What are the central structural and procedural characteristics of civil society communication in relation to social cohesion? The main focus of the research unit is on semantic, pragmatic and persuasive aspects in the public and internal communication of civil society actors. The research focus is therefore on the analysis of concrete discourse elements: Which interpretive frames are foregrounded in the communication of political ideas? Which metaphors are dominant in relation to core concepts such as social cohesion or resilience?

The aim of this research unit is to answer the following questions:

• How do civil society institutions constitute a “we” or a community? Who should or needs to be held together?
• How are these conceptualizations of social cohesion articulated? Are certain scripts and frames or metaphor complexes salient? How are these acts of inclusion and exclusion realized linguistically?
• What narratives are dominant in discourses around social cohesion? Are these related to crisis or disaster narratives?
• What is the relationship between discourses of cohesion in society as a whole and in civil society?
• Does civil society take up narratives and patterns of argumentation from public discourses and to what extent does civil society influence public discourse?

To address our research questions, we will combine qualitative and quantitative discourse and content analytical methods, including automated text analyses, such as sentiment mining, topic modeling, and topical network analysis.