Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

D’après Georges Simmel, le conflit est inhérent à la société. Désignant des situations antagonistes entre deux ou plusieurs personnes, il contribuerait, selon l’auteur, à l’unité de la société. Différents conflits interpersonnels existent, dont celui du duel et de la discussion. Lorsque les opposants entrent en duel, ils recherchent en premier lieu la réussite personnelle. Pour y parvenir, la communication entre les sujets est souvent synonyme d’expression, « chacun cherchant d’abord, non pas l’interlocution mais la possibilité de parler ». En fin de compte, c’est moins l’individu auquel on est confronté que l’on a envie d’entendre que la possibilité de pouvoir s’exprimer ou d’agir soi-même. Dans une discussion, telle qu’entendue par Jürgen Habermas, il s’agit d’abord de tendre vers une victoire commune. Dans leurs interactions, les interlocuteurs partagent leurs idées, leurs arguments en vue d’aboutir à ce qu’ils estiment être le meilleur pour eux grâce à la recherche de vérité, de justesse et de sincérité. Aujourd’hui, nous sommes davantage tournés vers une société d’expression plutôt qu’une société de discussion , laquelle reste, aux yeux de nombreux scientifiques, un modèle trop idéal pour trouver une application concrète dans la vie de tous les jours. S’inscrivant pleinement dans la culture de notre société, le sport est considéré comme une pratique sociale ordinaire. Or, en portant notre attention sur les rapports que les adversaires entretiennent entre eux à l’occasion de leur affrontement sportif, il nous a été possible de faire un double constat : il est d’abord des conflits entre opposants qui sont le reflet de la société actuelle (c’est le cas du football). Le monde sportif offre par ailleurs l’occasion de développer une autre forme de communication entre adversaires, celle d’une « société de discussion » : c’est le cas de l’affrontement tennistique. / According to Georges Simmel, conflict is inherent in society. In establishing conflict situations between two or more people, it helps to achieve, according to Simmel, unity in society. There are different types of interpersonal conflict, including the duel and the discussion. When two opponents take part in a duel, they are seeking, first and foremost, personal success. To achieve this, the communication between the two individuals is often synonymous with expression, “each seeking primarily, not to communicate but to be able to speak.” Ultimately, it is not so much that they want to hear the other person speak as having the opportunity of speaking or acting themselves. In a discussion, as understood by Jürgen Habermas, the primary aim is to work towards a common victory. Through their interaction, the speakers share their ideas and arguments in order to achieve what they believe is best for them through a quest for truth, fairness and sincerity. Today we are more oriented towards an expression society rather than a discussion society, the latter model being, in the view of many scientists, too much of an ideal to have any practical application in everyday life. Sport is part and parcel of the culture of our society, and is deemed to be an ordinary social practice. However, if we focus on the relationships between opponents during their sporting clash, we can make two observations: not just that interpersonal conflicts are a reflection of today’s society, as in the case of football; but also that the world of sport provides an opportunity to develop another form of communication between adversaries: that of a “discussion society”, which finds its fullest expression in competitive tennis.

A l'occasion de deux recherches menées autour de la question de l'éducation à l'environnement et au développement durable nous avons pu observer que ce champ était exposé à des controverses de tous ordres : scientifiques, éthiques, politiques, techniques, etc… autant que piégé par toutes sortes de représentations sociales fondées ou erronées. Le corollaire pratique de ces controverses a été le recours au débat comme moyen de mieux comprendre les enjeux en présence, de dépasser les représentations « automatiques » ou « aveugles » de la réalité afin de prendre des décisions raisonnables. Notre problématique porte sur l'identification des conditions d'efficacité du débat réglé et argumenté, et sur l'observation des mécanismes qui permettent au débat de servir de cadre pour l'apprentissage à la mise en problème, à la co construction de savoirs et à l'éducation à la citoyenneté dans et hors l'école, mais aussi dans les organisations, depuis les associations jusqu'aux entreprises. Notre thèse est qu'il existe, dans la forme même des débats et plus largement des échanges langagiers, une articulation génératrice d'apprentissages et de volonté d'agir, entre d'une part les types d'arguments élaborés et exposés par les locuteurs et d'autre part la manière dont s'effectuent les échanges. Autrement dit, il existe une relation d'ordre cognitif entre effort de rationalisation au niveau des argumentations et effort de communication au niveau des interactions langagières. / On the occasion of two researches around the issue of environmental education and sustainable development we have seen that this field was exposed to all kinds of controversy: scientific, ethical, political, technical, etc. as well as trapped by all kinds of social representations based or erroneous. The practical corollary of this controversy was the use of debate as a means to better understand the issues at stake, beyond the representations of "automatic" or "blind" to reality in order to make reasonable decisions.Our problem concerns the identification of the conditions of efficiency and reasoned debate settled, and observation mechanisms that allow the debate to provide a framework for learning the setting problem, the co-construction of knowledge and citizenship education in and out of school, but also in organizations, from associations to businesses. Our work will focus on describing these conditions and lead to the development of a typology of debates according to criteria of greater or lesser efficiency in terms of problematization, co-construction of knowledge and effective action. Our thesis is that there exists, in the form of debates and more broadly language exchanges, generating a joint learning and willingness to act, on the one hand between the types of arguments developed and presented by the speakers and secondly how to perform the exchange. In other words, there is a relationship between cognitive rationalization at the level of argumentation and communication efforts at linguistic interactions.

Within the last three decades, contemporary North America came to reinvent a socially focused genre of literary personal narratives. These new editorial and writing projects, published in the form of collections of personal narratives, emerged as a tool for the socially voiceless to secure some measure of agency in their contemporary social and cultural situation. Projects such as the Freedom Writers’ Diary or volumes of the Voice of Witness book series fit in the process that is currently labeled social empowerment. Witnesses express a deep urge to share their story in the hope to denounce their experience of an enduring social injustice. The written word, primary a means for self-disclosure, serves to exorcise the suffering associated to this specific predicament. The narrators engage in a powerful self-investigative gesture oriented towards resilience and renewed enfranchisement in regaining control over their life and environment. At the moment of publication, however, these testimonies come to be validated as authentic examples of the injustices they disclose. These examples serve an educational purpose: raising the audience’s awareness and opening deliberative fora for these issues to be discussed and for solutions to be hammered out and eventually implemented. <p>The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a theoretical model for the subgenre of testimonials of social empowerment. With the concept of empowerment as groundwork, the model develops a textual approach framed in a psychosocial structure. I argue that testimonials may be described as examples of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action. As speech acts aimed at reaching understanding, testimonials capitalize both on the binding and bonding aspects of illocutionary force in the hope to secure with their audience an ongoing dialogue over issues of social justice. The volumes, as unofficial public spheres, mobilize the normative and practical dynamics at work in social movements. These dynamics express as two narrative guiding threads: an aesthetic based on impact, and an ethics based on responsibility. The texts’ aesthetic develops a form of perlocutionary realism instantiating a sense of authenticity and sincerity embodied in the narrators’ voices. The resulting impact is coupled to moral concerns based on a polysemic understanding of social responsibility, on which narrators seek to build their narratives’ ethical potential. A series of case studies allowed to demonstrate that both narrative threads are realized as an appropriation of four paradigmatic forms of rhetorical ethos, each based on a specific realm of the social world: intimacy, justice, spirituality and activism.<p> / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished