opposed to programmatic reconstruction of a social agenda should even be understood as social movements. In fact, when groups are situated in opposition to any form of
institutionalized power, they may be simply mirroring what they are fighting against and merely producing moot activism that settles
for what seems possible within the narrow space that is left in a rising convergence of ideologies . The original vision is consequently
coopted, and contemporary discontent is legitimated through a process of self-mystification.
Once again, this conclusion reveals flaws parallel to the original disenchantment with legal reform.

Legal activism might not be perfect, but its better than the alt
Orly Lobel 7, University of San Diaego Assistant Professor of Law, The Paradox of Extralegal Activism: Critical Legal
Consciousness and Transformative Politics, 120 HARV. L. REV. 937, http://www.harvardlawreview.org/media/pdf/lobel.pdf
the extralegal model has suffered from the same drawbacks associated with legal cooptation. I show that as an effort to avoid
the current wave of suggested alternatives has effects that ironically mirror those of cooptation itself. Three central types of
difficulties exist with contemporary extralegal scholarship. First, in the contexts of the labor and civil rights movements, arguments about legal cooptation often developed in response
to a perceived gap between the conceptual ideal toward which a social reform group struggled and its actual accomplishments. But,
ironically, the contemporary message of opting out of traditional legal reform avenues may only accentuate this problem. As the rise of
In the following sections, I argue that
the risk of legal cooptation,

informatization (moving to nonlegal strategies), civil society (moving to extralegal spheres), and pluralism (the proliferation of norm-generating actors) has been effected and appropriated by supporters from a wide range of

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concepts have had unintended implications that conflict with the very social reform ideals from which they stem .
Second, the idea of opting out of the legal arena becomes self-defeating as it discounts the ongoing importance of law and the possibilities
of legal reform in seemingly unregulated spheres. A model encompassing exit and rigid sphere distinctions further fails to recognize a reality of increasing interpenetration and the blurring of
boundaries between private and public spheres, profit and nonprofit sectors, and formal and informal institutions. It therefore loses the critical insight that law operates in the
background of seemingly unregulated relationships. Again paradoxically, the extralegal view of decentralized activism and the division of society into different spheres
in fact have worked to subvert rather than support the progressive agenda . Finally, since extralegal actors view their actions with romantic
idealism, they fail to develop tools for evaluating their success. If the critique of legal cooptation has involved the argument that legal
reform, even when viewed as a victory, is never radically transformative, we must ask: what are the criteria for assessing the achievements
of the suggested alternatives? As I illustrate in the following sections, much of the current scholarship obscures the lines between the descriptive
and the prescriptive in its formulation of social activism. If current suggestions present themselves as alternatives to formal legal
struggles, we must question whether the new extralegal politics that are proposed and celebrated are capable of producing a constructive theory and
meaningful channels for reform, rather than passive status quo politics. A. Practical Failures: When Extralegal Alternatives Are Vehicles for Conservative Agendas We dont
political commitments, these

want the 1950s back. What we want is to edit them. We want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, and the milk and cookies, while blotting out the political bosses, the tyrannical headmasters, the inflexible rules, and

A basic structure of cooptation arguments as developed in relation to the labor and civil
rights movements has been to show how, in the move from theory to practice, the ideal that was promoted by a social group takes on
unintended content, and the group thus fails to realize the original vision. This risk is particularly high when ideals are framed in broad terms that are open to multiple
interpretations. Moreover, the pitfalls of the potential risks presented under the umbrella of cooptation are in fact accentuated in current proposals. Paradoxically, as the extralegal movement is
framed by way of opposition to formal legal reform paths, without sufficiently defining its goals, it runs the very risks it sought to
avoid by working outside the legal system. Extralegal paths are depicted mostly in negative terms and as resorting to new alternative
forms of action rather than established models. Accordingly, because the ideas of social organizing, civil society, and legal pluralism
are framed in open-ended contrarian terms, they do not translate into specific visions of social justice reform. The idea of civil society, which has been
the lectures on 100 percent Americanism and the sinfulness of dissent.163

embraced by people from a broad array of often conflicting ideological commitments, is particularly demonstrative. Critics argue that [s]ome ideas fail because they never make the light of day. The idea of civil society . . .

In former eras, the claims about the legal cooptation of

the transformative visions of workplace justice and racial equality suggested that through legal strategies the visions became stripped
of their initial depth and fragmented and framed in ways that were narrow and often merely symbolic. This observation seems
accurate in the contemporary political arena; the idea of civil society revivalism evoked by progressive activists has been reduced to symbolic acts with
very little substance. On the left, progressive advocates envision decentralized activism in a third, nongovernmental sphere as a way of reviving democratic participation and rebuilding the state
from the bottom up. By contrast, the idea of civil society has been embraced by conservative politicians as a means for replacing government-funded programs
and steering away from state intervention. As a result, recent political uses of civil society have subverted the ideals of progressive social reform and
replaced them with conservative agendas that reject egalitarian views of social provision .
failed because it became too popular.164 Such a broadly conceived ideal as civil society sows the seeds of its own destruction.

