Speak Some Shit AC

NarrativeYou are a teenager and have cancer . You undergo a year of chemotherapy and after a brief return to normal life, you have a relapse. Your physician says that chemotherapy and radiation therapy could be tried, but a bone marrow transplant (BMT) is your only chance of a real cure. He tells you and your parents that you could die as a result of complications from the transplant, but without it you would only be expected to live one year . You and your family discuss the alternatives and decide to have the transplant. You ask what will happen if the BMT fails, but both your physician and your family tell you that right now you must fight to get better and not think negative thoughts. You do not ask any more questions. The doctor gives your parents the consent form to read over. You look at it as well, but only your parents may sign it. The preparation necessary before the transplant is worse than you had imagined it would be and you experience painful side effects. You also become fearful because some BMT patients, whom you've heard about through the hospital's patient/family grapevine,

went to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) this month and never came back. Still, you do not ask your family if these patients died and neither your family nor your doctor ever asks you if you have thought about what you would want done if you were sick enough to need intensive care. One week after the BMT , before the new marrow has even taken hold in your body, you start to have trouble breathing . Over the next day it gets harder to breathe and becomes difficult to speak more than two words at a time. You are frightened because you feel so hungry for air . As your family watches you struggle to breathe, they become frightened as well. A doctor tells you that you will need help from a ventilator soon and for this they must transfer you to the PICU. You ask them please, do not send you to the PICU, because you do not want to die there . You and your parents look to your doctor, who is obviously worried. Your parents ask the doctor to save you; he says that the ventilator is your only chance. You are transferred to the PICU and are put into a deep sleep , as the doctor promised, but eventually you wake up enough to realize that your fingers cannot move and your eyelids will not

open. You cannot speak, and even a grimace is impossible. You are groggy most of the time. The voices of family members, of certain nurses that you come to recognize, occasional music, a light stroking on your arm-these become the highlights of your existence. Time passes slowly and

you lose track of the days. After some weeks you notice that you are more awake than before, yet you still cannot move . Nobody told you that you might be awake but unable to move a muscle. They had promised that you would be asleep. The air goes into your lungs with so much force that you feel like your lungs are going to burst , and you are choking on the tube in your windpipe. The ulcerations in your mouth and throat hurt continuously . Even worse than the pain is the dawning realization that you are dying. You want to ask for more medicine to keep your pain and fear under better control. You want to say goodbye to your family and go home to die, but you cannot move or speak at all. You hear the members of your family whisper to each other and they tell you how much they love you, but you cannot respond to them. You die in the PICU

FrameworkNormative debate in the form of absolutist ethics allow for privileged debaters to never have to deal with the practical implications of their arguments and performances. VincentVincent, Christopher J. "Re-Conceptualizing Our Performances: Accountability in Lincoln-Douglas Debate." VBriefly. N.p., 26 Oct. 2013. Web. <http://vbriefly.com/2013/10/26/201310re-conceptualizing-our-performances-accountability-in-lincoln-douglas-debate/>.

We generate universal theories and assume they can be applied to anyone. These abstractions assume a conception of universality that never intended to account for the African American experience. This drowns out the perspectives of students of color that are historically excluded

from the conversation. Normativity becomes a privilege that historically students of color do not get to access because of the way we discuss things. These same philosophical texts have served as a cornerstone in Lincoln Douglas and in turn have been used to justify exclusion. That is why it is easy for a white student to

make claims that we do not know whether racism is bad, or even question whether oppression is bad, since after all it is just another argument on the flow. They never have to deal with the practical implications of their discourse. These become manifestations of privilege in the debate space because for many students of color, who have to go back to their communities, they still have to deal with the daily acts of racism and violence inflicted upon their homes, communities, and cultures. To

question or even make a starting point question for the debate to be about justifying why racism is bad ignores the reality of the bodies present in the room. Our justification of western philosophy has allowed us to remain disconnected from reality. Philosophy, as Mills argues, justifies particular way of knowing under free and rational thought, through a universal way of knowing, believing, and discussing. We have embedded white ways of knowing as normative without ever challenging how it replicates oppressive structures. The question then becomes how does our

discourse justify what we believe? For many debaters it is the gaming aspect of debate that allows us to assume that our speech can be disconnected from the speech act. The speech can be defined as the arguments that are placed on the flow, and is evaluated in the context of what is the most logical and rational argument to win the round. The critical distinction is the speech act, which is the performance of that discourse. It’s not what you say, but what you justify. Understanding the speech act requires critically

assessing the ramifications of the debaters discourse. Debate is in and of itself a performance. To claim that it is not is to be divorced from the reality of what we do. We must evaluate what a debaters performance does and justifies. For white debaters it is easy to view the discourse as detached

from the body. For those with privilege in debate , they are never forced to have their performance attached to them but instead their arguments are viewed as words on paper. They are taught to separate themselves from any ideologies and beliefs, and feel that there is no consequence to what they say. It becomes the way in which they justify what is deemed as “rational” and “logical” thought. The argument sounds like it will be competitive so it is read but it is deemed

as just an argument. Judges evaluate this as just a speech. This becomes what I deem as a performance by the body, rather than a performance of the body.

