Week 4: Colonialism, Road Maps, and Big Tournaments
Hello! Welcome back to my senior project blog. Holmes and Heights had major tournaments this weekend (the qualifier for the non-UDL national tournament and UDL nationals respectively), so most of my time was spent helping them prepare arguments.
At Holmes we continued preparation for this weekend’s tournament. To recap, they are usually policy debaters but decided to try and qualify to go to nationals in Public Forum debate, a shorter, newer debate event. On Monday, I spectated and flowed (took notes on) a practice round they did in class. Although I am not able to be there in person, I have been spectating what they do during their class periods through Zoom. It allows for the more advanced debaters/those with an upcoming competition to work in a smaller group and talk to me about what they need help with research-wise while the teacher works with other students in the class.
We weren’t able to get through the whole practice round since their class periods are so short, but I was able to give them feedback on some aspects of their speeches. It is somewhat difficult to adjust to new events with different speech orders, so we briefly went over what the job of each speech in a PF round is. I also reminded them of the importance of “off-time road maps”. In debate, each argument flowed on a different piece of paper. For example, if the aff and neg have 2 main points each, then the judge and debaters will each use 4 pieces of paper to take notes, one for each main argument in the round. This helps arguments and speeches stay organized. It is helpful to think of every debate as a combination of “mini” debates on each piece of paper. Before each speech, debaters state the order of the arguments they are going to go over; this is what an off-time road map is. It allows others to organize their notes/pieces of paper to follow the speech. Although there are much fewer arguments in a PF round than in a policy debate round (usually 4 main points rather than 6+), road maps are still the norm.
The next day in class, we talked a little bit more about the aff and neg strategy. They decided that they wanted to modify their neg arguments a bit. Instead of focusing on electricity costs and renewables, they instead pivoted to arguments about nuclear waste and lack of regulation. In particular, their waste argument centered on the impact that nuclear waste dumping has on indigenous land. Thus, we went over framing. Last week, I wrote about Height’s indigenous cultural appropriation aff that used structural violence framing to criticize debate’s emphasis on unrealistic extinction scenarios. I advised Holmes to use similar cards to frame their argument about indigenous land. Their second argument did have an extinction scenario, but some cards exist that say that both extinction impact analysis and discussions of structural violence are valuable and inform each other, so I pointed them to those.
I also cut some evidence about AI and nuclear energy. The evidence explained that the tech industry is facing an impending energy crisis that can be solved with domestic nuclear energy. AI is developing at unprecedented speeds and requires large amounts of energy; nuclear energy has the potential to fuel much of that technology. Those cards can be used on the affirmative, but the rest of the article (which I also cut) concluded that AI and nuclear energy are generally bad for the environment and that the current presidential administration is more likely to allow for riskier nuclear energy projects that can result in accidents.
At Heights, we mainly prepped for UDNC. The class is mostly made of underclassmen, and they have English STAAR testing next week, so while I worked with the varsity debaters, many of them were working on assignments for their English class. We worked on their negative arguments. Aside from specific arguments for individual affirmatives, the Heights team decided on running a K on the neg. Specifically, they prepped the settler colonialism K (or set col for short), which argues that some aspect of intellectual property law perpetuates settler colonialism in the US. For example, the concept of individual property over a creative work is often incompatible with Indigenous creativity that can be collaborative and communal in a way that Western law doesn’t account for. More generally, the US conceptually being a settler project is also a common argument. Generally, it is best to read an argument for your critique that is as specific to the affirmative as possible. Otherwise, the affirmative can argue that the K is not a criticism of the aff itself, but rather of something independent of the aff that exists regardless of whether the aff passes or not. The aff only has to defend the policy it advocates for, and thus only has to prove that the policy is not problematic, not all government action.
To aid in the endeavor of finding specific set col arguments, I began to look through the wikis of teams that often run set col. Most good teams “open source” or post all the evidence that they use in debates, so I was able to find evidence that was already cut. Generally, it’s acceptable to read cards that aren’t cut by you or someone you know, since some schools have 50+ debaters and private coaches that cut cards, while others have only 2 debaters; open-sourcing evidence is a way to increase competitive equity and access to research. It’s still expected debaters have read the whole piece of evidence and understand it.
To move further towards producing my final project, aside from continuing to note observations I make while interacting with debaters at both schools, I’ve begun to write out some of the questions I want to ask them to help me write my final paper. I want to gain insight into how debaters view the activity, so I will be asking them questions about their thoughts on how it changes their worldview and their performance in other classes, what they think of the jargon, how they learned it, how comfortable they are with it, etc.
Aside from that, I want to leave you all with something that made me smile this week. There is a bit of a running joke in the debate community that it doesn’t matter how many rounds you win or lose or how good or bad you are, you will end your debate career with a loss. Debate tournaments have a set number of guaranteed preliminary rounds, and winning a certain number of them means dancing to elimination (”elim”) rounds (octafinals, quarterfinals, semifinals, finals, etc.). Losing an elim round means the team is out of the tournament. At any debater’s very last tournament in their last year of high school or college, they very likely will “break” (make it to elimination rounds) and then get eliminated along the way. The exceptions are winning finals and winning your last preliminary round but not breaking. Although the Heights team did not break, they did win their last preliminary round, making them part of a very small group of debaters that got to end their career on a high note, something I was very happy to hear about.