The Project?

Has anyone ever encountered a project debater in LD? It seems like the position is more popular in policy because of their greater acceptance of pre-fiat arguments than in LD. Anyone know what arguments are usually run in project cases? How is it structurally different? Do you have to be a black inner-city kid to run it?

Last season, a debater from Oklahoma (Sean Wynn) ran his project at a few tournaments. I never personally encountered it, but it certainly was a legend.

Alex Bennett wrote:Has anyone ever encountered a project debater in LD? It seems like the position is more popular in policy because of their greater acceptance of pre-fiat arguments than in LD. Anyone know what arguments are usually run in project cases? How is it structurally different? Do you have to be a black inner-city kid to run it?

Well the bigger issue with the project isn't that it's pre-fiat, but rather that they will openly admit to not being topical on the aff. Anyone can run it, but knowing that you're from Westlake HS in TX, I'm gonna say that you prolly shouldn't be running it. Nothing personal, but I'm going to take a guess and say that you aren't the recipient of constant discrimination and you're not a minority that is not only underrepresented in an activity but is also potentially put at a structural disadvantage because of economic/behavioral pseudo-requirements for the activity.

The project can be run in many different styles. Townson on the College Circuit talks about a Black Aesthetic and models themselves after Malcolm X (ie confrontational, accusatory, etc.). The HS team in the movie "resolved" (long beach something or other) based their project on the works of Paulo Friere who criticizes the "banking model" of education (btw if you're confused by anything I'm referencing, cross-x.com and wikipedia are your friends). Project teams rarely embrace the topic on the aff (although next year's policy topic offers a unique opportunity for a project-style aff that would actually be topical). I'm sure some have run the project as more of a statism argument, some teams use hip-hop (either pre-recorded/not by them or live) or spoken word, and I think Louisville (who really made the project known throughout the community) talked about how to increase participation.

To go more to the heart of the argument (ie discrimination/inherent disadvantage based on where i live/go to school), these arguments are made all the time (Cockroft's epic apple valley bad arg in quarters of toc comes to mind). They're really just proposing a different framework for the judge to use to determine a winner/what should or should not be included in debate. For the most part, it's a couple years off at a minimum in LD (College Policy is the testing grounds of debate, HS Policy copies them, we copy HS Policy, and PF copies the super-simplified versions of what we copied from Policy and tries to make them seem rational) since policy debate is really still figuring out what the community consensus is on the legitimacy of project teams. You probably don't have to worry about it coming into LD before you graduate.

In terms of general answers to it:

1. doesn't solve for increased participation - adopting their style of debate generally would just lead to minorities from poorer communities becoming the majority in debate while excluding others.

2. Even if debate is exclusionary, that doesn't mean it's bad - sports are exclusionary towards unathletic nerds, dance teams of any sort are exclusive to people who have rythym and can dance, math team is exclusionary towards people who don't like to study, etc. Debate is exclusive to people who can think critically, be word economical, debate both sides of an issue, and speak fast. Anyone can try debate, but you won't be good unless you have the skillset that is inherent to debate (this would be a sick answer against teams that perform hip-hop/spoken word/poetry as part of their advocacy)

3. alt doesn't solve - Townson was in outrounds of CEDA Nationals and in one of the most heated moments in debate history, Bill Shanahan mooned them. No one really cared that Townson was arguing about racism, they were just intrigued/disgusted that Shanahan dropped his pants in the room - proves even when project teams get major publicity, no one cares enough to do something about it. Also, teams have been running this style of argumentation for years and nothing's really happened except people now carry answers to it/micropolitics.

4. Micropolitics bad - you prolly have this ev somewhere, and it's responsive.


These ain't spectacular answers, nor is this a complete analysis of project debate. But it's a decent starting place.

Oh, if you want to be really ballsy, engage their advocacy. Don't argue it doesn't belong in debate/doesn't matter in terms of the ballot. If you think you can handle them on their level, go for it.

poneill wrote:

Alex Bennett wrote:Has anyone ever encountered a project debater in LD? It seems like the position is more popular in policy because of their greater acceptance of pre-fiat arguments than in LD. Anyone know what arguments are usually run in project cases? How is it structurally different? Do you have to be a black inner-city kid to run it?