Reforms are possible and desirable- tangible change outweighs the risk of cooption
Omi and Winant 13 Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Michael Omi, Associate Professor at the University
of California, Berkeley, Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Director of the
University of California Center for New Racial Studies, 2013, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36:6, 961-973, DOI:
10.1080/01419870.2012.715177
In Feagin and Eliass account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is little sense that the white racial frame
evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely a distraction from
more ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call surface flexibility
to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase

If they mean the USA is a contradictory and

incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or
political power in the USA, we disagree . The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it is also in many respects a racial
democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic policies, social policies, or for
that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? Over the past decades
racial democracy is an oxymoron a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms.

there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in different
institutional sites employment, health, education persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime
home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; racebased wealth disparities widened tremendously. It

would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and
unchanging throughout US history. But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred
since the Second World War and the civil rights era. Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement,
and that we overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation
we wrote about racial reaction in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in

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argue that the right wing was able to rearticulate race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of
the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political
landscape. So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that is the whole story .
US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or
neglect . Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible ; they have set powerful democratic forces in motion. These
racial (trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobiliza- tions, led by the black movement, but not confined to
blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting
Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared
anti- miscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his interest convergence hypothesis effectively
substantial agreement with us. While we

explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnsons famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 We have lost the South for a
generation count as convergence? The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorpora- tion of
opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process; here the US racial regime under movement pressure was exercising its
hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms which he calls passive revolutions cannot

be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions

must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in the realm of politics , not absolute rule. So yes, we think there were important
if partial victories that shifted the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further
victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and
across civil society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of
the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined others and the democratization of structurally racist societies,

broadened and deepened democracy

itself. They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social
justice and inclusion accomplished by other new social movements: second- wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmentalist
and anti-war movements among others. By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was an unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social
movements were subject to the same rearticulation (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of colourblindness and its variants; indeed all
these movements confronted their mirror images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even their incorporation and containment,
even their confrontations with the various backlash phenomena of the past few decades, even the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of colour- blindness,
reveal the transformative character of the politicization of the social. While it is not possible here to explore so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it
but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and identity. These demands

was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into the mainstream political arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and anti- democratic
social movements that are evident in US politics today.

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2NC A2: Law Bad

This isnt offence- we should learn the interworking of the legal system surrounding prostitution
to understand have governance and control operates to effectively alter the system
Their offence doesnt assume the game space- their ev says working in the legal system is badbut not that learning legal education in debates is not useful to future activism- even if extra-legal
Law is inevitable- rather than expel the law- we should recognize it can be used strategically as a
tool of resistance
Scoular 10 What's Law Got To Do With it? How and Why Law Matters in the Regulation of Sex Work, Jane Scoular, The Law
School, University of Strathclyde, JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2010 ISSN:0263323X, pp.1239
Rather than expel law, we need a more complex analytical framework to understand its contemporary relevance . Such a framework
can be developed by applying insights from theories of governmentality to the studies on the regulation of sex work . This offers a
fuller appreciation of the wider legal complex, and its role in regulating and authorizing the spaces, norms, and subjects of
contemporary sex work. It also explains law's role in maintaining the systems of governmentality, across legal systems, that exacerbate these injustices and forms of bare life that
have become hallmarks of late- industrial capitalist societies. In arguing for the continued relevance of law I do not intend to reinstate an imperialist,
uncritical positivist position. I argue instead for its strategic use in order to `pursue a deconstructivist agenda within legal arenas and
discourses'.117 This requires an acute understanding of law as a mode of regulation as well as an understanding of how it could be how
harnessed as a tool of resistance . As Tadros notes: rather than the structure or fabric which constitutes our society, the law is a machine which oils the modern structures
of domination, or which, at best achieves a tinkering on the side of justice. 118 In order to tinker more on the side of justice rather than
domination, one has to be critically aware of how modern forms of governance and control operate . This article, it is hoped, begins this process as
it allow us to see that law does matter in the regulation of sex work and could matter , albeit in a different way than was thought before.

Their indicts are of current legalization schemes- that doesnt then mean efforts should be
abandoned by it needs to be done better
Showden 9 Assistant Professor Political Science University of North Carolina Greensboro, Carisa, Prostitution and Womens
Agency: A Feminist Argument for Decriminalization http://policeprostitutionandpolitics.com/pdfs_all/Academics%20Research
%20Articles%20Support%20Prostitution%20%20Decriminalization/2009%20Prostitution%20and%20Womens%20Agency%20A
%20Feminist%20Argument%20for%20Decriminalization%20.pdf
the one case of legalization in the United Statesin rural
in Nevadahas been quite poorly implemented and needs not to be a model of feminist policy making.45 That current legalization
schemes are deeply flawed does not mean all efforts at legalization have to be abandoned; it means that it needs to be done
better. I want to look at the problems with the Nevada legalization approach and compare it to the hybrid decriminalization/legalization model that the Netherlands has begun implementing. The point of this brief comparison is to think about how to change the
Critics of legalization schemes often rightly point out that legalization can be and often is at least as harmful to prostitutes interests as criminalization. Certainly
counties

working environment for sex workers to enable them the greatest degree of control over their sexuality and income. In Nevada prostitution is only legal in state-licensed brothels. Because the state has given brothel owners an outright monopoly on legalized sexual

