Louisville Project
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Louisville Project was a project by the University of Louisville's policy debate team (the University of Louisville Debate Society or ULDS) to increase meaningful minority participation in debate, which started in 2000.
Led by Coach Ede Warner, the Louisville Project eschewed traditional forms of debating like speed reading, debating the resolution, and presenting traditional forms of evidence. The project instead used hip hop music, personal experiences, and other media to present their arguments. They argued that many elements of policy debate are exclusionary and thus limit diversity in debate.
History
In 2005, Louisville started a "Take it to the Streets" initiative in which they offered to debate the topic normally if the judge was replaced with a layperson. Because of the time required to find a new critic, the rounds were to take place with reduced speech times, approximately equivalent to those of Lincoln-Douglas debate. Most teams accepted the agreement and Louisville lost the vast majority of those debates.
In November 2005, Ede Warner announced, on the collegiate debate message board eDebate, his resignation as the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) 2nd vice president, canceled the University of Louisville's debate tournament (the "Super Bowl of Debate"), and announced his plans to stop recruiting debaters and retire in 5 years. This is regarded by many in the debate community as the beginning of the end of the Louisville Project.
Louisville continued "The Project" through the 2006–2007 season and became self-titled as the MPOWER (Multi-cultural policy organizing with emancipatory rhetoric) Movement.
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This entry incorporates text from “Louisville Project” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.