Reflecting on attending the National Conference in New Orleans

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Now that I’ve written a bit about the ideal model of debate that should be taught and practiced, I thought I might criticize contemporary debate teaching and practice from the same perspective, that of the Lacanian discourses. Contemporary debate practices are the university discourse, or what Lacan would later call the discourse of fake science.…

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I cannot answer this question, but I can provide the conditions by which a debate model could be judged in relation to this question. In short, I know what I want the students to be able to do after participating in a debate program. In my own program efforts, I think I have accomplished this…

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Or We Need Actual Peer Review, not this Monstrosity

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This September is finally starting to feel like fall and I’m experiencing quite a bit of nostalgia for my old debating life. The smell in the air and the quality of the light on campus make me anxious that have not booked a bus or hotel yet; that I made plans on a Saturday to…

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Attitude and Engagement at the start of the term

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A great chat I had impromptu this morning with my friend and colleague Matt about one of my rhetoric lectures that I have given over the years at Cornell University. The version we are discussing is this one from about five years ago: Even though I have several iterations of this talk available on YouTube,…

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This summer has been one of great travel and great ideas. I haven’t really been meeting my goals of doing regular videos or even regular writing, but June was a very concentrated moment for me in working through some nascent thoughts. Here’s a talk I gave with Korey Stegared-Pace from Stockholm’s Microsoft Reactor. They focus…

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The first debate event occurred over a weekend at a university. The directors of multiple debate programs met in person and online to discuss the year ahead. The first day was about “equity,” a policy of discipline necessary at competitions where fairness matters more than anything. Since the debate event is organized around the idea…

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