Well the bigger issue with the project isn't that it's pre-fiat, but rather that they will openly admit to not being topical on the aff. Anyone can run it, but knowing that you're from Westlake HS in TX, I'm gonna say that you prolly shouldn't be running it. Nothing personal, but I'm going to take a guess and say that you aren't the recipient of constant discrimination and you're not a minority that is not only underrepresented in an activity but is also potentially put at a structural disadvantage because of economic/behavioral pseudo-requirements for the activity.

The project can be run in many different styles. Townson on the College Circuit talks about a Black Aesthetic and models themselves after Malcolm X (ie confrontational, accusatory, etc.). The HS team in the movie "resolved" (long beach something or other) based their project on the works of Paulo Friere who criticizes the "banking model" of education (btw if you're confused by anything I'm referencing, cross-x.com and wikipedia are your friends). Project teams rarely embrace the topic on the aff (although next year's policy topic offers a unique opportunity for a project-style aff that would actually be topical). I'm sure some have run the project as more of a statism argument, some teams use hip-hop (either pre-recorded/not by them or live) or spoken word, and I think Louisville (who really made the project known throughout the community) talked about how to increase participation.

To go more to the heart of the argument (ie discrimination/inherent disadvantage based on where i live/go to school), these arguments are made all the time (Cockroft's epic apple valley bad arg in quarters of toc comes to mind). They're really just proposing a different framework for the judge to use to determine a winner/what should or should not be included in debate. For the most part, it's a couple years off at a minimum in LD (College Policy is the testing grounds of debate, HS Policy copies them, we copy HS Policy, and PF copies the super-simplified versions of what we copied from Policy and tries to make them seem rational) since policy debate is really still figuring out what the community consensus is on the legitimacy of project teams. You probably don't have to worry about it coming into LD before you graduate.

In terms of general answers to it:

1. doesn't solve for increased participation - adopting their style of debate generally would just lead to minorities from poorer communities becoming the majority in debate while excluding others.

2. Even if debate is exclusionary, that doesn't mean it's bad - sports are exclusionary towards unathletic nerds, dance teams of any sort are exclusive to people who have rythym and can dance, math team is exclusionary towards people who don't like to study, etc. Debate is exclusive to people who can think critically, be word economical, debate both sides of an issue, and speak fast. Anyone can try debate, but you won't be good unless you have the skillset that is inherent to debate (this would be a sick answer against teams that perform hip-hop/spoken word/poetry as part of their advocacy)

3. alt doesn't solve - Townson was in outrounds of CEDA Nationals and in one of the most heated moments in debate history, Bill Shanahan mooned them. No one really cared that Townson was arguing about racism, they were just intrigued/disgusted that Shanahan dropped his pants in the room - proves even when project teams get major publicity, no one cares enough to do something about it. Also, teams have been running this style of argumentation for years and nothing's really happened except people now carry answers to it/micropolitics.

4. Micropolitics bad - you prolly have this ev somewhere, and it's responsive.


These ain't spectacular answers, nor is this a complete analysis of project debate. But it's a decent starting place.

Oh, if you want to be really ballsy, engage their advocacy. Don't argue it doesn't belong in debate/doesn't matter in terms of the ballot. If you think you can handle them on their level, go for it.

Yeah, I'm not actually considering running it except as a joke. I have this strange fascination with arguments that are usually rejected by the debate community (Irony, Micropolitics, Performance) as not being strategic and then seeing it there's any way to redeem such a position.

It seems though that the project only works when debate is conceived as a performance and not a search for the truth. While I do think that warrants for such a paradigm exist, its harder to conceptualize the round in such a way to guarantee a ballot.

Alex Bennett wrote:

Yeah, I'm not actually considering running it except as a joke. I have this strange fascination with arguments that are usually rejected by the debate community (Irony, Micropolitics, Performance) as not being strategic and then seeing it there's any way to redeem such a position.

It seems though that the project only works when debate is conceived as a performance and not a search for the truth. While I do think that warrants for such a paradigm exist, its harder to conceptualize the round in such a way to guarantee a ballot.

Yeah, even in policy this is an issue that they face. The biggest thing you have to overcome is why your performance justifies a ballot. If you watch the documentary resolved, the project team profiled in this film does a pretty good job at this