Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis - