Marburg
Germany
Organised by Luciana Radut-Gaghi, Christine Barats and Johannes Angermuller, le Séminaire DiscoursNet Paris invites you to send expressions of interest to send in contributions for a panel on "Is There a French Discourse Analysis? Traditions, Travels and Appropriations of a “School”"
This panel will take place within the DiscourseNet Congress "Discursive Imaginaries of Change: Heterotopias, Power, Knowledge, and the "Great Transformation"" at Marburg Germany 19-21 July 2027.
Please try to get in touch with Luciana Radut-Gaghi <luciana.radut-gaghi@cyu.fr> and Johannes Angermuller <angermue45@googlemail.com> by the 28th of October with your preliminary ideas. You would then need to submit your title and abstract on the conference website by 31/10/2026. You will find more information about the congress themese here: https://discourseanalysis.net/DNC2027.
Panel description:
"Is There a French Discourse Analysis? Traditions, Travels and Appropriations of a “School”"
“French discourse analysis” circulates internationally as a recognisable label, alongside Critical Discourse Analysis and the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse. Yet its unity is far from obvious. Born at the crossroads of Pêcheux’s automatic discourse analysis, Foucault’s archaeology and the linguistics of enunciation, it has since branched into textometry, argumentation, the study of formulas and institutional discourse, digital discourse, and a distinct tradition within information and communication sciences. Abroad, it has been read through partial translations and selective receptions, much like the “French Theory” that never existed as such in France (Cusset, 2003; Angermuller, 2015).
This symposium turns the question into an object: is “French discourse analysis” a school, a national tradition, a francophone network, or an export label produced by its own circulation? The question engages directly with the congress’s interest in power, knowledge and epistemic orders. The hierarchy between English-language discourse studies and other traditions decides which concepts travel, which are translated and which remain local. Asking whether there is a “French” analysis is therefore also asking whose knowledge counts in our own field, including within the francophone world, where Paris can itself act as a centre for its peripheries.
The symposium unfolds over two sessions. The first, “Tradition”, reconstructs the genealogy of the field and asks what holds it together (the primacy of the corpus, interdiscourse, the materiality of language, a distrust of the sovereign subject), then follows its travels and receptions, in France’s francophone peripheries and beyond, read as successive discursive appropriations. The second, “Today”, examines what is being done under this name now: the analysis of native digital discourse, the renewal of corpus methods from textometry to AI-assisted argument mining, and the study of institutional and political discourse in information and communication sciences. It asks whether these new objects and tools extend the tradition, transform it, or dissolve it into an international discourse studies.
Held in French, Spanish and English and open to dialogue with other traditions, the symposium does not defend a national label. It seeks to make visible both the continuities of a tradition and the transformations that its circulation and renewal perform.