Extending the conversation: continuity and change with debate and forensics organization entering the 21st century.

• Author: McDonald, Kelly Michael
• Position: Special Issue: Visual Argument-Part 2

Across the span of the 20th century, there have been many efforts to build successfully communities of students and teachers interested in the practice of forensics. This issue of Argumentation & Advocacy features spokespersons for a representative sample of forensic organizations that now afford opportunities for college students to engage in intercollegiate and on-campus debate. In these essays, as one might expect, are represented a variety of views, traditions, and practices-each with its own history and orientation toward forensics. When soliciting these views, leaders of forensics organizations were asked to describe their goals, the mission or purpose of the organization, where the organization sees itself in five to ten years from now, and the pedagogical role of the organization within higher education. Our aim was not to be exclusive: other forensic organizations are invited to continue the discussion and write appropriate essays explaining their own emergence and traditions. Hopefully, the assembled voices in the section will lead to discussion of and among our organizations toward the end of borrowing what distinct groups find useful and refining different senses of identity.

As long held practices, traditions become entrenched by ritual and re-enactment. Debate societies sponsor tournaments and create guidelines which, almost by definition, become institutionalized. This habituation of forms of communion is liberating to the extent predictability eliminates uncertainty or unwillingness to participate. Habits, as James reminds us, are helpful in that they free us from conscious attention to particular matters and allow us to concentrate on other factors. As members of debate and forensics organizations we must make the best of the liberation which our tradition affords.

Membership in a particular organization is an issue of choice. Presumably the program to which one is affiliated represents their interests. Greater knowledge of our interests and the interests represented by diverse forensic communities is a first step to realignment of those solidarities. The import of our interests and subsequent decisions is underscored by Anthony Gidden's when he argued, None the less actors have interests by virtue of their membership of particular groups, communities, classes, etc. This is why it is so important not to treat wants and interests as equivalent concepts: interests may imply potential courses of action, in contingent social...