Participation and Equality – Discourses on Inclusion and Solidarity as well as Diversity and Equity since 1990 (SP 1: Participation and Equality, Phase 2: Discourses on Diversity and Equity)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Noah Bubenhofer; Professorin Dr. Juliane Schröter
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441142207

This application is for funding a second phase of the first subproject of the research group “Controversial Discourses”. The research group analyzes the most important public media discourses in Germany and in German-speaking Switzerland from 1990 to the present in order to: 1. enrich the history of the German language with findings from discourse history, 2. develop methodological innovations through collaborative digital linguistic discourse analyses, and 3. expand public understanding of the societal debates chosen for the analyses. Due to the significant public and media attention that issues of social inclusion and solidarity, diversity and equity have received over the past decades, years, and especially in recent months, the corresponding discourses are the object of investigation in subproject 1. While the focus of the analyses in the first funding phase (2022–2026) is on the first two discourses mentioned, the second phase (2026–2030) will concentrate on those concerning diversity and equity. Currently, no comprehensive history of these discourses in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland since 1990 exists. Key research questions that subproject 1 addresses across the two funding phases include: How are the selected discourses shaped in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland? What common elements can be identified between them, and what differences can be found? How do these discourses evolve over time? What innovative analytical methods can be applied? The planned studies by the applicants and the planned dissertation of a PhD student on these questions can build on important results from the first funding phase – for example, on the corpora already compiled for both phases, on findings related to the discourses on solidarity and inclusion, as well as findings on the concepts of ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’, and on the developed methods in distributional semantics. The analyses will now focus on the linguistic treatment of key events in the discourses on diversity and equity and on experimenting with methods in argumentation analysis. In this way, the second funding phase will further test the applicants’ main hypotheses, namely that: a) the discourses on social inclusion, solidarity, diversity, and equity largely represent struggles over access to key resources for individuals, and b) large parts of these discourses are underpinned by similar values and assumptions, which, however, have changed over the past decades and which are also contested.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5182: Controversial discourses: Language history as contemporary history since 1990
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Partner Organisation: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF)