Monday, June 25: Topic Analysis Labs

As promised, today's lab meetings have been action-packed. We began this morning with Josh's mini-lecture on trade agreements (which included an explanation of tariffs, the WTO, and various other related terms and concepts), followed by a discussion on how to define "worker welfare," "developing countries," and "economic gains." We concluded that while foreign nations' compliance with U.S. labor standards is sometimes economically beneficial to America, the resolution assumes a conflict between worker welfare and U.S. economic gains. Thus, debaters should evaluate the resolution as a trade-off: the affirmative gets to claim benefits from protecting worker welfare, but must weigh those against economic costs; the negative gets to claim economic benefits, but those come with a decrease in protection for workers. After a brief interruption in which students received ID cards, lab resumed. We identified the type of resolution, the object of evaluation, evaluative term, context, agent of action, types of conflict in the topic, burdens on each side, presumption, and extremes versus middle ground, in addition to listing out authors and search terms for the students to use in the library. (Today, we'd like to recognize Nikita Lalwani for her active participation and helpful contributions!)Following an afternoon lecture by Dr. Robinson, we discussed last night's assigned reading in depth, and then took students to the library to begin the research process. Each student has an evidence assignment due tomorrow, with cases to be due shortly thereafter.