Plusieurs membres d’Engage ont participé au 6ème congrès DiscourseNet (DNC6) « Discours et imaginaires des sociétés passées, présentes et futures : médias et représentations des (dés)ordres (inter)nationaux », qui s’est tenu cette année à l’Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), du 7 au 10 juillet 2025. Le congrès se concentrait sur la construction discursive des imaginaires sociaux et politiques. Il proposait de discuter de la manière dont les acteurs sociaux imaginent et articulent les sociétés passées, présentes et futures dans un monde marqué par des crises multiples et imbriquées.
7 membres du centre de recherche ont présenté une communication lors de cette conférence. Voici le titre de leurs présentations et leur abstract :
Leaving the pandemic: a critical discourse analysis of the construction of futures in governmental discourse during the COVID-19 crisis
By Lydie DENIS (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles)
The COVID-19 crisis is remembered as a “historically distinguishable era” (Lundström, 2022: 6), during which the temporality of social activities underwent significant disruption. From the closure of stores to the imposition of curfews, the pandemic reshaped how temporality is constructed in political discourse. The crisis context necessitated a focus on immediacy and urgency while simultaneously constructing visions of the future through hypotheses and promises aimed to be fulfilled. Imaginaries of the future thus articulate expectations, anticipations and plans (Canto-Mila & Seebach, 2024). This study examines how the futures of the crisis and the post-crisis are constructed in governmental discourse during the pandemic. Grounded in Critical Discourse Studies, (more particularly in the Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016)) the research analyzes a corpus of 28 press conferences, delivered between 2020 and 2022. These press conferences constitute the official governmental communication on COVID-19 measures. The findings reveal an evolution in how futures are articulated. At the onset of the crisis, futures are framed as actionable goals through specific or general objectives and conditional scenarios designed to avert undesirable outcomes. Over time, the future transitions into a horizon of projection, encompassing potential post-crisis outcomes and aspirations for “better tomorrows”. However, as the public health situation remains unpredictable, the future becomes increasingly ambiguous, with no assurances, thereby influencing perspectives on (in)action (Mische, 2009). Ultimately, this analysis sheds light on how political discourse navigates the (un)certainties of the crisis, offering insights into the evolving imaginaries of the future during crises.
Rethinking (de)politicisation: going beyond a moralistic research agenda
By Thomas JACOBS (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles), Kelly VOSSEN (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles), Lydie DENIS (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles)
The concepts of politicisation and depoliticisation are employed in different fashions across diverse literatures (e.g. Comby, 2015; Pepermans & Maeseele, 2017; Němcová, 2024; Weitkamp et al., 2024), making their definition complex and contested. Across this wide variety of theoretical approaches, a common denominator is the moralization of (de)politicisation – it is often argued that (de)politicisation is inherently a good or a bad thing for society. Progressive thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe (2018) may for instance see politicisation as intrinsically positive as it promotes social change, while conservative politicians such as John Major and Nick Clegg (2020) have construed the stabilising force of depoliticisation as something fundamentally positive.
This paper critiques this moralistic tendency in the scientific literature, arguing that it essentializes (de)politicisation and overestimates the importance of moralization as a discursive strategy – disregarding other strategies such as rationalisation, authorisation, normalisation and so on (Van Leeuwen, 2007; Kryzanowski, 2022). The extant literature often reduces (de)politicisation to a single moralized effect, overlooking its complexity and underestimating the diverse consequences to which it may give rise. Instead of a moral perspective, this panel advocates for a strategic understanding of (de)politicisation (Jacobs 2022). This approach conceptualizes (de)politicisation as describing the political effects and outcomes, both intended and unintended, of discursive strategies. The goal of such an approach is to map these diverse consequences and understand the interactions of the discursive strategies that gave rise to them. By considering (de)politicisation as strategic tools, we can analyse their effects and interactions in all their complexity without being limited by a focus on moral judgments. To illustrate the value of this strategic perspective, we examine two empirical cases: the imaginaries (Taylor, 2004; Browne & Diehl, 2019) of climate change among youth activists and the public health measures put in place during the COVID-19 crisis. These cases demonstrate that all (de)politicisation has complex political consequences, highlighting the need for a nuanced, strategic analysis that complements and thus moves beyond moral evaluations. Ultimately, this panel seeks to refine(de)politicisation as analytical tools, demonstrating their potential to provide fresh insights into political change from a discourse-analytic point of view.
