Liberte' Egalite' Diversite': Diversity In The English Press Before And After The Paris Terrorist Attack

Cesare Zanca Università degli Studi di Siena LIBERTE' EGALITE' DIVERSITE': DIVERSITY IN THE ENGLISH PRESS BEFORE AND AFTER THE PARIS TERRORIST ATTACK Abstract The idea of a possible substitution of the last word of the celebrated French motto is not an original one. It has been the headline of several newspaper articles and of a Canadian/ French Corporate Theatre Company in 2015 . Diversity, in these instances, referred to issues that implied the inclusive, empathic and progressively widespread use of the word that was explored in previous contributions to the works of the Languaging Diversity conferences . The French Theatre Company site, for example, lists the following as central themes for debate: Les discriminations ethniques, les préjugés, l'égalité hommes/femmes, la gestion des âges, le handicap. The article from Le Monde is a review of a book on the political support given to the idea of diversity: L'Invention de la diversité by Réjane Sénac. In other words, Diversity here represents a new conceptualization of the traditional idea of fraternity which stresses the idea that also the more marginalized categories should be included and that institutions and power are deliberately using this word to introduce new policies and procedures. But most of the results you will get these days by googling the modified motto I our title will refer to a TV programme broadcast by the France Tv channel Numéro 23 on November 21st 2015. “Une émission spéciale”, a special edition dedicated to a debate on the consequences of the Paris terror attack on November 13 2015. Does this imply that the recent events are significantly changing our perception of what diversity means and our inclination to support diversity policies? Is the inclusive idea of diversity being challenged by Jihadist inspired attacks and the recent migrant crisis? Are power and policies changing as a result of this? Is this relevant for language users and translators? Following the previous discussions of ‘diverse diversities’ in the SiBol/Port diachronic corpus of British and International Newspapers in English for the Languaging Diversity 2013 and 2014 conferences, this paper extends the analysis to a comparison with a new ad hoc corpus that is being collected after the Paris Attacks. It will include most of the newspapers collected in 2013 published in the three months following the attack. According to the MdCADS methodology (Partington 2010), these corpora will be used to conduct quantitative and qualitative investigations of discourse features related to the idea of diversity and “the broader societal and political framework in which such discourse is embedded” (Schäffner 1996: 201), shunting back and forward from numbers and statistical information to qualitative findings and evaluations to identify “the relationship between instance and system, between the typical and the exceptional, between signal and noise” (Partington 2004).