Jouya,+Sohail

Director of Debate at University Academy (DEBATE – Kansas City) Coach at Kansas City Kansas Community College
 * __ AFFILIATIONS __** :

- I appreciate adaptation to my preferences but don’t do anything that would make you uncomfortable. Never feel obligated to compete in a manner inhibits your ability to be effective. My promise to you will be that I will keep an open mind and assess whatever you chose. **In short: do you.**
 * __ BIG PICTURE __**

- **Truth** > Tech, but I recognize that debate is a game. This doesn’t mean I believe judges should intervene on the basis of reasonability in every instance, what it does mean is that embedded clash between opposed positions (the “nexus question” of the round) is of more importance than blippy technical oversights between certain sheets of paper.

- As a coach of a UDL school where many of my debaters make arguments centred on their identity, **diversity** is a genuine concern. It may play a factor in how I evaluate a round, particularly in debates regarding what’s “best” for the community/debate space.


 * Do you and I’ll do my best to evaluate it but I’m not a tabula rasa and the dogma of debate has me to believe the following. I have put a lot of time and thought into this while attempting to be parsimonious, if you are serious about winning my ballot a careful read would prove to serve you well: **

- **All speech acts are performances**, consequently debaters should defend their performances including the advocacy, evidence, arguments/positions, interpretations, and representations of said speech acts.
 * __ FORM __**

- “Are you cool with **speed**?” In short: **yes**. But smart and slow always beats fast and dumb. I have absolutely no preference on rate of delivery, though I will say it might be smart to slow down a bit on really long tags, advocacy texts, or on overviews that have really nuanced descriptions of the round. My belief is that **speed is typically good** for debate but please remember that spreading’s true measure is contingent on the amount of arguments that are required to be answered by the other team.

- **Ethos:** I used to never really think this mattered at all. To a large degree, it still doesn’t considering I’m unabashedly very flowcentric but I tend to give high speaker points to debaters who performatively express mastery knowledge of the subjects discussed, ability to exercise roundvision, assertiveness, and swag. I’m personally quite annoyed at many judges who insert a “decorum” clause in their philosophy regarding the “need for civility.” These notions are quite loaded and make broad assumptions that ought to be unpacked and questioned, particularly if the deployment of this concern consistently villainizes certain subsets of debaters. I certainly believe debaters should show mutual concern for each other’s well being and ought to avoid condescension or physical/rhetorical violence – but I do not conflate this with respectability politics. Arguments are arguments and deserved to be listened/responded to regardless of mainstream notions of digestibility or the personal palate of an opposing team. In all honesty, some humour, shade, and disses have a place in rounds so long as they aren’t too terribly mean-spirited. Please don’t misinterpret this as a call to be malicious for the sake of being cruel.

- **Holistic Approaches**: the 2AR/2NR should be largely concerned with two things: 1) providing framing of the round so as make an evaluation of impacts and the like discernible 2) descriptively instruct me on how to make my decision Overviews have the potential for great explanatory power, use that time and tactic wisely.

While I put form first, I am of the maxim that “form follows function” – I contend that the reverse would merely produce an aesthetic, a poor formula for hypothesis testing in an intellectually rigorous and competitive activity. In summation: **you need to make an argument and defend it.**

- **The Affirmative ought to be responsive to the topic**. This is a pinnacle of my paradigm that is quite broad and includes teams who seek to engage in resistance to the proximate structures that frame the topic. Conversely, this also implicates teams that prioritize social justice - debaters utilizing methodological strategies for best resistance ought to consider their relationship to the topic. Policy-oriented teams may read that last sentence with glee and K folks may think this is strike-worthy…chill. I do not prescribe to the notion that to be topical is synonymous with being resolutional.
 * __ FUNCTION __**

- **The Negative’s ground is rooted in the performance of the Affirmative as well as anything based in the resolution.** It’s that simple; engage the 1AC if at all possible.

- I view rounds in an **offense/defense** lens. Many colleagues are contesting the utility of this approach as productive in certain kinds of debate and I’m ruminating about this (see: “Thoughts on Competition”) but I don’t believe this to be a “plan focus” theory and I default to the notion that my decisions require a forced choice between competing performances.

