Participation and Egalitarianism – Discourses on Social Participation/Solidarity and Diversity/Equality since 1990 (SP 1: Participation and Egalitarianism)

• 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

Social debates concerning access to central resources for a self-determined life (money, rights, status, etc.) are constantly being conducted in public. They have not lost their explosive power to the present day, as shown, for example, by the recent debates under the keywords "rip-offs" [German: "Abzocker"] / "social fraud" [German: "Sozialbetrug"] and "#MeToo". Put simply, these debates are often linguistically conducted distribution struggles in which the private becomes political. They form the subject of the sub-project "Participation & Egalitarianism", which is divided into the two focal points "Participation - Discourses on Social Participation and Solidarity since 1990" and "Egalitarianism - Discourses on Diversity and Equality since 1990" in the two planned funding periods. The debates on participation and equality are - according to the basic hypothesis of the applicants - often based on the same values (e.g. justice, social cohesion and solidarity) and premises (e.g. the idea that access to central resources for a self-determined way of life is politically controllable); they gain their explosiveness from the subcutaneous change of these values and premises in recent years and decades. Sub-project 1 "Participation & Egalitarianism - Discourses on Social Participation and Solidarity as well as Diversity and Equality since 1990", in conjunction with the other sub-projects, contributes to a linguistic history of controversial discourses since 1990 (cf. framework application). In the first funding phase, it aims to describe and analyse discourses of solidarity and participation in the Federal Republic of Germany and Switzerland - two countries that can be understood as representatives of social market economies. This is achieved through a corpus linguistic discourse analysis, with which relevant patterns of language use are identified and classified in a data-driven manner and interpreted against the background of sociological theories. The central starting point is the culturalist assumption that collective values about social coexistence - the social bond - are constantly negotiated and that patterns of language use are indicators of these negotiations.

• 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)