The Role of the Judge is to disrupt the practice of judging on flow exclusively, and instead evaluate the impacts of the speech act itself, in an effort to disrupt normative approaches to LD. This means we evaluate the pre-fiat in round impacts to our speech acts. Vincent 2Vincent, Christopher J. "Re-Conceptualizing Our Performances: Accountability in Lincoln-Douglas Debate." VBriefly. N.p., 26 Oct. 2013. Web. <http://vbriefly.com/2013/10/26/201310re-conceptualizing-our-performances-accountability-in-lincoln-douglas-debate/>.

As a community we must re-conceptualize this distinction the performance by the body and of the body by re-evaluating the role of the speech and the speech act. It is no longer enough for judges to vote off of the flow anymore. Students of color are being held to a higher threshold to better articulate why racism is bad, which is the problem in a space that we deem to be educational. It is here where I shift my focus to a solution. Debaters must be held

accountable for the words they say in the round. We should no longer evaluate the speech. Instead we must begin to evaluate the speech act itself. Debaters must be held accountable for more than winning the debate. They must be held accountable for the implications of that speech. As educators and adjudicators in the debate space we also have an ethical obligation to foster an atmosphere of education. It is not enough for judges to offer predispositions suggesting that they do not endorse racist, sexist, homophobic discourse, or justify why they do not hold that belief, and still offer a rational reason why they voted

for it. Judges have become complacent in voting on the discourse, if the other debater does not provide a clear enough role of the ballot framing, or does not articulate well enough why the racist discourse should be rejected. Judges must be willing to foster a learning atmosphere by

holding debaters accountable for what they say in the round. They must be willing to vote against a debater if they endorse racist discourse. They must be willing to disrupt the process of the flow for the purpose of embracing that teachable moment. The speech must be connected to the speech act. We must view the entire debate as a performance of the body, instead of the argument solely on the flow . Likewise, judges must be held accountable for what they vote for in the debate space. If a judge is comfortable enough to vote for discourse that is racist, sexist, or homophobic, they must also be prepared to defend their actions. We as

a community do not live in a vacuum and do not live isolated from the larger society. That means that judges must defend their actions to the debaters, their coaches, and to the other judges in the room if it is a panel. Students of color should not have the burden of articulating why racist discourse must be rejected, but should have the assurance that the educator with the ballot will protect them in those moments.

Medical ethics cannot be determined from moral absolutes, and must be determined practically on a case by case basis, determined by the needs of a patient. MontgomeryMontgomery, Kathryn. "How Doctors Think: Clinical Judgment and the Practice of Medicine." Oxford University Press (2006): n. pag. Web. <http://www.ivory-ivory.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/how_doctors_think.pdf>.

It is not that medicine and moral inquiry have no use for certainty or “fixed and invariable answers”: nothing would make physicians or moral reasoners happier. But as objects of knowledge, health and morals differ from physical phenomena, about which certainty is available. For moral questions, as for questions about the care of patients, absolute or invariant answers are unobtainable . For this reason, scientific reasoning, or episteme, is inappropriate in fields like medicine, ethics, law, or meteorology, disciplines that are interpretive because they are radically uncertain. Episteme belongs, instead, to stable physical phenomena that can be known through necessary and invariant laws. Medicine and morals (like navigation, law, and meteorology) call for phronesis or practical reasoning, the ability to determine the best action to take in particular circumstances that cannot be distilled into universally applicable solutions . While scientific reasoning has precision and replicability as its goals, practical

reasoning seeks the best answers possible under the circumstances. It enables the reasoner to distinguish, in a given situation, the better choice from the worse. The former is law-like and generalizable to every similar instance, while the latter is inescapably particular and interpretable, applicable to only a small set of more richly detailed circumstances.

