Strategies and tactics of polemical exchanges: The play of minorization/de-minorization in public hearings

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.