while they have to work in

brothels to avoid being criminals, prostitutes dont count as employees but rather are categorized as independent contractors so that they get no state-provided
workers benefits (e.g., workers compensation, retirement, and unemployment), are not covered by minimum wage or fair labor standards laws or occupational health
and safety regulations, nor can they unionize.46 They have to live in the same place where they work, and they have to register with the police. In most brothels, if a prostitute needs to go into town during her weeks on shift,
commerce, all independent prostitution is a criminal offense. The effect is that no woman can work legally without agreeing to share her income with a state-licensed pimp (Chapkis 1997, 162). Further,

she has to be accompanied by a non-prostitute, and most are required to live outside of the town limits during their week off each month. They work a standard shift: 12-14 hours per day, seven days a week, for 21 days straight. Fifty percent of the money earned per
transaction goes back to the brothel management. In addition, prostitutes have to pay fees for room and board, supplies (including condoms), and are required to tip house employees. To be allowed to refuse a customer, the prostitute has to provide management with
what it considers an acceptable reason. In most brothels, women are required to participate in a lineup.47 It seems the only benefit to the prostitutes in this system is that they are not in danger of being arrested, as autonomy has been legalized out of the Nevada

cooperative
brothels in The Netherlands that provide a high level of physical protection for prostitutes while also giving individuals control over their
working conditions, offering a very different model of brothel prostitution than that which is practiced in Nevada . The Netherlands
offers a legal model premised on protecting the labor interests of prostitutes rather than focusing on the interests of third party moralists or neighbors, as we see in the Nevada scheme. In
brothel system. Note that none of these requirements is necessary to brothel prostitution as Kathryn Hausbeck and Barbara G. Brents explain in their social and political history of the Nevada system. Additionally, Lenore Kuo describe s

the Dutch model, acts of prostitution between consenting adults are decriminalized (Kuo 2002, 88), but the conditions of work are matters of regulation since a change in the law in 2000. (Before the change, brothels and pimping were banned, but being a prostitute
was legal.) Here, zoning of streetwalking consists primarily of safe parks and red light districts. In the former, police-patrolled parks are established where women are permitted to congregate for purposes of soliciting, and service centers are provided for women
who need counseling. In the latter, brothels and window prostitution are located in specified zones in twelve cities.48 Brothels have to be licensed and are subject to health and safety regulations, and coercion, deceit, and abuse are prohibited.49 This does not mean that
theyve been eradicated, only that ferreting out coercion and abusenot prostitution per sehas become the focus on law enforcement. Registered, tax-paying prostitutes can get state-sponsored workers benefits, but many prostitutes avoid registration because of the
bureaucratic stigma attached and the risk of losing their anonymity. (For example, being a known prostitute will get one barred from entering many countries, like Switzerland and Austria, thus limiting prostitutes freedom of movement and future job prospects.50)

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The sex worker response to the changes in the law have been mixed, but generally positive, noting particularly independence (setting prices, organizing working hours and choosing what services to provide), an
improvement in the image of the profession and the enforcement of rules on health and safety as the main benefits to legalization of
organized prostitution (Wijers 2008). There are still a number of problems with this system, including the variability by local jurisdiction in the licensing of establishments and enforcement of health codes. The Red Thread (the Dutch prostitutes
organization) is arguing for more uniform laws, the establishment of a hotline to which prostitutes can report abuses, greater labor law enforcement, greater state support of independent operators, more licenses for small, cooperative brothels, and more support for

individual sex
workers do not have to register [with police] and are not submitted to mandatory health checks (Wijers 2008). What is clear in reviewing the
Dutch model is both that labor interests can be protected in a law that emphasizes cracking down on coercion (trafficking) while legalizing
consensual sex work and that state regimes are better at regulating sexuality than they are at promoting freedom. This is why I argue that decriminalization should be the default position, and women working independently should be free from state
intervention in their labor. The problem with simple decriminalization is that third parties (e.g., escort services or brothel owners) can still take
advantage of womens labor, so while the state is no longer disciplining her sexually, her labor interests would not be improved tremendously.
This is why some sex-as-work advocates argue that legalization is preferable to decriminalization because, as the current status of pornography demonstrates , if we leave it
up to the goodness in the hearts of porn producers or pimps to obtain consent and insist on safer sex practices, we havent done all we can to help women.52
Decriminalization can aid the sex radicalism agenda, but it alone does not meet the needs pointed out by the sexed labor analysis. To shape sexual and labor
relations more positivelyto create different social relationships within sexual commerceprostitutes need to be decriminalized, but
any business that hires sex workers needs to be regulated in line with meeting womens interests . This will not necessarily change the violence that is faced by street walkers,
prostitutes who want to leave the profession.51 One of the main problems seems to be with the licensing system, which works well for brothel owners, but fails to protect prostitutes privacy interests. But importantly and positively,