My reading of the narrative gives us an opportunity to stand with the patient in order to determine the best action. Thus my reading is an a-priori necessity for the act of ethics. JonesJones, Anne Hudson. “Narrative in Medical Ethics.” BMJ : British Medical Journal 318.7178 (1999): 253–256. Print. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1114730/

Hunter’s work on the narrative structure of medical knowledge has helped clarify some of the mental processes involved in medical education and practice.20 Unlike analytic philosophers who are trained to work deductively from general principles to the particular case, doctors are trained to work in the opposite direction, beginning with the particular case and then seeking general medical principles that might apply . Hunter argues that this practice is not inductive but abductive, as doctors tack back and forth between a particular case and the generalised

realm of scientific knowledge.20,23,24 This process is similar to the ethical practice of casuistry, which was revived and rehabilitated in an influential book by Jonsen and Toulmin.25 In casuistry, ethical examination begins with the features of a particular case, then seeks to recall similar paradigm cases that may shed enlightenment about the best resolution for the case at hand. Casuistry is, arguably, one form of narrative ethics. But narrative ethics has underlying assumptions that casuistry does

not share. Foremost among them is a focus on the patient as narrator of his or her own story, including the ethical choices that belong to that story. Brody has described a narrative ethics in which the doctor must work as coauthor with the patient to construct a joint narrative of illness and medical care.26 This coauthoring involves more than simply recognising the patient’s autonomy as author. Brody calls it a relational ethic.26 Kleinman27 and Frank28have written about it from differing perspectives, the doctor’s and the patient’s respectively, but both agree that

such a narrative practice is relational and requires the doctor to be an empathic witness of the patient’s suffering. In an ideal form, narrative ethics recognises the primacy of the patient’s story 29 but encourages multiple voices to be heard and multiple stories to be brought forth by those whose lives will be involved in the resolution of a

case.30,31 Patient, doctor, family, nurse, friend, and social worker, for example, may all share their stories in a dialogical chorus32 that can offer the best chance of respecting all the persons involved in a case.33

Narratives are not just important in academic discussion. They influence our public opinion on important medical ethics issues. This proves that the aff spills over. Jones 2Jones, Anne Hudson. “Narrative in Medical Ethics.” BMJ : British Medical Journal 318.7178 (1999): 253–256. Print.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1114730/

Patients and their family members and friends are not the only ones who write important narratives of witness. By writing narratives from their personal experiences, doctors and

other healthcare professionals also can have a powerful effect on the public discussion of an ethical issue . In the United States, for example, it was doctors’ narratives of assisting patients’ suicides that broke through decades of professional silence and opened debate about this issue in American medical journals. In 1982, after Selzer published his fictional story “Mercy,”3 about a doctor’s unsuccessful attempt to help a terminally ill patient die by giving him an overdose of morphine, he received hate mail. A few years later,

when the journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published “It’s over, Debbie, ” 16 an anonymous, presumably

factual account by a doctor who had deliberately given a patient who was terminally ill with cancer an overdose of analgesics to speed her death, a Cook County state’s attorney took the journal’s editor to court to try to force him to reveal the author’s identity . The effort was unsuccessful. And a few years later, after Quill published an

eloquently written account of prescribing drugs for a patient who, he knew, intended to use them to commit suicide,17he was brought before a grand jury but was not indicted. Despite the general legal prohibition against physician assisted suicide in the United

States, exemplified by the legal action taken against JAMA and Quill, doctors’ narratives have helped compel re-examination of this controversial ethical issue.

Contention OneMarginalizing and silencing bodies in academic spaces like debate reinstitutionalizes violent hierarchies of oppression. Brown and StregaBrown, L., & Strega, S. (2005). Introduction: Transgressive Possibilities. In Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-Oppressive Approaches. Toronto, Ontario: Canadian Scholars' Press/Women's Press.

Traditional social science research, whatever its intentions, has silenced and distorted the experiences of those on the margins , taking a deficit-informed approach to explaining their lives and

experiences. The histories, experiences, cultures, and languages (the “ways of knowing”) of those on the margins have historically been devalued, misinterpreted, and omitted in the academy, where , as noted, only certain conceptualizations of information are counted as “valid” (objective and therefore authoritative) knowledge. In this process, many ways of knowing, which Foucault referred to as

