Strategies and tactics of polemical exchanges: The play of minorization/de-minorization in public hearings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Broadly debated in various public arenas, the ‘reasonable accommodation’ controversy has emerged on the advocacy agenda in Quebec (Canada), raising heated disagreements about religious minorities’ rights and practices, and passionate discussions about policies governing the management of religious diversity. While borrowed from the legal domain, the concept of reasonable accommodation moved beyond its origin and became the subject of various inquiries in communication studies and sociology, raising questions such as the media’s role in transforming the debate into a social crisis, the sexist representation of women and the racializing implications of the debate. However, the literature omitted the inherent dialogical nature of the debate and consequently missed identifying the communicative tactics employed by protagonists of the debate. The analytical and conceptual tools offered by conversation and argumentation analysis have not been used to clarify the discursive mechanisms of this controversy. This article fills this gap and examines the verbal and non-verbal interactions occurring during an important yet understudied instance of public debate: the public hearings that took place in Quebec, Canada, between May 2010 and January 2011, within the framework of public consultations on Bill 94. The article contributes to an understanding of the communicative strategies that influence public debates and their tactics: polarization and the processes of minorization and de-minorization. Findings show that polarization could be schematized according to two axes: one opposing partisans of an open secularism and partisans of a ‘republican’ secularism and one confronting justification based on gender equality, and justifications based on the principle of state neutrality. The findings also reveal that public hearings are not only an arena in which those possessing institutional power define who counts as minoritarian and who does not, they are also arenas in which those that are seen to be the ‘others’, can challenge the established structures of power and formulate alternative narratives of heir realities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.024 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".