- **I will vote on Framework**. That means I will vote for the team running the position based on their interpretation, but it also means I’ll vote on offensive responses to the argument. Vindicating an alternative framework is a necessary skill and one that should be possessed by kritikal teams - justifying your form of knowledge production as beneficial in these settings matter.

**Framework appeals effectively consist of a normative claim of how debate ought to function**. The interpretation should be prescriptive; if you are not comfortable with what the world of debate would look like if your interpretation were universally applied, then you have a bad interpretation. The impact to your argument ought to be derived from your interpretation (yes, I’ve given RFDs where this needed to be said). Furthermore, **Topical Version of the Affirmative must specifically explain how the impacts of the 1AC can be advanced** with the hypothetical TVA, it might be in your best interest to provide a text or point to a few cases that achieve that end. This is especially true if you want to go for external impacts that the 1AC can’t achieve – but all of this is contingent on a cogent explanation as to why //order// precedes/is the internal link to //justice//.

- I am pretty comfortable judging Clash of Civilization debates.

-**Presumption is always an option**. In my estimation the 2NR may go for Counterplan OR a Kritik while also giving the judge the option of the status quo. Call it “hypo-testing” or whatever but I believe a rational decision-making paradigm doesn’t doom me to make a single decision between two advocacies, especially when the current status of things is preferable to both. I will not “judge kick” for you, the 2NR should explain an “even if” route to victory via presumption to allow the 2AR to respond.

“But what about when presumption flips Affirmative?” I haven’t been in too many of those and if this is a claim that is established prior to the 2NR I guess I could see voting in favour of an Affirmative on presumption.

- **Role of the Ballots ought to invariably allow the 1AC/1NC to be contestable and provide substantial ground to each team**. Many teams will make their ROBs self-serving at best, or at worse, tautological. If they fail to equally distribute ground, they are merely impact framing contentions that may not function well without a good warrant. A good ROB can effectively answer a lot of framework gripes regarding the Affirmative’s affirmation of an unfalsifiable truth claim.

- **Framing is the job of the debaters**. Epistemology first? Ontology? Sure, but why? Where does performance come into play – should I prioritize a performative disad above the “substance” of a position? Overall sheets of paper in the round? These are questions debaters must grapple with and preferably the earlier in the round the better.

- **Analytics that are logically consistent, well warranted and answer the heart of any argument are weighed in high-esteem.** This is especially true if it’s responsive to any combinations of bad argument/evidence.

- My threshold for theory is not particularly high. **It’s what you justify, not necessarily what you do**. I typically default to **competing interpretations, this can be complicated by a team that is able to articulate what reasonability means in the context of the round**, otherwise I feel like its interventionist of me to decode what “reasonable” represents. The same is true to a lesser extent with the voters as well. Rattling off “fairness and education” as loaded concepts that I should just know has a low threshold if the other team can explain the significance of a counter-voter or a standard that controls the internal link into your impact. I think theory should be strategic and I very much enjoy a good theory debate. Multiple topicality and specification is not strategic, it is desperate.

- **I like conditionality** probably more so than other judges. As a young’n I got away with a lot of, probably, abusive Negative strategies that relied on conditionality to the maximum (think “multiple worlds and presumption in the 2NR”) mostly because many teams were never particularly good at explaining why this was a problem. If you’re able to do so, great – just don’t expect me to do much of that work for you. I don’t find it particularly difficult for a 2AR to make an objection about how that is bad for debate.

Furthermore, I tend to believe the 1NC has the right to test the 1AC from multiple positions.

Thus, Framework along with Cap K or some other kritik is not a functional double turn. The 1NC doesn’t need to be ideologically consistent. However, I have been persuaded in several method debates that there is a performative disadvantage that can be levied against speech acts that are incongruent and self-defeating.

- **Probability is the most crucial components of impact calculus with disadvantages**. Tradeoffs ought to have a high risk of happening and that question often controls the direction of uniqueness while also accessing the severity of the impact (magnitude).

