Three important notes about this file

-Personal Experience Good

Using personal experience does not create a confessional format—it’s an opportunity to share experience and expose disenfranchisement

Reid-Brinkley 6/24/12

(Dr. Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley, June 24, 2012, “Personalized Debate and the Difficulty of Building Coalitions”, http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/personalized-debate-and-the-difficulty-of-building-coalitions-2/)FS

You make a few assumptions about the use of personal experience in debate that I want to question. Most of the students who use personal experience in debate are not doing so to just win the round. The students of color (and their allies) that make race centric arguments are not just talking about their personal experience to win a ballot. There are way more easy ways to win a ballot than to make yourself vulnerable by discussing your personal experience. Their use of personal experience is a choice to share, to offer those who have never encountered the issues they face an opportunity to put names to the faces of real people facing real problems. Debate encourages us to remain disconnected from the subject matter and makes it easier to ignore the cries of the disenfranchised. That you assume they are asking you to engage personally just to win the debate is incorrect. Instead, they are asking you to open yourself up to honest engagement which requires that you make yourself vulnerable too. It is out of that space of vulnerability that real empathy across difference can be built. This is not about individual debate rounds, its about the very nature of the debate community. When they ask you to invest yourself personally, they are asking you to join hands and put your body on the line, just like they do every time they step foot in the hostile environment of national debate tournaments.
Inclusion of personal experience is inevitable and necessary to confront power structures, which must be explored and not merely accepted as stasis points for debate

Butler 6/25/12

(Butler, Judy, June 25, 2012, “Some Thoughts on the Role of Personal Experience and Debate”, http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/some-thoughts-on-the-role-of-personal-experience-and-debate/)FS

The question is not do we debate from our personal experiences (I have never heard a team say we personally experience oppression and you don’t so we win) but whose personal experiences do the structure of topics reflect – I would humbly suggest that they presuppose a relation to the state as a neutral, natural and normal tool of policy, that you can program in a goal and out comes an OUTCOME – not an historically AND CURRENTLY hostile institution that was anything but neutral in its subjugation of you and those who look like you – 18 to 24 year old black males know they disproportionably populate the jails as a class – their FRIENDS go to jail, it is not a statistic that they just read about – and the concomminent day to day reality of the policing of young black men that requires a great deal of real, in person contact between the security organs of the state and those young men – and not much of it is positive or feels like protection – the statistics are glaringly apparent.

Pretending debate or any policy making deliberation can be somehow separated in anything but a very surface and artificial way from ones personal experience is counterintuitive – you can acknowledge it or not – but I defy you to teach novice debaters how to debate without appealing and referring to their personal experiences

-Experts Bad

Appealing to ‘experts’ silences alternate voices, buttresses neoliberalism, and perpetuates discrimination

Kothari 05- Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, (Uma, “Authority and Expertise: The Professionalisation of International Development and the Ordering of Dissent,” Antipode//MGD)

I discuss the successful co-optation of ‘‘alternative’’ approaches to international development into the mainstream neoliberal agenda of multi-lateral and bi-lateral agencies, and argue that this is enabled by the ongoing professionalisation and technicalisation of the UK development industry. I suggest here that an increasingly technocratic and tool-kit approach to development has exacerbated the depoliticisation of development and the atheoretical perspective of much development discourse. This has been achieved by limiting the effectiveness of critical voices and contesting discourses through their conscription into neoliberal discourses and practices. I focus upon how the key figure of the development ‘‘expert’’ acts as an agent in consolidating unilinear notions of modernising progress, construed as ‘‘the only force capable of destroying archaic superstitions and relations, at whatever social, cultural and political cost’’ (Escobar 1997:86). Through this agency, ‘‘experts’’ embody the unequal relationship between the ‘‘First’’ and ‘‘Third’’ Worlds, and between donors and aid recipients, and exemplify the process through which development is located within institutionalised practices. This production of the ‘‘professional’’ development expert, identified as such not solely because of the extent and form of their knowledge but often because of who they are and where they come from, legitimises and authorises their interventions by valorising their particular technical skills and reinforcing classifications of difference between, for example, the ‘‘developed’’ and ‘‘developing’’ worlds (see Bhabha 1994).