“subjugated knowledges” (1980), have been excluded or trivialized The search for research methodologies that are capable of grasping the messy complexities of people’s lives, especially the lives of those on the margins, involves reclaiming these knowledges while simultaneously moving away from the binary conceptualizations fostered under existing research paradigms. The theoretical pieces and exemplars in this book focus on racialized, gendered, differently abled, and classed experiences from a strengths-based focus and as sources of strength. Thus, it

offers support for marginalized researchers attempting to cleave to the truth of their own experience. It also offers research ideas for those who are not from the margins, or who occupy both marginal and privileged spaces, but who want to engage in research practices from a position of

solidarity with the marginalized. Practitioners are being encouraged to embrace research as a core feature of practice. As previously noted, in social work at least there is strong support in many quarters for a move to “evidence based practice” that reinscribes traditional positivist notions of how knowledge should be created and assessed, in which what constitutes “evidence” is understood securely within a positivist/Enlightenment (White, heterosexual, patriarchal) framework. We suggest that it is no accident that it is particularly the practice professions that are being pushed in this direction. As professions historically and currently

dominated by women, they have long struggled with and for issues of legitimacy. As female-dominated professions and as professions that work with those on the margins, we have been tempted (and have at times in the past) taken the position of “proving” ourselves by subjecting ourselves as well as our research methodologies and processes to standards of legitimacy that are ultimately not in our own interests. Now we have a chance to step into the research space that has been opened up by those on the margins. In acknowledging that previous e fforts to develop a critical social science have largely failed to contribute to anti-oppressive practice or policy making, we must ask different questions about how to construct and conduct our inquiries. This book is therefore for research practitioners in search of transgressive possibility

This is used to justify genocide. Absolon and WilletAbsolon, K., & Willett, C. (2005). Putting Ourselves Forward: Location in Aboriginal Research. In Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-Oppressive Approaches. Toronto, Ontario: Canadian Scholars' Press/Women's Press.To look twice is to practise respect. Respect calls upon us to consider how we are represented by others, the expectations that others have of us, and how we represent ourselves. As Aboriginal scholars, we have both been highly dismayed by the realization that our experience as Aboriginal peoples is poorly represented in the academy. There are few places that accurately reflect Aboriginal reality, where we can see and say, “This represents who I am.” Thus far, Aboriginal peoples have been represented in curricula, research, and scholarship (if at all) as a savage, noble, stoic, and, most disturbingly, a dying race. Images and representations of Aboriginal peoples that predominate in media, popular culture, and research studies portray us not as we are, but as non-Aboriginals think we are. To various degrees, we all struggle to free ourselves from

the colonial beliefs and values that have been ingrained in us. Throughout the world such “neutral” and “objective” research has been used to justify the oppression and genocide of the Other for the good of humankind. Gilchrist (1997) explains that: “[t]he fact that much research does not confront ideologies of oppression prevents the application to research of critical knowledge regarding traditional culture, colonial history and racist structure. This results in research which does not use appropriate concepts as variables and defines one’s culture using the cultural beliefs of another. (Gilchrist, 1997, p. 76)” This lack of accurate representations of Aboriginal peoples in almost every facet of popular culture leads us (Aboriginal peoples) to seek validation in one another. This is a two-edged sword; while Aboriginal peoples are extremely

proud of Aboriginal individuals who become famous in sports, politics, or the media, generalized representations of Aboriginal role models can negate the reality of oppression. A minority of Aboriginal peoples who have successfully negotiated Western culture are too often held up as proof that the problems of oppression, racism, and inequity can be easily overcome or, worse, that the roots of these problems lie not within institutions or systems of governance but within Aboriginal peoples themselves.

The performance of finding ethics in narratives is a method to challenge Western ideals of knowledge, meaning the act of the AC solves. MorrisMorris, David B. "Narrative, Ethics, and Pain: Thinking With Stories." NARRATIVE 9.1 (n.d.): 55-77. http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30940862/narrative_ethics_and_pain.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1439854537&Signature=vnCk2jJEHCzV04dekiOPKGh7MeU%3D&response-content-disposition=inline

Is it possible that ethical action might depend less on analytical reasoning than on responding to a dilemma as we might respond to a story? "Thinking with stories" is a concept I borrow from sociologist Arthur W. Frank in The Wounded Storyteller (23-25). By thinking, Frank means, and I mean, a process very different from the exclusive operation of reason. Thought clearly involves reasoning, in addition to various forms of cognitive activity from memory to meditation, but I want to emphasize that thinking also involves a crucial collaboration with feeling . In fact, the ancient Western binary habit that requires us to put reason and emotion into separate words and unconnected categories is, I contend, a neurological mistake, with crucial implications for ethics. We need a greatly revised understanding of reason and emotion? a revision consistent with recent discoveries in cognitive science?in order to escape the history of erroneous assumptions about thinking and about ethics, a

history that I wish to challenge. The concept of thinking with stories is meant to oppose and mod ify (not replace) the institutionalized Western practice of thinking about stories. Thinking about stories conceives of narrative as an object. Thinker and object of thought are at least

theoretically distinct. Thinking with stories is a process in which we as thinkers do not so much work on narrative as take the radical step back , almost a return to childhood

experience, of allowing narrative to work on us.