- Counterplan debates can often get tricky, particularly if they’re PICs. Maybe I’m too simplistic here, but I don’t understand why Affirmatives don’t sit on their solvency deficit claims more. Compartmentalizing why portions of the Affirmative are key can win rounds against CPs. I think this is especially true because I view the Counterplan’s ability to solve the Affirmative to be an opportunity cost with its competitiveness. Take advantage of this “double bind.”

- **Case arguments are incredibly underutilized** and the dirty little secret here is that I kind of like them. I’m not particularly sentimental for the “good ol’ days” where case debate was the only real option for Negatives (mostly because I was never alive in that era), but I have to admit that debates centred on case are kind of cute and make my chest feel all fuzzy with a nostalgia that I never experienced– kind of like when a racist puts on a cardigan, eats a Werther’s Original, and watches //Mad Men// uncritically.

I know enough to know that **kritiks are not monolithic**. I am partial to topic-grounded kritiks and in all reality I find them to be part of a typical decision-making calculus. Few things frustrate me more than teams who utilize a kritik/answer a kritik in a homogenizing fashion. Not every K requires the ballot as a tool, not every K looks to have an external impact either in the debate community or the world writ larger, not every K criticizes in the same fashion. I suggest teams find out what they are and stick to it, I also think teams should listen and be specifically responsive to the argument they hear rather rely on a base notion of what the genre of argument implies. The best way to conceptualize these arguments is to think of “kritik” as a verb (to criticize) rather than a noun (a static demonstrative position).
 * __ KRITIKAL DEBATE __**

It is no secret that I love many kritiks but deep in every K hack’s heart is revered space that admires teams that cut through the noise and simply wave a big stick and impact turn things, unabashedly defending conventional thought. If you do this well there’s a good chance you can win my ballot. If pure agonism is not your preferred tactic, that’s fine but make sure your post-modern offense onto kritiks can be easily extrapolated into a 1AR in a fashion that makes sense.

In many ways, I believe there’s more tension between Identity and Post-Modernism teams then there are with either of them and Policy debaters. That being said, I think the Eurotrash K positions ought to proceed with caution against arguments centred on Identity – it may not be a smart to contend that they ought to embrace their suffering or claim that they are responsible for a polemical construction of identity that replicates the violence they experience (don’t victim blame).

There’s a lot of talk about what is or isn’t competition and what competition ought to look like in specific types of debate – thus far I am not of the belief that different methods of debate require a different rubric for evaluation. While much discussion as been given to “Competition by Comparison” I very much subscribe to **Competing Methodologies**. What I’ve learned in having these conversations is that this convention means different things to different people and can change in different settings in front of different arguments. For me, I try to keep it consistent and compatible with an offense/defense heuristic: competing methodologies **requires an Affirmative focus where the Negative requires an independent reason to reject the Affirmative.** In this sense, **competition necessitates a link**. This keeps artificial competition at bay via permutations, an affirmative right regardless of the presence of a plan text.
 * __ THOUGHTS ON COMPETITION __**

**Permutations are merely tests of mutual exclusivity.** They do not solve and they are not a shadowy third advocacy for me to evaluate. I naturally will view permutations more as a contestation of linkage – **and thus, terminal defense** to a counterplan or kritik -- than a question of combining texts/advocacies into a solvency mechanism. If you characterize these as solvency mechanisms rather than a litmus test of exclusivity, you ought to anticipate offense to the permutation (and even theory objections to the permutation) to be weighed against your “net-benefits”. This is your warning to not be shocked if I'm extrapolating a much different theoretical understanding of a permutation if you go 5/6 minutes for it in the 2AR. Even in method debates where a permutation contends both methods can work in tandem, there is no solvency – in these instances net-benefits function to shield you from links (the only true “net benefit” is the Affirmative). An exception to this scenario is “Perm do the Affirmative” where the 1AC tacitly subsumes the 1NC’s alternative; here there may be an offensive link turn to the K resulting in independent reasons to vote for the 1AC.