par Derinöz, Sabri
Référence IAMCR 2022: Communication Research in the Era of Neo-Globalisation: Reorientations, Challenges and Changing Contexts (11-15 July 2022: Beijing)
Publication Non publié, 2022-07-11
Communication à un colloque
Résumé : In the past few years, the concept of diversity became widespread in the Western world. Its polysemy and vague referent (i.e., the social phenomenon it refers to) has not prevented the word to become a keyword in rich countries, characterised by the acknowledgment of a postcolonial society and the coexistence of ethnic minorities. In the French field of discourse analysis, it has been noted that the word behaves like a fuzzy expression that condenses complex social issues that the word per se helps to shape. In a social context where different interests, power relations and strategies « have made its use necessary and at the same time problematic » (Maingueneau 2014: 98), the word diversity is manipulated « in political and social discourse without ever being explicitly defined » (Devriendt 2012).Belgium has embraced diversity, a concept that we can easily find in the media as in political discourse, even if it has no clear meaning (Senac 2012; Devriendt 2012). In the francophone Belgium, the idea of diversity emerged at the beginning of the century under the influence of American management, but also in a context where international organizations (mainly the UN and the EU) advocated for the promotion of cultural diversity and the end of ethnic discrimination (Mathien 2013; Sholomon-Kornblit 2018; Senac 2012). In the post-multiculturalism era, diversity seeks to engage with the cultural complexities of ethnic identities, while rejecting communitarian multiculturalism (Hall 1991, Titley 2014). In the Belgian political agenda, diversity appeared alongside the concept of equal opportunities in the last twenty years, as a follow-up to migrant integration and ethnic and racial discrimination (Adam 2006; Tandé 2013). According to some scholars, the reformulation of the public problem of discrimination into diversity led to a depoliticization of the issue (Tandé 2013). In this communication, we seek to explore how diversity arose as a public issue in the media, competing with and reconstructing other public issues (Cefai 1996). To achieve this goal, we will collect a corpus of the three main francophone newspapers from the year 2000 onwards, using the keyword diversity (7 million words). This large corpus will be analyzed using a mix of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, a mixed methodology that can help observing under which social conditions a lexical shift occurs (Calabrese & Mistiaen 2017). Through the observation of frequencies, the concordance tool and co-occurrences, we will show how diversity was gradually constructed in newspapers as a public issue, namely a social problem seeking for solutions involving public authorities. This paper is a draft of an upcoming article.

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