Dissidence numérique d’ex-musulmans. Construction discursive
d’« imaginaire de vérité »
Par Déborah PHARES (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles)
Dans le cadre d’une analyse des discours critiques d’individus lambda se définissant comme ex-musulmans et/ou apostats sur la plateforme X, cette présentation propose une articulation théorique entre l’“imaginaire de vérité” (Charaudeau, 2005 ; Pirat, 2006), l’idéologie (Fairclough, 1995 ; Van Dijk, 1998), l’idéologie composite (Brace, Baele et Ging, 2023) et la représentation (Hall, 1997) discursive de l’islam. L’imaginaire de vérité, selon Charaudeau, est conçu comme un ensemble de représentations et d’idées présentées comme indubitables afin de légitimer un discours et des actions. Cette articulation permet de comprendre comment cet imaginaire de vérité subjectif, via une mise en scène multimodale, redéfinit le rapport des ex-musulmans à l’islam et à leur propre identité. Cela est d’autant plus intéressant qu’historiquement, l’apostasie et la critique de l’islam sont considérées comme hérétiques, contraignant ceux qui renoncent à leur foi à garder le silence, à se cacher et à s’autocensurer (Sahad, Chu Abdullah, & Abdullah, 2013 ; Mohamad et al., 2017, 2018). Dans cette dynamique, il s’agit de remodeler certaines perceptions politiques et sociales de l’islam et de l’apostasie, de légitimer une nouvelle réalité pour les apostats et d’influencer les discours islamiques dits normatifs en revendiquant un pouvoir discursif sur la “vérité”. Notre proposition théorique repose sur trois études de cas de tweets d’ex-musulmans aux profils variés sur X, illustrant comment ils mobilisent l’espace numérique pour (re)construire un imaginaire de vérité collectif et (re)configurer leur place dans le débat Public
Imaginaries and Commitment of the deaf community
By Olivier RASQUINET (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles) & Cédric TANT (ULB & UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles)
In the context of a perceived crisis in Deaf engagement, this proposition explores how the imaginary shapes commitment and disengagement of deaf people within their community. While previous studies highlight a decline in participation in mass-events organized by and for the deaf community (Foster et al., 2018), recent research suggests a broader retreat from collective advocacy centered on deaf identity (Rasquinet, 2024). This shift raises questions about how deaf individuals negotiate their visibility in the public sphere and whether their commitment has taken alternative forms. Building on the framework of Cultural Disability Studies (Waldschmidt, 2018), we examine this phenomenon through a critical lens, considering how dominant socio- political structures influence deaf imaginaries. Drawing on a corpus of nine semi- structured interviews conducted in 2023, our study includes sign language users and oralists, categorized based on their involvement in deaf spaces. Preliminary findings indicate that while traditional forms of deaf activism may be waning, commitment persists through intersectional advocacies (e.g. LGBTQIA+ rights, anti-racism, feminism), suggesting a reconfiguration rather than a disappearance of commitment. By interrogating the role of the imaginary as a collective consciousness (Grassi, 2005), we analyze whether this disengagement from deaf-centered spaces signifies a broader realignment of priorities within minority communities. We also explore whether this shift can be understood as a form of subjective commitment to an objective environment (see Durand, 1992). Through this analysis, we contribute to discussions on the interplay between discourse, representation, and the imaginaries of minority groups in contemporary societies.
The Anti-woke Imaginary in Francophone Political Essays: The Discursive Construction of Contemporary Antagonisms by Moral Entrepreneurs
By Jan ZIENKOWSKI (Université libre de Bruxelles), Lucile COENEN (Université libre de Bruxelles).
This contribution provides a critical discourse study of contemporary anti-woke discourse articulated in a selection of recent francophone political essays. It investigates how anti-woke moral entrepreneurs construct and mobilize an imaginary for (re-)thinking past, present and future societies. The article argues that these essays mobilize illiberal political imaginaries that reproduce and reinforce anxieties over various social, cultural and economic crises that supposedly plague France, Europe and/or Western civilization. Imaginaries are discursive and ideological constructs that allow social actors to make sense of social order (Krzyżanowski, 2020). They contain myths that offer a political horizon for the articulation of political grievances, forms of suffering, trauma and/or dislocation, but also for the articulation of social demands and hopes. Imaginaries generate forms of political subjectivity (Bouchard, 2017; Kølvraa & Forchtner, n.d.). Discourse can be understood as a practice of articulation constitutive of social and political imaginaries (Smith, 1998; Zienkowski, 2024). This NVIVO- supported study puts a discursive twist to Bouchard’s (2017) sociological approach to imaginaries. It asks: (1) what are the ontological building blocks of anti-woke imaginaries (e.g. actors, social relations, norms, practices, institutions); (2) how are these building blocks temporarily organized (e.g. what are the ‘evolutions’, ‘cyclic patterns’, ‘ruptures’, or ‘crises’ of the woke problematic); and (3) in what settings and spaces do the authors place (fight against) wokeness (e.g. universities, media, countries, …)? It identifies implicit and explicit definitions of wokeness and investigates how the building blocks of anti-woke imaginaries get articulated to images of present and future social (dis)orders.