Culpability in discourse. Circulations and controversies in European public spheres

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS FOR ISSUE No. 2/2027 - De Europa, European and Global Studies Journal

Culpability in discourse. Circulations and controversies in European public spheres

Issue coordinated by Francesca Bisiani, Lecturer and Researcher at the Catholic University of Lille and Alicia Mâzouz, Professor at the Catholic University of Lille and Associate Researcher at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University

The mere mention of the word culpability is enough to evoke a whole set of representations inherited from law, morality, and psychology, as though these fields naturally possessed a monopoly over its meaning. Within European criminal law traditions, culpability constitutes one of the conditions of legal responsibility: it makes it possible to establish the imputability of an act and to legally characterize a criminal offense. Associated with transgression and the judicial response to criminal conduct (Saint-Gérard, 2000), culpability thus refers to relatively stable frameworks of definition. In psychology, the concept has been the subject of numerous debates and is frequently examined in relation to related notions such as responsibility (Scarfone, 2003), reparation (Graton & Ric, 2017), and shame (Ciccone & Ferrant, 2023).

Yet, in contemporary societies, culpability can no longer be regarded as a fixed or unequivocal category. It is constructed, negotiated, displaced, and continually reconfigured through media, political, judicial, institutional, and digital discourses that contribute to its circulation within the public sphere. Far from being merely a legal or moral designation, culpability emerges as a discursive construct shaped by power relations, conflicts of interpretation, and competing processes of attributing responsibility.

This call for contributions therefore proposes an examination of the European and transnational circulation of discourses of and about culpability, as well as the discursive mechanisms through which culpability is constructed, disseminated, contested, or overturned. Particular attention may be devoted to the language, narratives, and media, institutional, or digital frameworks that contribute to the production of figures of the culpable party, the victim, and the responsible actor within contemporary public spheres.

What discourses make possible the processes of accusation, exoneration, or the reassignment of responsibility? Culpability is embedded in discursive operations that structure relations of legitimacy and shape social positions. It may be assigned, displaced, redirected toward others, or erased from public narratives. From both activist and journalistic perspectives, Mona Chollet (2024) has notably shown how certain contemporary forms of internalized or experienced culpabilization disproportionately affect women, children, and individuals in workplace environments, revealing underlying dynamics of control, normalization, and social sanction.

Without limiting itself to these approaches, this special issue seeks to examine the discursive forms of culpability across different social spheres and the power relations they expose.

In accordance with the editorial mission of De Europa, this special issue seeks to foster a multidisciplinary, European, and multilingual reflection on the discursive forms of culpability.

While its initial framework is grounded in the fields of linguistics and law, the issue also welcomes contributions from sociology, psychology, art, and other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, with the aim of bringing together diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of discourses, practices, and representations of culpability in contemporary societies. Contributions may be situated within, but are not limited to, the following thematic areas:

1. Culpability and Criminal Proceedings

Legal and institutional frameworks provide a privileged vantage point from which to observe contemporary forms of the construction, attribution, and circulation of culpability. Contributions may examine the discursive mechanisms through which fault is acknowledged, contested, displaced, or reassigned within judicial proceedings, as well as the effects of these processes on the individuals involved. Particular attention may be given to situations of secondary victimization, otherwise known as victim blaming, in which victims are confronted with explicit or implicit forms of doubt, disqualification, or blame.

Discourses surrounding violence against women, and more broadly violence experienced by victims, provide a particularly fertile field of analysis in this regard. Judicial settings are not merely spaces for the establishment of facts; they are also arenas in which competing narratives are negotiated, different interpretations of events come into conflict, and the figures of the victim, the accused, and the responsible party are constructed.

The French context also constitutes a particularly rich field of inquiry, owing both to the numerous recent and expected judgments of the European Court of Human Rights concerning France and to innovative positions adopted by domestic courts, such as the conviction of lawyer Jérémie Assous in the Depardieu case. Operational action plans and good-practice guidelines developed in cooperation with courts and victim-support organisations also provide valuable material for legal and linguistic analyses.

The debates generated in France by the proposed SURE bill illustrate some of these tensions. Presented in part as a response to the congestion of criminal courts through the use of expedited procedures, the proposal has been criticized for weakening the principle of oral proceedings and reducing the opportunities afforded to victims to be heard.These controversies highlight the discursive issues surrounding the recognition of violence, the attribution of responsibility, and the very conditions under which lived experiences become visible within the judicial sphere.

Contributions may therefore examine the language, narratives, silences, and counter-discourses that accompany violence, the mechanisms through which victims are accused or discredited, and the argumentative resources mobilized to establish or challenge the credibility of the actors involved. The objective is to analyze the discursive forms through which responsibility, the legitimacy of speech, and various constructions of culpability are produced within contemporary judicial settings.