especially in the short term. But the most significant policy change that could improve the lot of streetwalkers is a change in broader economic and social service policies, specifically drug rehabilitation and child protective services, rather than any prostitution-specific
policy. Consider the results of Ine Vanwesenbeecks study of the experiences and psychological states of prostitutes in indoor and outdoor venues in the Dutch system, where criminalization is not a factor effecting the experience of sex workers. She found that about
one-quarter of prostitute women suffer severely. About half of the women are doing far better than the stereotyped view, at or slightly less well than the average non-prostitute woman in the Netherlands. And a little more than one-quarter are faring quite welleven
better than the average non-prostitute woman.53 The differences in how women fare appear to depend on five factors: childhood experiences, economic situation, working conditions, survival strategies, and interaction with clients (Kuo 2002, 95). The first two of the
five factors are non-specific to prostitution; the final three are related to changing the structure of the job of street prostitutes, and the first two need to be addressed by changing womens overall cultural and economic well-being so that they dont face the worst forms of
prostitution as their best employment options to start with. Those who suffer under exploitative labor conditions in sex work do so for two main reasons: one, criminalization and two, poverty and abuse outside of prostitution. Prostitution policy can only address the
former. Hence, economic policy is prostitution policy. Additionally, domestic violence policy is prostitution policy: At highest risk were those women who would never prostitute but for great economic necessity. Abuse by a private partner was often the source of this
extreme economic need (Kuo 2002, 96). Legalization schemes have tended to protect community interests and brothel owners interests, but as currently constructed they operate almost as oppressively as criminalization for the women involved. Individual
interactions may be therapeutic or resistant, but the material structure of the work environment requires serious sex-as-labor challenges in order to meet the possibilities sex workers can provide for a more open sexuality discourse while avoiding the perpetration of the
harms abolitionists have documented. Thus, state policies must be a target of feminist activism. But if the only goal is abolition, not only is the policy doomed to fail, it is doomed to punish poor women while failing to attend to the primary reason most women go into

the state sets so much of the discursive and material framework within which womens sexuality and work are
determined, the law and its enforcement are central tools for changing the framework and social meaning of prostitution and
womens sex. Ideally, feminists would move to supporting a hybrid legalization/decriminalization model that opens up space for
women to operate singly or in small groups without state intervention while labor law and safety provisions were applied to any thirdparty business interests working with prostitutes (e.g., escort service providers, corporate brothel owners). Certain features of current practices would not be part of an ideal state policy. For example, prostitutes
must not be required to register with police, and self-employed independent operators should not be required to get a state license .
Registration is a further effort to monitor and control prostitutesto mark whores off from respectable womenand is not
necessary to allowing women to engage in sex work or to receive services that might put them on the path of improving their working
conditions or leaving prostitution. Registration schemes are also unlikely to work. Prostitutes across the globe generally try to avoid complying with registration imperatives, even when it would garner them public benefits. Partly this is
sex work: economic need. Because

because of the temporary nature of most prostitutes work in the field, and partly because they wish to avoid the bureaucratic stigmatization of registering.54 Decriminalization could begin to change the structures within which sex workand sexuality more generally

But because
the law helps to regulatedoes not determine but shapesnot only the way we interact sexually but the desires we have and can imagine and the relationships we build from those desires, changing
the law is one important element in creating a more just sexual order. Because the state can be just as coercive as individual pimps and traffickers, it is important not simply to displace one
source of coercion for another. The power of the state to do good promote more equitable economic policies, for example must be harnessed while
not handing the state more paternalistic powers over womens sexual self-development. V. Conclusion Prostitution should be decriminalized not because it is an inherent good to
develops and is regulated and produced. It is not meant to be a panacea for all of the harms of prostitution; nor can prostitution alone transform sexual relations between men and women (or between gays or lesbians or transgender people).

be protected, but first because of the harms that criminalization brings with it, and second because of the roleeven if limitedprostitution can play in helping to bring about a new sexual ideology where womens and mens sexual desires and imaginations are more
open. Prostitution needs to be made less exploitative, and the way to do that is to shine light on it, not to cloak in under the darkness of criminality. So long as women are criminals, they are seen as appropriate targets of abuse. By decriminalizing prostitutes, the state
would be saying that they are worthy of respect, worthy of recognition as laborers and as agents. Decriminalizing prostitution would also make it easier to help women who are abused and who want to get out of the business. They would not have to confess to being a
criminal in order to obtain help, and if they are no longer engaged in a crime, they wont be turned away from domestic violence shelters because of criminal activity. And those who provide services to prostitutes would no longer court police sanction for abetting

Decriminalization here functions as a form of

radical incrementalism that collapses the distinction between reform and revolution and recognizes the power of domination
but also represents the social field as a dynamic, multidimensional set of relationships containing possibilities for liberation as well
as domination (Sawicki 1991, 9). The sex-as-work analysis is an answer to the abolitionist definition of sex and gender construction that still recognizes the problems of current sexual practices. To insist on the labor value
of sex work, and to insist on womens understanding of sex as work and not just as sex, is to contest the meaning of sex that says that men make women objects through
sexual acts; it is to insist that the sex women have has meaning for them and not just about them. This does not require giving up any challenge to the economic system that
limits womens options to sexual labor or poverty. Nor does it mean that any prostitution sex is prima facie liberating; but it does mean that men dont get to define all of the terms on which sex is engaged, even under
conditions of asymmetrical power relations. To change the conditions of sexual laborto legalize it; to organize it; to bring women together to challenge
male definitions and male power of ownership within prostitution (focusing on womens cooperative brothels rather than male pimps, for example)is to wrest agency from
the configurations of power within which one exists; its to face victimization and find agency within it. To change the legal
terms of prostitution is to launch a challenge to extant configurations of power, to insist the formal rules governing womens
sexualized existence evolve in the face of womens sexualized challenge to the construction of sexuality as dominance/male,
submission/female. Such a challenge or denunciation is a form of sexual metaphysics, a means of bringing about or aiding the becoming ofaltered sexual
social relations.
solicitation, so the many services prostitutes say they neede.g., counseling, peer support, immigration assistance, and language classescould be more easily and widely provided to them.55

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2NC A2: Cant Solve Stigma

The law can reframe the terms of prostitution debates- changes the conception of sexual social
relations
Showden 9 Assistant Professor Political Science University of North Carolina Greensboro, Carisa, Prostitution and Womens
Agency: A Feminist Argument for Decriminalization http://policeprostitutionandpolitics.com/pdfs_all/Academics%20Research
%20Articles%20Support%20Prostitution%20%20Decriminalization/2009%20Prostitution%20and%20Womens%20Agency%20A
%20Feminist%20Argument%20for%20Decriminalization%20.pdf
To insist on the labor
value of sex work, and to insist on womens understanding of sex as work and not just as sex, is to contest the meaning of sex that says that men make
women objects through sexual acts; it is to insist that the sex women have has meaning for them and not just about them. This does not require giving up any
challenge to the economic system that limits womens options to sexual labor or poverty. Nor does it mean that any prostitution sex is prima facie
liberating; but it does mean that men dont get to define all of the terms on which sex is engaged, even under conditions of asymmetrical power relations. To change the conditions
of sexual laborto legalize it; to organize it; to bring women together to challenge male definitions and male power of ownership
within prostitution (focusing on womens cooperative brothels rather than male pimps, for example)is to wrest agency from the configurations of power
within which one exists; its to face victimization and find agency within it. To change the legal terms of prostitution is to launch
a challenge to extant configurations of power, to insist the formal rules governing womens sexualized existence evolve in the face
of womens sexualized challenge to the construction of sexuality as dominance/male, submission/female. Such a challenge or denunciation
is a form of sexual metaphysics, a means of bringing about or aiding the becoming ofaltered sexual social relations.
The sex-as-work analysis is an answer to the abolitionist definition of sex and gender construction that still recognizes the problems of current sexual practices.

Legal approaches to prostitution will generate large scale societal shifts in how we view sex
Lucas 5 professor in the Department of Justice Studies at San Jose State, Ann, The Currency of Sex, in Rethinking
Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture, ed: Radin, p. 261-262
Radin advocates the incomplete commodification (legal regulation) of prostitution, specifically, the prohibition of
brokering/pimping, recruitment, training, advertising, and contract enforcement . These proposals reflect incomplete analyses of both commodification generally, and
prostitution specifically. Prostitutes report that this kind of incomplete commodification, as practiced in Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and elsewhere, is not much
better than complete criminalization.7o Almost everything that facilitates the practice of prostitution is prohibited, so although the
actual exchange of sex for money is legal, prostitution remains "illegal in all but name"71 and engenders nearly the same level of
abuse of prostitutes as under full criminalization. Radin's antiproliferation regulations thus would perpetuate prostitutes' marginalization
and inhibit their flourishing. Yet Radin proposes incomplete commodification precisely to improve the lot of the most vulnerable prostitutes in the real world; in an ideal world, she would prohibit
prostitution entirely. Sadly, her regulations cannot satisfy her real-world objective. Legal regulation informed by a fuller appreciation of commodification and
prostitution in the real world would look very different than Radin's version. Instead of trying to limit prostitution's proliferation, the
law could regulate prostitution like other work. For example, prostitutes could be protected by OSHA regulations, allowed to organize,
and made eligible for employment-related benefits.72 Such changes could have far-reaching symbolic, as well as material,
consequences- but not those feared by commodification critics. Like social and market rhetoric, legal rhetoric helps shape our thinking.73 Existing criminal laws against prostitution
reinforce stigma, whether that criminalization is complete (sex is market-inalienable) or partial (sex is incompletely commodified). Legal recognition of prostitutes as workers with shared
interests in safety, benefits, and professionalism could go far in reshaping current conceptions,74 without harming the larger society.75 Conclusion: The
To prevent the domino effect,

Centrality of Empirical Data and Heterogeneity Many analyses of commodified sex are inadequate because they are insufficiently informed by actual lived experience, and by variation in lived experience. In seeking the best
rules governing prostitution, analysis should account for the experiences of prostitutes, both female and male, and their clients.76 This is not to suggest that prostitutes alone be allowed to make the rules, nor that our own
judgment as prostitution outsiders (if we are such) be suspended. Instead, this is an argument that more comprehensive investigation of possibilities and experiences enhances everyone's judgment. As we have seen,
commodification critics are concerned not just about how selling sex affects prostitutes' senses of self but about the social effect-the effect on the rest of us-when anyone's sexuality is commodified. Their reasoning would be
more persuasive if supported by actual experience: Where prostitution is legal, is sexuality discussed in market rhetoric? If not, why not? Is the status of women in such countries lower than it is where prostitution is illegal?