Contention TwoRelying exclusively on universalized ethics to determine correct action results in an ethical system that we does not consider the perspectives of excluded Bodies. This justifies exclusion and violence against non-normative bodies. YancyYancy ‘5 George, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 19(4), p. 215-216

I write out of a personal existential context. This context is a profound source of knowledge connected to my "raced" body. Hence, I write from a place of lived embodied experience, a site of exposure. In philosophy, the only thing that we are taught to "expose" is a weak argument, a fallacy, or someone's "inferior" reasoning power. The embodied self is bracketed and deemed irrelevant to theory, superfluous and cumbersome in one's search for truth. It is best, or so we are told, to reason from nowhere. Hence, the white philosopher/author presumes to speak for all of "us" without the slightest mention of [THEIR] his or her "raced" identity. Self-consciously writing as a white male philosopher,

Crispin Sartwell observes: Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the "whiteness" of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or [End

Page 215] apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the "comprehension" of a range of materials.

Narrative ethics allow us to solve these problems by engaging with moral “Others” by recognizing that we cannot speak for them, and instead standing in solidarity with them. This means the method of my Affirmation solves. MccarthyMccarthy, J. "Principlism or Narrative Ethics: Must We Choose between Them?" Medical Humanities 29.2 (2003): 65-71. Web. <http://mh.bmj.com/content/29/2/65.full#ref-27>.

The third tenet of narrative ethics is the claim that the task of moral justification is not, primarily, a unifying one. Rather, its focus is on acknowledging and embracing the multiplicity of, often contested, meanings that are available in any given situation. What is key for

this narrativist account is the idea that many different voices and readings of moral situations and individual lives are possible . And, generally, narrativists focus less on trying to reduce competing perspectives to a commonly shared view and more on involving as many people as possible in the dialogue . Anne Hudson Jones summarises this view thus: In ideal form, narrative ethics recognises the primacy of the patient’s story but encourages multiple voices to be heard

and multiple stories to be brought forth by all those whose lives will be involved in the resolution of a case. Patient, physician, family, health professional, friend, and social worker—for example, may all share their stories in a dialogical chorus that can offer the best chance of respecting

all the persons involved in a case (Hudson Jones A,20 p 222). In turn, for narrativists, relational virtues such as empathetic listening and support are privileged . In the course

of such privileging, these virtues are reworked to acknowledge and accommodate the narrative view that , in some senses, difference is irreducible. Howard Brody, for example, radically reconceives the moral demands of “empathy” in the following passage: In a culture that prizes autonomy and independence, we may fondly imagine that most people are whole and intact, unlike those who suffer from

disease. … Charity tends to assume that I start off whole and remain whole while I offer aid to the suffering. Empathy and testimony require a full awareness of my own vulnerability and radical incompleteness; to be with the suffering as a co-human presence will require that I change. … Today I listen to the testimony of someone’s suffering; tomorrow that person (or someone else) will be listening to my testimony of my own. Today I help to heal the sufferer by listening to and validating her story; tomorrow that sufferer will have helped to heal me, as her testimony

becomes a model I can use to better make sense of and deal with my own suffering (Brody H,27 pp 21–2). On Brody’s view, the demand of empathy does not require us to “step into another’s shoes” in order to understand their

pain. It does not presuppose that it is ever possible fully to understand another’s pain . The other person is always “other” to us, her difference persists, resisting assimilation under the umbrella of mutual understanding. Instead, empathy demands that we bear witness to our own vulnerability and lack so that we stand , not as whole to part, or healthy to ill, but as a “co-human presence”. On this view, health professionals cannot offer patients the reassurance that they know and understand them, only the acknowledgement that they have listened and heard. On this view too, no health professional is untouched by a patient’s pain and

vulnerability, there is professional engagement, not detachment. What is refreshing about the account of narrative ethics outlined above is that it introduces the idea that the aim of ethics is not, necessarily, to reduce discord, disunity, and disagreement. Where principlism is lauded because of its justificatory force—for example, its supposed objective rules distinguishing between good and bad actions, and its theoretical consistency, by contrast narrative ethics, as we have seen, slides toward relativism and diversity with seemingly wild abandon (MacIntyre excepted). Some might see this slide as good reason to abandon narrative ethics for the more stable and theoretically satisfying principlist position. What if, however, one were to view the relativism of narrative ethics not as a failure of comprehensiveness or probity or insight, but rather, as pointing the way toward a reframing of what we understand the task of ethics to be?