L’influence de la crise pandémique sur l’approche économique de la formation d’adultes dans les politiques de l’Union européenne : Analyse critique du discours de textes institutionnels européens (2011-2025)

Details

Supervisors

Bussi, Margherita

Faculty

Faculté des sciences de l'éducation

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de l'éducation, à finalité spécialisée (horaire décalé)

Abstract

enThis master's thesis, situated in the field of educational sciences, examines what the pandemic crisis changed in the economic approach to adult learning in European Union policies. It asks to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic altered the discursive, normative and axiological foundations of these policies, or whether it instead intensified a pre-existing economistic framing. The research draws on Critical Discourse Analysis, mainly Wodak's discourse-historical approach, applied to a corpus of fourteen institutional texts issued by the Commission, the Council and the Parliament between 2011 and 2025, supplemented by the Treaty of Lisbon. The two sub-corpora, pre- and post-pandemic, are systematically compared, and the analysis is complemented by a lexical count addressing the gendered dimension of the discourse. The findings suggest an intensification through the layering of discursive registers rather than a paradigm shift: the discursive layers added after 2020 (resilience, twin transition, social rights) re-legitimise a skills paradigm inherited from Lisbon without altering its hierarchy of aims. The thesis proposes the concept of "inclusive and resilient neoliberalism" to characterise this configuration, documents the silences of the discourse (structural determinants of participation, the care economy) and draws implications for research as well as for adult education in French-speaking Belgium.