The time has come as it does every few years where I must watch most everyone destroy and mock the thing I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand. Debate appears to most as a very simple operation of placing facts on a conveyor belt and turning it on. The facts then go down…

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There’s a nice moment in teaching, somewhere around May when the exams are nearly graded and the summer is before you where you start to think about the possibilities of next fall’s courses.  It’s a lovely time, but a dangerous one, at least it is for me. We have strict rules at our University, spurred…

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It’s hard to find a faultless conference. But the Tokyo Argumentation Conference might just be the best model of a conference that balances a critical and serious approach to teaching with respect and space for the consideration of research developments in the field.  The reason that this conference is one of my favorites is that…

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“Why do I go to conferences?” is the question on my mind right now, as it always is in the days leading up to a big conference trip. I’ve sort of (emphasis on “sort of”) gotten used to the dismissal of my papers and ideas as really weird, strange, or perhaps maybe not serious enough,…

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Just finished reading Ben Lerner’s short but good The Hatred of Poetry in which he attempts in great Burkean fashion to “create gain out of loss” by claiming poetry exists in order to show us the critical lack between Poetry, the abstract hope of transcendence and poems, those sometimes great and sometimes rancid attempts to get…

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Talking this morning with people from Student Affairs once again connected me to the classroom as a place, a topoi, a site of inquiry, and possibly the most occupied and least thought about space on campus for most people.  We suffer from an addiction to materiality. We turn all of our investigative power toward the…

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Back in Atlanta for another event that centers around talking at and to other people about complicated ideas. One month ago I was just here teaching and learning at the USU Debate Championships hosted by Morehouse College. Now I have just finished attending the Rhetoric Society of America bi-annual conference. Long story short: It was…

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At the USU national tournament held two weeks ago in Atlanta, BP debaters found themselves confronted with two motions that I believe were the first moments where debaters could have turned debate on itself as a topic. This is something that regularly and easily happens in contemporary policy debate. It cannot yet happen, and may…

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No shortage of thoughts about USU floating around the internet. For me, it was one of the best tournaments I’ve been to in a long while. No I’m not some weirdo – I too was bothered by the delays, the cut round, the wording of that motion. Even in spite of all these things it was…

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Debate Stream on YouTube is streaming CEDA Nationals live. CEDA, anachronistically stands for Cross Examination Debate Association, but the debate style is that of American policy debate with all the speed, crazy citations, and wild combination of post-structuralist theory with contemporary political discourse you could want. It’s shaping up to be a good weekend. What…

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