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Between specialisation and decategorisation: ​ How diversity meaning shifts in the Belgian francophone media

par Derinöz, Sabri
Référence Diversity in Media Societies (27-28 octobre 2022: TH Köln)
Publication Non publié, 2022-10-28

Communication à un colloque

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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 countries characterised by the acknowledgment of a postcolonial society and the coexistence of ethnic minorities. 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 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). According to several scholars, there is a dynamic in which diversity’s meaning is regularly shifting: between a semantic “specialisation”, referring mainly to ethnic minorities (Calabrese 2018), and a “decategorisation” leading to a diversity selection “à la carte”, often excluding ethnic or religious issues for the benefit of other categories such as gender, age or disability (Doytcheva 2020). In this communication, we want to focus on several appearances of those shifts of diversity that we encountered in a study that focused on the arising of diversity as a public issue in the media (Cefai 1996), using a corpus of the three main francophone newspapers from the year 2000 onwards (7 million words), 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). In our corpus, we observed several moments through time where those shifts occurred sometimes around specific collocations such as “from a diverse background”, “inclusive diversity” or “equality and diversity”.