La construcción discursiva de la identidad en los nuevos movimientos sociales: el caso español del 15M.

Abstract

The main objective of this Doctoral Thesis is to contribute to the study of discursive construction of identity in social movements, delving into the characteristics of the new social movement, the processes of construction of identity and the discourse dimension of identity.

For this, discourse and social movements will be reflected upon through a review of the fundamental concepts of identity, and the current phenomenon will tried to be understood through a study of the precedent movements. Therefore, the 15M movement will be addressed after a study of the evolution of social mobilization theory. Likewise, the thesis will delve into the discourse dimension of politics, and the relationship between discourse and society and discourse and political identity will be delved on. Furthermore, this work will place the new social mobilization within the digital sphere, and will try to offer a first look into the new forms of political action and organization developed in the net society, and tries to understand the influence of the Internet and the ICT in the ways of organization of the 15M movement. Lastly, the validation of the rhetoric method as a model of analysis of political discourse will be tried.

The study of the discursive construction of identity in social mobilizations will be conducted through the analysis of discourses produced in the 15M movement. The 15M movement is the object of study of this research work due to its characteristic as a social movement, and agent of change in the democratic context, of being a new political actor that begins a struggle for power and social transformation through a re-definition of reality, manifests linguistically, and uses the language as a political actor to participate and influence the political debate.

To study the discourse construction of identity in social mobilizations, this work will analyze the main calls to convene of the 15M movement in Spain from 2011 to 2013. The methodological design has been structured in an analysis of the discourses of mobilization in two phases of the movement. The object of study is addresses in the first phase, as it discusses the birth of the 15M movement, and in the second phase, the development of the 15M movement in the following two years, is studied.

The methodology used is a qualitative method of analysis that is based on canonical precepts of Aristotelian rhetoric that comprises the macro-textual and micro-textual dimensions. Through the rhetoric method, a systematic analysis of the 15M movement’s discourses is conducted, structured according to the classic precepts of Aristotelian rhetoric and linguistic analysis. The analysis is structured following the canonical precepts: intellectio, inventio, dispositio and elocutio; and the persuasion foundations ethos, logos and pathos, and the tripartite structural arrangement exordium, narratio and peroratio. The linguistic analysis is comprised by narrative, linguistic and paralinguistic strategies, catering to the linguistic varieties, morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic resources.