the experience so far in those European and Australian jurisdictions with legal prostitution suggests that it has
neither diminished women's social status, nor made market valuations of sexuality any more common than they are, for example, in the
U.S.77 Similarly, have commodified love, sexuality, marriages, family relationships, or personhood resulted from practices like awarding money damages for pain and suffering, loss of consortium, and wrongful death, or
Although we lack definitive answers,

compensating women upon divorce for unpaid household and family labor?78 Inquiries like these ",would assist us in evaluating the domino theory. For example, there is little evidence that child wrongful-death awards have
made even a significant minority of parents (or nonparents) think about children as commodities.79 Similarly, while the availability of life insurance likely helps commodify human life, most people appear not to think about
their spouses primarily in terms of "what is she/he worth to me dead?" (Indeed, we prosecute, punish, and denounce those few individuals who kill to collect insurance proceeds.) Both reasoning and evidence indicate that

commodified and noncommodified sexuality and rhetoric coexist without diminishing human flourishing. Indeed, this diversity and
coexistence may actually enhance flourishing in other areas of life. Regarding one-prostitution law reform proposal, Laurie Shrage suggests, In arguing for socialist
and feminist regulationism in regard to prostitution, perhaps we provide a model for pressing for socialist and feminist regulation of
other industries as well. If we no longer treat sex commerce as an evil produced by capitalism and patriarchy, but see the evil in the
way sex commerce is produced and shaped in a classist, sexist, and racist society, then we should develop social policies that attempt
to reshape it in anti-classist, anti-sexist, and anti-racist ways.... In short, perhaps in the future we can offer a more humane, feminist and socialist
sex industry as a model for other kinds of labor reform. 80 In regard to prostitution, embracing commodification and legitimation have
more merit than fearing them, restricting them, and disempowering people.81 Excessive caution about commodification does not do

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justice to the complexity, variety, and resilience of societies and individuals, and overlooks commodification's potential for positive
social transformation. Moreover, unwarranted fear of commodification may contribute to the reification of concepts like the
madonna/whore dichotomy, to the benefit of none and the detriment of all-especially prostitutes, promiscuous women, and other
sexual "deviants" on the disfavored side of the line.

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2NC A2: Moots Sex Workers Voice

Legal reform as a starting point can incorporate the diversity of viewpoints of sex workers
Pivot Legal Society 6 BEYOND DECRIMINALIZATION: Sex Work, Human Rights and a New Framework for Law Reform,
Pivot Legal Society, April, 2006, http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/pivotlegal/legacy_url/275/BeyondDecrimLongReport.pdf?
1345765615
The purpose of this report is to provide a comprehensive overview that will serve as a starting point for discussion of the many complex and controversial issues surrounding sex work and
regula- tion of the sex industry. Sex

workers themselves should be provided with a prominent role in any law, policy, or social reform. This report
sex workers have
expertise, knowledge and insight into the legal issues they face and the ways in which laws can be applied or amended to provide
them with the equality, liberty and personal security that is guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Although there is considerable
diversity among sex workers, they share the experience of systemic discrimination, marginalization and social alienation. If they are to
highlights the issues to be considered by all levels of government as they engage in the process of law reform. As illustrated by the information presented ,

achieve full citizenship, sex workers should have access to the human rights complaint process and equal opportunities when it comes to availing themselves of the other protections offered by
law. All legislation effecting sex workers must be consistent with the Charter. The

starting point when considering the issue of sex work and legislative
reform is the need for criminal law reform. Pivots research suggest that the only way to evolve towards a legal framework that is empowering and allows for the safety of sex
workers is to repeal the Criminal Code provisions relating to adult prostitution. Repealing the criminal laws relating to adult prostitution, ss. 0, , (), (3) and 3, will
create the opportunity for sex workers to access the employment and labour protections that are afforded to other workers under the laws of B.C. and
Canada. With the repeal of these criminal laws, sex workers will face fewer barriers to accessing the protec- tive services of the police. Clearly, the
criminal laws that are in place to protect all Canadians from exploitation and violence should be applied equally to sex workers in cases where they are victims of crime. Sex workers
emphasized that they want full access to police protection as well as rigorous enforcement of laws when they are victims of crime, including when they are subject to exploitation by pimps or
clients. Sex workers deserve equal access to the criminal justice system. Persons who are coerced or forced to engage in sex work against their will should have full
access to the protections found under the criminal laws of Canada, and specifically those provisions that prohibit sexual and physical assault, harassment, threats and extortion. While they want
and deserve equal access to these existing laws, sex workers indicated that no additional laws designed specifically for their protection are necessary.

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Case

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A2 hartman
Hartmans methodology is flawed and self-contradictory.
Wilkinson 99 Karen Wilkinson, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America
byReview by: Journal of American Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Aug., 1999), pp. 374-375Published

Despite raising some interesting points about the construction of black identity within that society, Scenes of Subjection is a
frustrating book to read. Hartman's heavy reliance upon theory often does little to illuminate the point she is attempting to make. In
addition, though she acknowledges the problems of using source material such as interviews conducted by the WPA in the
introduction, throughout the text these interview transcripts play a central role as authoritative accounts of the past. What is more
problematic, however, is Hartman's assertion in the opening pages that in this book she will not resort to the reductive and damaging
strategy of reading "slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and terrible she includes scenes of total humility
and depravity described so graphically in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ultimately in this
respect Hartman fails, as she too falls into the trap of highlighting the spectacle of brutality that slavery involved.

