Forensics as Scholarship: Testing Zarefsky's Bold Hypothesis in a Digital Age

The tables of contents from the 1915–1917 volumes of the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking reveal how the field of communication's academic lineage can be traced back to the forensic debating tradition. In the U.S., that tradition's practical roots were established by hundreds of contracts between universities to hold intercollegiate debates for public audiences. Later in the 20th century, the advent of organized debate tournaments turned forensics into a specialized laboratory for argumentation, where contest round practice yielded first a stock-issues model of argument, followed by multiple debate paradigms, and then a series of critical rhetorics. We envision a next evolutionary step where forensics moves to seize novel opportunities offered by the digital age to refresh its practice as a “participatory culture. “Key to this evolution is recognition of David Zarefsky's insights into the relationship between argument, criticism, and judgment. We illustrate the potential of debate to model strategies of new media literacy through adaptation of his hypothesis-testing model of argument to digital contexts

The Debate Authors Working Group Model for Collaborative Knowledge Production in Forensics Scholarship

The disconnect between modes of knowledge production in forensics (mostly collaborative) and academic study in the humanities (mostly solo work) is a chasm that can complicate the transition from tournament competitor to professional scholar. Might arrangements that promote joint authorship help harmonize the two modes of knowledge production and convert creative energy from the forensics setting to the academic publishing enterprise? This essay considers the possibility, reflecting on how efforts to coordinate collaborative knowledge production in debate authors working groups relate to professional development challenges isolated in the 1974 Sedalia Conference, the 1984 National Developmental Conference on Forensics, the 1993 Quail Roost Caucus, and the 2009 National Developmental Conference on Debate. The analysis sheds light on issues of perennial importance for the forensics community and also contributes understanding of how recent technological and sociological trends portend changes in the process of knowledge production for the academy writ large