Controversy as a Social Performance [Observing the positions surrounding the Harper’s Magazine Letter: is the debate about free speech?]

The Thesis aims to discover whether the positions shaped around the controversy of the Harper’s Magazine Letter result in mere disagreements concerning the right of free speech, or if they reveal shared assumptions. Such shared assumptions consist in the structure and in the dynamics on which the debate is grounded: in order to prove it, a theoretical conceptualization has been first formulated, and later applied to the data through a coding process. The data are opinion articles published after the Letter and the following dispute begun to circulate online; the research design reflects the technique of the grounded theory. The coding procedure, based on the theoretical themes, reveals how the concepts explain the different positions emerging from the data, overlapping among them. Mapping the controversy is such way helps to further investigate the entity of debates as social performances.