Their appeal to experts replicates the paternalism of colonialism- establishes police as the only source of knowledge

Kothari 05- Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, (Uma, “Authority and Expertise: The Professionalisation of International Development and the Ordering of Dissent,” Antipode//MGD)

I begin with an examination of the post-war production of the development expert and the reproduction of systems of expertise and forms of authority that they articulate. To highlight the rising status and importance of the expert, I subsequently contrast the contemporary development professional with the British colonial officer, a figure who was frequently opposed to these new systems of expertise and subjectivity. Many former colonial officers who subsequently worked for the aid industry condemn post-independence development ‘‘experts’’ as self-designated professionals arguing that they possess limited knowledge and experience of the countries for which they advise, design and implement policies. This discussion exemplifies the continuities and divergences from colonialism to development and, more importantly, the trajectory from colonial rule to the neoliberal agenda and discourse of contemporary international development. The third section demonstrates the constraining effects of designating and channelling expertise and the subsequent co-optation of potentially critical discourses. This discussion focuses upon the creation of professionals and the exclusive forms of knowledge that surround the practice of participatory development—a popular approach that through its incorporation into mainstream, orthodox development has led to its widespread adoption in development policy and practice reflecting, in part, the continuing universalising project and strategies of neoliberalism (see Kothari and Minogue 2002). These refer primarily to the policies of economic reform, minimalist states, privatisation and principles of marketbased economics and the policy instruments of, for example, the World Bank and IMF’s structural adjustment programmes that enable them. But neoliberal policies further extend to, and affect, social, cultural and political issues including processes of social change and development, access to rights and justice as well as forms of individual and community dispossession (see Harvey 2003).

Reliance on experts necessarily silences the voices of minorities- leads to racism and eurocentrism

Kothari 05- Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, (Uma, “Authority and Expertise: The Professionalisation of International Development and the Ordering of Dissent,” Antipode//MGD)

Development is predicated on the assumption that some people and places are more developed than others and therefore those who are ‘‘developed’’ have the knowledge and expertise to help those who are not (Parpart 1995:221). These often unspoken assumptions are highly problematic but continue to prevail in development thinking and are embodied in the ideas and practices of the professional. The forms of expertise produced are developed in part by reasserting (colonial) dichotomies that distinguish between the ‘‘modern’’ and the ‘‘traditional’’, whereby the ‘‘traditional’’ culture, forms of social organisation, production and beliefs of the Third World are seen as outmoded and in need of being succeeded by more ‘‘modern’’, inevitably Western, attitudes and practices. As Escobar writes: Development fostered a way of conceiving of social life as a technical problem, as a matter of rational decision and management to be entrusted to that group of people—the development professionals— whose specialized knowledge allegedly qualified them for the task. Instead of seeing change as a process rooted in the interpretation of each society’s history and cultural tradition . . . these professionals sought to devise mechanisms and procedures to make societies fit a pre-existing model that embodied the structures and functions of modernity. (1997:91) Escobar (1995) also maintains that ‘‘principles of authority’’ are in operation within development discourse which involve the role of the expert who continually identifies problems, categorises and labels them and then intervenes to resolve them. Indeed, the use of these ‘‘technical assistance experts’’, as they used to be known in the 1950s, is central to most development interventions (Crewe and Harrison 1998:93) and consequently, as shown below, development schemes reflect a form of cultural imperialism founded on ideas about the ‘‘professional’’, ‘‘expert’’ and ‘‘expertise’’. Crucially, however, these are not neutral categories but are notions reconfigured through neoliberal development imaginaries. They are taken up by prevailing ideological orthodoxies contemporaneously and ideas about professionalism, for example, have been absorbed by neoliberal thought and operationalised in development practice. Furthermore, by privileging certain groups of individuals and particular forms of knowledge, they articulate a eurocentrism that is highly gendered and racialised. There is also a discursive practice in development that shapes ‘‘who can speak, from what points of view, with what authority, and according to what criteria of expertise; it sets the rules that must be followed for this or that problem, theory or object to emerge and be named, analysed, and eventually transformed into a policy or plan’’ (Escobar 1997:87). Supporting this view, Crewe and Harrison (1998) suggest that the perception of the ignorance of ‘‘local’’ people sometimes emerges out of their lack of familiarity with the latest development techniques, although these have often emerged out of Western fashions which are necessarily updated so rapidly that building expertise in them is always just beyond the reach of ‘‘local’’ development practitioners. Indeed, ‘‘experts are also able to confirm the legitimacy of their role and intervention by claiming to possess the latest and more advanced expertise’’ (Crewe and Harrison 1998:97). This superior knowledge ‘‘relies on constant reiteration and renewal of technical language, methods and orthodoxies’’ (109) and as Chambers posits, ‘‘the rate of obsolescence of development fashions and ideas has accelerated’’ (1993:1).