Learning by Research

Thesis Title: Ethnographic and argumentative study of a protest movement to the "MAP for all" : between claim and dissimulation

Emmanuel Macron, who favoured the amendment of the bioethical law of 2011, made medically assisted reproduction (MAP) accessible to all women a key measure of his presidential program during 2017 campaigns. Currently, these medical procreation techniques were only accessible to heterosexual couples, married or not, of childbearing age and able to prove that they have been living together for over two years. By revising article 1 of the bioethical law (relating, among other things, to MAP), it was then a question of extending the conditions of access to couples of women and to single women, which, as a result, comes to remove the medical criterion of a certified infertility within a couple. This legislative process is the subject of much debate and controversy in France. The collective of twenty-one associations "Marchons enfants!", formed for the occasion, has asserted its strong opposition to this bill and its willingness to mobilize in order to make the French government back down and ultimately, to try abort this legislation.As part of the field of linguistics, and more particularly of critical sociolinguistics, the present research work consists in studying these discourses of opposition and contestation in the face of this possible change in reproductive and sexual rights. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, which leads to the collection of data from several activist associations (La Manif pour tous, Alliance Vita and the Catholic Family Associations) between early December 2018 and end of January 2020, this study aims to deconstruct these oppositonal discourses in order to understand what discursive strategies and ideologies are mobilized for the purpose of persuasion and to question the conditions of this militant expression in the public debate.

Key Words: Critical sociolinguistic, Ethnography, Speech analysis, Argumentation, Protest discourse

Doctoral School: ED LLSH - Langues, Littératures et Sciences Humaines
Research Laboratory:  Laboratoire de linguistique et didactique des langues étrangères et maternelles (LIDILEM – UGA)
Thesis Supervision: Claudine MOÏSE and Dominique LAGORGETTE

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