AT K - K Answers 2 - Michigan 7 2023 CPSW

Top Level
1AC/NC Policy Relevant Skillz
Policy is key to students future job prospects- need skillz
Banfield et al., PhDs, 22
(Janet Banfield, Sam HamptonORCID Icon &Monika Zurek, all Geo@Oxford, Towards a pedagogical policy turn in geography Journal of Geography in Higher Education Volume 46, 2022 - Issue 2)
25 years after Harvey’s intervention, debate raged in the 2000s as human geographers contemplated the character and desirability of policy impact. Martin (Citation2001) explained geographers’ limited influence on policy through a turn towards theoretical rather than empirical work, and called for a new “geography of public policy”. Dorling and Shaw (Citation2002) sympathised but argued that a policy turn was unlikely because geographers do not value it, are not good at it, and are not validated by policy makers. Ward (Citation2005, Citation2006, Citation2007) expanded the debate by highlighting impactful geographical contributions, including refuting normative notions of relevance, which focused too narrowly on policy audiences and short term, measurable impact. Public geography, by contrast, concerns itself with diverse publics and multiple modes of scholarship, including activism, participation, and pedagogy. Students, he argued, are our “first public, for they carry geography into all walks of life” (Ward, Citation2006, p. 500). Subsequently, and re-articulating the value of participatory scholarship (Pain, Citation2003, Citation2004, Citation2006), Pain et al. (Citation2011) expressed concerns that the forthcoming UK Research Excellence Framework assessment (REF) would entrench elitist notions of impact and underplay community knowledge exchange. Since this flurry of frustration, the policy debate amongst human geographers has subsided, and Martin’s vision of a “policy turn” has not materialised, although the relationship between geography and policy impact continues to attract comment, with (for example) physical geographers embodying critical reflexivity and concern for policy relevance through the emergence of critical physical geography (Lane, Citation2017; Lave et al., Citation2018); and transdisciplinary concerns surrounding anthropogenic environmental change reigniting disciplinary interest in the value of an explicitly geographical perspective (André, Citation2017; Schwanen, Citation2018). Nonetheless, the residue of the earlier debate constrains geography’s potential to make meaningful policy impact. Ward’s (Citation2006) criticism that geography is too focused on policy audiences encourages us to cast our eyes elsewhere, while both Martin’s (Citation2001) call for a geography of public policy – while encouraging active engagement – and Dorling and Shaw’s (Citation2002) lament seemingly objectify policy as something to be studied rather than practised by geographers. It is hardly surprising that Pain’s (Citation2003, Citation2004, Citation2006) advocacy of participatory research in social geography has not translated into policy work, if policy is seen as external and to be critiqued rather than practised. This, though, conflicts with blossoming undergraduate interest in and demand for more practically oriented educational experiences to prepare them for engaging with pressing issues of environmental and social justice beyond the ivory tower. Geography graduates pursue myriad careers, and many aspire to policy roles, typically in sustainability, international development or spatial planning. Currently, geography is growing (in the UK), with GCSE, A-Level and undergraduate entries in England increasing since 2010 (Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), Citation2020). At the same time, the diverse skills developed by geographers are attractive to employers across varied sectors (Prospects Luminate, Citation2020), but how sustainable can this be if the type of policy work to which students increasingly aspire is conspicuously absent from the policy work to which they are exposed in their curricula?
This outweighs other internal links
Banfield et al., PhDs, 22
(Janet Banfield, Sam HamptonORCID Icon &Monika Zurek, all Geo@Oxford, Towards a pedagogical policy turn in geography Journal of Geography in Higher Education Volume 46, 2022 - Issue 2)
In re-opening the policy debate, we do not wish to rehash old quarrels, and we acknowledge both compelling postcolonial arguments against striving for policy impact, and radical geographical reasons to resist the pressure for demonstrable short-term impact. However, disciplines make their greatest impact through their students. Our professional experience indicates increasing desire for applied learning opportunities to complement the theoretical and critical emphasis of human geography and the scientific niches of physical geography. Yet, definitional, institutional and structural issues perpetuate the devaluation of extra-academic policy experience and the division between policy work and curriculum direction. There is a growing imperative to act among young people but with students increasingly coming to university to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to enter the policy world yet graduating without meaningful exposure to extra-academic policy work, we are failing to provide them with the policy-specific scaffolding that they both desire and require to capitalise on their academic skills, make informed career choices and fully realise their – and our – potential.
