Tauring-Traxler,+Oskar

High School: Minneapolis South (4 yrs of debate, 2009-2013) Currently Enrolled at: University of Minnesota, Class of 2017 (2 years of debate - 1 time NDT participant) - Political Science Major, w/ a Psychology and Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature double minor I also am currently a Varsity coach at Bloomington Jefferon high school (3rd year of coaching)

Nutshell Version: I love debate. Do it how you wanna do it. My predispositions do not lead me to automatically reject, or look down upon, any style/intellectual content that you might desire to bring into the round. That said, if I find anything a debater does to be reprehensible, repugnant, offensive, malicious, or objectionable I will end the round, the team (or person) will get the lowest speaks I can assign, and the team will lose the round (regardless of whether or not both debaters were the perpetrators). That said, I have never had to take matters into my own hands to such a degree, and I hope that I continue to have such luck.

Extended Version: I love debate! I was pretty much a traditional policy debater in high school and college, so I have a lot of familiarity with policy debate. That said, since I have started coaching and through my education at the U, the arguments that I find myself most interested in tend to be of a more critical variety. My debaters are Jefferson read a variety of critical arguments, high theory and identity arguments. In school, I have been focusing on political theory, and comparative critical theory. So, I'm as down to vote on a well-constructed DA/CP strategy as your Baudrillard or Dada arguments. What I care about most, in debate, is in depth (AND COMPARATIVE) impact calculus. The problem I find most frequently in Varsity debate is not the lack of impact calculus, but more often it is that each team explains their own impacts well - but never does the next, and arguably most important, step which is to specifically compare the impact scenarios that each team is articulating and how they interact with each other, such that I have a clear way to resolve the claims being made on both sides.

In a policy round, I will default to a utilitarian lens - meaning that whoever articulates the bigger impact is who I will vote for - most often.

In a critical round, I sincerely hope that you are engaging the debate at the level of framing, because otherwise it becomes rather difficult to evaluate your critique.

T - love topicality, not as big of a fan of t-usfg because I tend to think that it is an excuse for lazy debating, but I will evaluate the round as objectively as I can.

Theory - down with theory, to make it a voter you need to articulate why it's a reason to reject the team and not just the argument

CP - down, specific is better, but it's debate

DA - disads are the best part of policy debate, as long as they are articulated with specific link claims, otherwise they become lackluster - but I will still evaluate them

K - love em, just make sure you articulate it well, I try not to fill in holes that are not explained by the debaters. One thing I find true about the way I evaluate most critique debates - and this is important - is that I am willing to interpret the critique as a disad and vote for it as long as I think that the negative proved something fundamentally wrong with the affirmative, and has a sufficiently articulated impact claim about that issue. I don't necessarily think K debates need to be a debate about competing methodologies, because I think the burden of the negative is not to prove that there is a better action out there, but simply that there is a problem with the affirmative that implicates their advocacy beyond repair (at least in the round in which I am voting for the critique). HOWEVER, if there is an alt in the 2nr and either team wins that the debate is about competing methods - then the debate is about competing methods. Ultimately, it is still about what arguments are made in the debate round, what I intend to clarify is that my default is not to stick the negative with their alternative - because honestly I find that they are often very ambiguous, incoherent, and rarely defended by the literature.

I am more than happy to address questions related to how I evaluated any specific debate round, or how I think about debate, in an email or before/after the round. Good luck!

tauringtraxler@gmail.com