2.Culpability, Digital Spaces, and Technologies

Particular attention may be devoted to digital spaces, where the dynamics of virality (Paveau, 2017), self-exposure, and collective participation profoundly reconfigure the mechanisms of attribution, responsibility, and culpability. Social media platforms facilitate the circulation of diffuse, amplified, and sometimes anonymized forms of accusation, while simultaneously blurring the boundaries between individual and collective responsibility. Membership in online communities, the mediation of the screen, and the possibilities afforded by anonymity transform the ways in which accusation, justification, reparation, and the displacement of blame are articulated.

Contributions may therefore examine situations of online harassment, in which responsibility tends to become fragmented among multiple individuals, circulate within digital communities, or even be redirected toward the victims themselves. The discursive forms of accusation, public denunciation, disqualification, and culpabilization that accompany digital violence constitute a particularly fruitful field of inquiry in this regard. The phenomenon of online mob dynamics ('effet de meute') may also constitute a specific object of analysis, as collective participation amplifies and redistributes blame in digital environments.

The trial that resulted, in November 2025, in the conviction of nine cyberharassers of actress Tiphaine D. provides a particularly illuminating example of these dynamics. As the target of a campaign of mass online harassment for defending and promoting an artistic, political, and activist reimagining of the French language known as féminine universelle (“universal feminine”), she came to be portrayed within digital spaces as the very embodiment of transgression and, consequently, as the alleged cause of the violence directed against her. The judicial process then became the site of a reversal in this attribution of culpability: whereas digital discourses portrayed the victim as blameworthy, the judicial institution reaffirmed the responsibility of those who had participated in the harassment. Situations of this kind invite examination of the discursive processes through which culpability is constructed, displaced, distributed, or reversed in contemporary digital environments.

Contributions may also explore the role of emerging technologies and artificial intelligence in these discursive reconfigurations of culpability. Algorithmic systems, surveillance technologies, recommendation engines, and predictive tools contribute to the emergence of new figures of risk, suspicion, and the anticipation of wrongdoing within the public sphere. They therefore invite renewed reflection on the conditions under which responsibility is attributed, on contemporary forms of social judgment, and on the new discursive regimes through which culpability is produced and negotiated.

3.Culpability and the Accusation of Institutions

Contributions may also examine the discursive tensions that accompany processes through which victims, responsible parties, or institutions perceived as failing in their duties are identified and designated. Particular attention may be paid to the ways in which certain actors are constructed as bearers of responsibility, as objects of protection, or, conversely, as targets of more or less explicit forms of accusation within the public sphere.

Contemporary discourses surrounding childhood provide a particularly fruitful context for analyzing mechanisms of culpabilization and the discursive negotiation of responsibility. Controversies concerning educational practices, debates about parenting, and the emergence of “no kids” discourse all contribute to the reconfiguration of the boundaries between protection, innocence, autonomy, and responsibility. These discourses generate competing representations of the child, who may be portrayed either as a vulnerable figure in need of protection or as an actor capable of being held responsible and, in some cases, indirectly accountable for certain situations.

The reactions provoked in France by several investigations into allegations of violence in extracurricular and after-school settings illustrate the complexity of these dynamics. These cases have given rise to discursive confrontations among institutions, families, advocacy groups, and sector professionals, generating competing narratives concerning the characterization of the alleged acts, the attribution of responsibility, and the recognition of harm. In some instances, they have led to reciprocal accusations, collective public statements, or mobilizations aimed at defending categories of actors who had been publicly called into question. Such situations invite analysis of the discursive processes through which the figures of the child victim, the responsible adult, the negligent parent, or the institution deemed culpable are constructed.

These avenues of inquiry, however, do not exhaust the diversity of contemporary forms of culpabilization. Contributions may also address culpability associated with work, family life, social success, health, or contemporary pressures toward performance and self-fulfillment. They may examine the discourses that produce, reinforce, or challenge these diffuse forms of culpability, which are often internalized and pervasive within contemporary societies.

Finally, this special issue seeks to encourage comparative and transnational approaches that examine the circulation of discursive norms of culpability across Europe. Contributions may analyze how different national contexts construct, mediate, negotiate, or contest the figures of the culpable party, the victim, and the responsible actor. Particular attention may be paid to the effects of legal, political, media, and cultural frameworks on these processes of categorization and attribution, as well as to the circulation of discursive models that contribute to redefining the boundaries of culpability in contemporary societies.

Submission Guidelines

An abstract of approximately 300 words (excluding references), along with five keywords, must be submitted in French and in one of the journal’s other languages (Italian, English, or Spanish) to the following address: redazione.deeuropa@unito.it

with copies sent to: francesca.bisiani@univ-catholille.fr
and alicia.mazouz@univ-catholille.fr

Articles corresponding to accepted proposals must be submitted to the same address by September 20, 2026.

Author guidelines are available at:

http://www.deeuropa.unito.it/content/Submit_an_article

Key Dates

September 20, 2026 – Deadline for submission of abstracts.

October 15, 2026 – Notification of acceptance sent to authors.

January 1, 2027 – Submission of full articles for the double-blind peer-review process (5,000–7,000 words).

April 16, 2027 - Review comments/corrections returned to authors.

June 11, 2027 - Submission of final revised versions of articles.

December, 2027 – Publication of the journal.