Debate pedagogy’s primary contribution to the study of rhetoric and argumentation is in the realm of invention – how do we come up with and produce argumentation that both addresses the issue at hand and includes, invites, and engages the audience to consider that argumentation? Sadly, this contribution is currently ignored. I learned I have…

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Debate camp in the United States was a large mainstay for many years. It still continues, mostly in edited form, across the country. The major reason that debate camps dried up in the early 2000s was mostly due to funding. When schools no longer have the money to subsidize attendance at debating summer camps, they…

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The conference ended yesterday, and I believe it lives up to all of the hype. The papers were excellent, and so were the questions in the discussions. Serious people attend this thing, and it is a great time. There are a lot of advantages to the way this conference is scheduled that other academic conferences…

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Here are some of my thoughts after day 1: Frans van Eemeren presented the first of three keynotes, where he divided argument studies into three sections  in order to take stock of argument studies – empericism, context, and formality. Empiricism is necessary for the development of argumentation theory, however we cannot merely rely on it…

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Is this blog abandoned? No way! Just taking a bit of a long break from it after a hectic end of the spring semester. Now that summer is in full swing, I’ll be posting more regularly. This week kicks off the return as I am in Amsterdam for the International Society for the Study of…

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Policy debate’s focus on race has attracted some media attention. The Atlantic ran an article that wondered if the way that winning debaters were interrogating the question of institutional racism, or white privilege, was doing harm to debate. Not far behind, the blog Powerline argued that yes indeed, from their point of view, these changes…

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JGSDF parachute(696MI) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Sorry for the delays in posting, I’ve been very sick, and finally just getting this one out. More to come, more frequently, especially during and after the USU Nationals this weekend. I love learning something new.  Upset after losing a debate that he “shouldn’t have,” the debater comes into the…

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Power in international relations (Photo credit: Wikipedia) This recent article in Foreign Policy is about the insular nature of international relations departments, and how there are two default tracks within those departments. Some departments try to encourage more outreach or impact by indicating tenure standards that look to see if the faculty member’s work has…

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My public speaking class has not been doing a very good job with a recent assignment, and I can’t find many resources to help them out. The assignment seems easy to us – find an article that makes a claim that you think is ridiculously wrong. Prove to the audience how wrong that claim is…

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The Vienna IV seems like a competition that time forgot. It’s a competition that reaches back to European debate the way it was long before I got involved in it, to a time when the more weird or inside-joke funny the motion was, the better the tournament. These are examples of motions and procedures that…

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