1AC Method Contention- Policy Actionability (AT: Scholarship/Research FW)
Prefer scholarship that is policy actionable-even if never implemented injecting these ideas in public debates can influence policy makers and steer the direction of IR
Horowitz, PhD/NDT Champ, 15
(Michael, PoliSci@Pen, https://warontherocks.com/2015/06/what-is-policy-relevance/ , 6-17-15)
Attempts to bridge the gap between academia and the real world, especially in the area of international relations, have accelerated over the last few years. There are several initiatives ongoing, including the Bridging the Gap project, the Tobin Project, the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations (TRIP), and a variety of others. The Bridging the Gap project, for example, trains academics how to ask policy relevant questions and write for public policy audiences. To complement these efforts, our understanding of what policy relevance “is” needs improving. In particular, distinguishing between research with significance for policy and research that is policy actionable — promoting realistic policy actions — can bring analytical clarity to the concept of policy relevance and help enhance efforts to bridge the gap. A fear that academia is becoming more irrelevant drives these efforts to bridge the gap. From former MacArthur President Robert Gallucci’s call for more relevance to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s fear that academic insights are not useful for the real world to writing by Peter Campbell and Michael Desch, Steve Van Evera, and Jim Steinberg and Frank Gavin, along with others, there is a sense that academics are not doing enough. On the other hand, the information age has been a game changer in the ability of academics to communicate directly with the policy world, and increasingly in their willingness as well. Just in the area of international relations, from blogs run by academics (e.g. Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, Duck of Minerva, Political Violence at a Glance, Lawfare, and others) to social media avenues such as Twitter to media outlets that consistently publish academics with policy insights (e.g. War on the Rocks, Foreign Policy, and Defense One), academics have a greater number of venues than ever to publish policy-relevant insights based on their scholarship. Anecdotally, it seems easier to take advantage of the opportunity than ever. Yet, if improving policy relevance in academia, as well as the ability of the policy world to consume academic research (if presented correctly), is an important goal, it makes the question of what exactly policy relevance “is” a vital one. Policy relevance often seems to be in the eyes of the beholder. A lack of precision in what policy relevance is, however, can encourage thinking about the issue that does not accurately capture reality, and leads to confusion when different people use the term in different ways. One way forward is to distinguish between four key concepts that seem at the core of discussions of policy relevance. What follows separates the components of policy relevance from the quality of the work itself, e.g. whether it holds together intellectually. While that is a crucial consideration for evaluating the overall utility of any piece, this is an attempt to drill down on the concept of policy relevance itself. Policy significance: Policy significance, most simply, is research that has implications for the policy world. A good deal of international relations research, even that involving advanced statistical methods and lots of academic jargon, arguably passes this bar. For example, Paul Staniland points out, in a response to Thomas Ricks, the utility of many recent political science articles and books for understanding topics ranging from how rockets launched from the Gaza Strip influence voting patterns in Israel to what we can learn about the emerging balance of power in East Asia from studying the period before the outbreak of World War I. A critic might respond, however, that many of these pieces are written in ways that make them inaccessible to mainstream policymakers, or that they are too long for policymakers to read. That is often true. As Paul Avey and Michael Desch’s research on how policymakers view academic journals shows, policymakers doubt the utility of academic journal articles featuring quantitative work and game theory (whether any senior policymakers read any journal articles, regardless of method, is a different question). Thus, the potential significance of research and writing for understanding a public policy issue alone is only part of the issue, though it is a useful sub-category. Policy accessibility: Policy accessibility reflects the essential readability of research — whether presented as a book, journal article, or blog post — for the policy world. A journal article and blog post by the same person on the same issue could be just as policy relevant as each other, but have very different levels of policy accessibility. The journal article might feature many theoretical references and discussions of academic debates that make it policy relevant, but not policy accessible. The blog post, in contrast, on the exact same research, might be policy accessible. One might even further refine this concept by distinguishing between writing that is policy accessible at the working level in the government, which is often staffed by younger people with more recent engagement with academic research, and writing for senior policymakers. Senior policymakers have even less time than their busy staffers to consume outside writing, and, unless they come from academia, potentially less familiarity with academic concepts. Another way to refine the concept of policy accessibility is to think about different venues as having different levels of policy accessibility for different audiences. Even within the policy world, venues more targeted at the Defense Department (DoD) versus the public conversation on an issue might require writing in somewhat different ways. Demonstrating fluency with DoD jargon and policy levers can be important for being accessible to busy staffers in a DoD office. In contrast, writing a mass media op-ed requires using more public language designed for the broadest audience. Policy actionability: Policy actionability refers to a recommendation that is possible to implement for the target of the recommendation. Most academic work is not policy actionable, fundamentally. For example, implications from international relations research are things such as whether countries with high male-to-female ratios are more likely to start military conflicts or that countries that acquire nuclear weapons become harder to coerce. Understanding the motivations for countries to have nuclear weapons has broad policy implications, but it is not a specific thing that is going to drive U.S. policy on Iran or North Korea, except in the broadest way. Academic research of this type shows what happens, on average. For research that is only policy significant, however, policymakers then figure out whether the particular case they are dealing with, e.g. Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine, fits the baseline and gives them useful information. That is to say, the policymaker is taking policy significant research and making it policy actionable. For example, understanding that democracies generally do not fight each other, the phenomenon known as the democratic peace, could shape policymaker expectations about whether a given dispute between two democracies will escalate into violence, all other things being equal, and then influence a policy response. For example, Peter Feaver and Eric Lorber’s piece on Obama’s Iran strategy and the role of economic sanctions is clearly policy significant and written in an accessible way. It points to challenges involved in a sanctions “snapback” against Iran if nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 go south, but does not recommend a specific course of action for the Obama administration. Its larger contribution is to the public debate on the topic. In a different way, some policy relevant writing is actionable in theory, but not in practice. Arguing that the United States should withdraw from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), for example, is a specific policy recommendation, but it is not a realistic recommendation given the strong commitment of the United States to remaining in NATO. It can be useful for agenda setting or dialogue generating, however. Policy actionable writing is different. Policy actionable writing, taking political and bureaucratic realities into account, generally does one of two things. First, policy actionable writing does the translation-function itself. It explains, for example, investment decisions the U.S. military should make based on lessons learned from research on military innovation. Second, policy actionable writing engages directly in a debate such as whether the United States should deploy ground troops to confront the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant or arm Ukraine, drawing on academic research or concepts to make the argument in favor or against. Public debate: Finally, academic writing in the public sphere can also help set the agenda for discussion, even though it is not necessarily designed to influence short-term public policy activities. Books and articles by scholars such as Paul Kennedy or Samuel Huntington exemplify this type of agenda-setting research. This type of writing can affect how policymakers think about various essential issues and evaluate the world when they make decisions, but does not explicitly guide any particular choices. For a recent example of an academic engaging public debate in a shorter format than a book, take John Mearsheimer’s article in Foreign Affairs on Western responsibility for ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine. His provocative suggestion that the United States should work with Russia to make Ukraine a neutral buffer state stimulated public dialogue, even though it was unlikely to be implemented, given the commitment of the Obama administration (and any other likely U.S. administration) to pushing back against Russian aggression. Gaining a better sense of what exactly constitutes policy relevance is a useful and arguably vital task. Too often, the debate about policy relevance devolves into rhetorical bomb throwing where it is entirely possible that both sides are right, depending on the metrics used and the definition of policy relevance used. No one wants academia to whither into obscurity. In reality, some writing might score highly in some of these areas, but lower in others, while other research might score highly across the board, and so on. Distinguishing between the significance, accessibility, actionability, and public debate functions of writing can provide a clearer understanding of what constitutes policy relevance. This framework can aid the field of international relations, as well as others, in moving the discussion forward and promoting policy relevance that we can all get behind.
1AC Method Contention -Speculation
The 1AC is an act of counter-speculation that opens up space for radical transformation
Komporozos-Athanasiou, PhD, 2-15-23
(Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is Associate Professor of Sociology at University College London https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-world-speculation-made/)
This world is one we can still recognize as ours. Following a period of unbridled financialization during the later part of the twentieth century (heralded by the momentous repeal of the Glass-Steagall legislation allowing commercial banks to act as financial traders), contemporary economies and societies are once again steeped in the whirlpool of speculation. In today’s turbocharged financial markets, speculation is even more opaque because of the highly complex technologies on which it relies: machine learning, algorithmically powered, superfast trading systems whose inner workings are often indiscernible even to traders themselves. High-frequency automated trading takes place in virtual pits, with data scientists and coders quietly monitoring a ceaseless search for patterns through stacks of data, including predictive analysis of social media content that informs trading decisions (not all that different from the practices of yesteryear’s financial astrologists). On the most obscure end of these markets, speculators submerge themselves in “dark pools,” which are exclusive forums for block trading securities that evade transparency requirements of formal exchanges, where dealings appear even more detached from reality. The complexity of this kind of trading means that it is often impossible to tell whether a product like the derivative will be used to hedge an uncertain event or derive profit from it. At the same time, speculative wagers are now placed not merely on the uncertainty of the future, but also on the volatility of uncertainty itself. At Chicago’s CBOE, a spinoff of the CBOT and the largest modern options exchange in the United States, volatility has its own index commonly called the VIX or “fear index”—a measure of expected price swings in the S&P options market. CBOE’s virtual pit even trades volatility as an “asset class” with its own “index futures.” The denizens of these new temples of finance continue to fire up the public imagination. On first blush, we may intuitively recall the greedy yet charming hedge funders—immortalized by Leonardo DiCaprio’s gregarious performance as Jordan Belfort in the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street—as the exemplary speculators of our time. But on closer inspection, a new and more tragic figure is emerging to usurp the suave megatrader of financialized capitalism from its throne. The modern-day speculator resembles Dr. Alexander Hoffmann, the tragic high-tech Frankenstein protagonist of Robert Harris’s 2011 bestseller The Fear Index: a tormented physicist-cum-financier confronted with VIXAL-4, an omniscient AI algorithm with the power to predict fear—including Dr Hoffmann’s own fear of losing himself entirely in a battle with the mercurial forces of finance. The novel was adapted to a TV series with actor Josh Hartnett rummaging the streets of Geneva injured, haunted, limping, and sweating while searching for clues to his own past and future, plunged into a nightmare reality where it is impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. Yet beyond this dreamlike world of hyper-technologized finance, contemporary markets’ thirst for volatility is remi

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