Social activities and the process of profiling the social world. The case of the right-wing and liberal interpretation of the situation on the Polish-Belarusian border

When in the second half of 2021 the situation on the Polish-Belarusian border rapidly inflamed, it became a subject of numerous articles published in major opinion weeklies of different ideological orientations. Their analysis using the profiling concept developed by Jerzy Bartmiński allowed to reveal two alternative profiles of people trying to cross Polish border from Belarus (illegal immigrant versus refugee) and different images of the social world hidden behind them, manifested in ideological (right-wing and liberal) language codes. According to J. Bartmiński’s concept, profiling is reconstructable practically in every text of culture, and the reconstruction of profiling makes it possible to obtain a cognitive definition, i.e. one that allows to present the way the speakers understand the events of the social world, the ways of ordering, categorizing and evaluating them. The reconstructed profiles were used in the analysed texts to generate different action patterns (defense of sovereignty versus helping people in a humanitarian crisis), which, however, have a common area, which is identifying the figure of external enemy and inner traitor.