Their critique of liberalism treats all political relations between black life and the law as the same
as non-consensual sex. This historical totalization fails.
First its non-unique all human relations with the law are non-consensual insofar as the social
contract is imaginary and the state has a monopoly on violence black life may be
disproportionately subject to state violence but absence of consent is a universal feature of the
law.
Second - The contingency of political engagement means the law can change the terrain of
consent even fatally flawed actors can still be manipulated into engaging in less comparative
violence.
Third that dehistoricized analogy obscures both the particular political challenges of the
modern antiblack context but also the lived historical horrors of rape on the slave plantation.
This is both a turn to their ethics argument and supercharges the link to our politics arguments.
And Harmans move to theorize the law through the sexual relations of the slave plantation
may be valuable for its provocative critique of subjectivity but it ultimately asks a different
question from pragmatic political concerns of the resolution an ethics of pragmatism demands
an emphasis on the contingency of political problems in a particular historical context.
Fan, professor of Public Administration and Institute of Public Policy Tamkang University, 6
(Mei-Fang, Environmental Justice and Nuclear Waste Conflicts in Taiwan, Environmental Politics, Vol. 15, No. 3, p. 417 434,
June)

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It is necessary to rethink the multiple conceptions of environmental justice articulated by the Yami and Taiwanese groups. This section focuses on the questions of how
we might respond to differing ways of understanding environmental justice, deal with the divisions within a multicultural society and
formulate environmental policy regarding nuclear waste dilemmas. The Yami professional and teenage student groups tended to stress the preservation of a liveable
environment for future generations and regarded it as the core element of the environmental justice movement and the basis for the Yamis opposition to nuclear waste. Instead, for most of the Taiwanese participants,
the Yamis anti-nuclear movement did not exactly correspond to the claims of environmental justice. Those Taiwanese participants who hold utilitarian views considered that the
Yami anti-nuclear waste movement involved political consideration, self-interest and the attempt to obtain benefits or celebrity. The gap between the Yami
and Taiwanese groups and the lack of mutual understanding and communication between them are significant. The Yami groups expressed their doubts as to whether the Taiwanese people would
treat the tribesmen sincerely as partners in dealing with environmental problems, while the Taiwanese participants seemed to view the Yami as insular. A growing number of environmental ethicists have
tried to rethink the problem of what practical effect environmental ethics has had on the formation of environmental policy. Contrary to a monistic
approach, moral pluralism as a practical philosophy allows a form of agreement on real cases in which agreement on the general formulation of
moral principles is not essential. Practical philosophy seeks the integration of multiple values and tries to reduce the distance between disputants by finding a general policy direction
that can achieve greater consensus. It searches for workable solutions to specific problems or a range of actions that are morally permissible or acceptable to a wide range of
worldviews (Norton, 1995: 129 33). The multiple conceptions of environmental justice articulated by the Yami and Taiwanese groups in the context of nuclear waste controversies
provide support for a pluralistic account of environmental values rather than a monistic philosophical stance. A foundational
approach to ethics that requires the application of a single theory functionally equivalent to truth fails to take a variety of conflicting
moral insights into account and limits alternatives to nuclear waste management. In contrast, pragmatism represents an engagement with the

actual problems in the specific historical and social contex t. Environmental pragmatism draws upon the pragmatist philosophical and
political tradition in American thought, advocating a serious inquiry into the practical merits of moral pluralism (Light & Katz, 1996). The American philosophical school, represented mainly in the late 19th- and early
20thcentury writings of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey is marked most notably by its anti-foundational character that denies the existence of a priori or self-justifying truths and moral absolutes (Minteer
& Manning, 1999: 193). For Light (1996), there is much that we do agree on that has not been put into environmental policy or communicated to the public effectively. From the metaphilosophical perspective, what

the truth of any particular theoretical framework is not always fundamental for specific environmental
problems and the appropriateness of any one theory in a particular case is contingent on historical , cultural, social and resource conditions.
Environmental pragmatism chooses the approach that is most appropriate for purposes of environmental practice regardless of its theoretical origin
(Light, 1996: 172, 177). Considering the multiple values held by the Yami and Taiwanese groups in the nuclear waste disputes, abstract moral norms provided by
environmental ethicists do not appear to resolve the practical problems faced by the local residents on Orchid Island. Instead of asking environmental
ethicists to give up their debates about non-anthropocentric natural value, environmental pragmatism endorses a pluralism that acknowledges the
possible necessity of sometimes using the anthropocentric description of the value of nature to help support a morally responsible
policy (Light, 2004). Furthermore, the pragmatists admit that our understandings and concepts are fallible, and that experience can at any time reveal our beliefs or the meaning of an
idea as false. Environmental pragmatism recognises the importance of many diverse individuals, experiences and concepts coming together to offer insights
into actual problems in the public sphere (Parker, 1996). A growing body of research has demonstrated the validity of a pragmatic approach
to specific environmental and social issues, including the cases of policymaking for leaded gasoline (Thomson, 2003), forest resource management (Castle, 1996), animal welfare and hunting
(Light, 2004). Environmental pragmatism , representing a democratic respect for diverse public values and ethical positions regarding the environment, is relevant to the multiple
understandings of environmental justice.
environmental pragmatists agree on is that

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1NR

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Filter
They conceded the 1NC Talisse evidence which indicates that before you can evaluate the
epistemology of the aff it first needs to be rigorously tested- otherwise people just maintain prior
held dogmatic modes of thinking

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Switch Side
Switch side debate solves ALL of their offense- reading your 1AC on the negative includes for the
epistemology and performance of the aff in these spaces- switch side is the ONLY way to change
how students orient themselves towards legal structures- thats Bile

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Law Debate
Critique only highlights the need for reform
Lobel 7 THE PARADOX OF EXTRALEGAL ACTIVISM: CRITICAL LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND TRANSFORMATIVE
POLITICS, Orly Lobel, Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego, Harvard Law Review, February, 2007, 120 Harv. L. Rev.
937, Lexis

The question we must

constantly pose is how critical accounts of social reform models contribute to our ability to produce scholarship and action that will be
constructive . To critique the ability of law to produce social change is inevitably to raise the question of alternatives . In and of itself, the
exploration of the limits of law and the search for new possibilities is an insightful field of inquiry. However, the contemporary message that emerges from critical legal
consciousness analysis has often resulted in the distortion of the critical arguments themselves. This distortion denies the potential of legal change in order
to illuminate what has yet to be achieved or even imagined. Most importantly, cooptation analysis is not unique to legal reform but can be extended to any process of social
A critique of cooptation often takes an uneasy path. Critique has always been and remains not simply an intellectual exercise but a political and moral act.

action and engagement. When claims of legal cooptation are compared to possible alternative forms of activism, the false necessity embedded in the contemporary [*988] story emerges - a
story that privileges informal extralegal forms as transformative while assuming that a conservative tilt exists in formal legal paths. In the triangular conundrum of "law and social change," law
is regularly the first to be questioned, deconstructed, and then critically dismissed. The other two components of the equation - social and change - are often presumed to be immutable and
unambiguous. Understanding the limits of legal change reveals the dangers of absolute reliance on one system and the need, in any effort for social reform, to contextualize the discourse, to
avoid evasive, open-ended slogans, and to develop greater sensitivity to indirect effects and multiple courses of action. Despite

its weaknesses, however, law is an optimistic

discipline . It operates both in the present and in the future. Order without law is often the privilege of the strong . Marginalized groups have used
legal reform precisely because they lacked power. Despite limitations, these groups have often successfully secured their interests
through legislative and judicial victories. Rather than experiencing a disabling disenchantment with the legal system, we can learn
from both the successes and failures of past models, with the aim of constantly redefining the boundaries of legal reform and
making visible law's broad reach.

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Exclusion
Dialectical responsiveness is distinct from exclusion because conversations must be goal-oriented
to settle a certain question for the ballot to make sense- their offense doesnt assume game spacesIn the context of game spaces some exclusion is necessary to maintain the goal oriented focus of
answering the resolutional question
There is a distinction between argumentative and ontological exclusion
You must only consider the importance of the aff discussion in light of opposition- a failure to
adequately encourage a response deprives the emergent dialogue of complete inquiry, this short
circuits the dialogue and undermines the benefit of their education- thats Galloway

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Reasonability
Competing interps is preferable- its the most objective standard for evaluation and definitional
comparison is key to topic education.
Reasonability is arbitrary, tautological, and the crux of our arguments is that they arent
reasonable anyway

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AT Kulynych
Debate is fundamentally about skills development- it builds the skills that allow the citizenry to
research and be informed about policy decisions. It enhances democratic deliberation capacities
that are able to deal with the myriad of global existential challenges the world faces- thats
Lundberg
Goal oriented and resolutionally focused debate teaches us how to better interact with
institutions and how we orient ourselves to them- this education is unique in being able to then
help us affect material change- thats Kinsella
Their argument provides us uniqueness- proves why maintaining a space of debate that teaches
us to become better advocates is key to solving problems
Kulynych concludes neg- Goal oriented policy debate activates agency
Kulynych 97 Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation, Jessica J. Kulynych, 1997, Northeastern
Political Science

When we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative perspective, we look precisely at those moments of defiance and
disruption that bring the invisible and unimaginable into view. Although citizens were minimally successful in influencing or controlling the out come of
the policy debate and experienced a considerable lack of autonomy in their coercion into the technical debate, the goal-oriented debate within the energy commissions could be seen as a
defiant moment of performative politics. The existence of a goal-oriented debate within a technically dominated arena defied the normalizing
separation between expert policymakers and consuming citizens. Citizens momentarily recreated themselves as policymakers in a
system that defined citizens out of the policy process, thereby refusing their construction as passive clients. The disruptive potential of the
energy commissions continues to defy technical bureaucracy even while their decisions are non-binding.

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Anti- Black
T version and switch side solve this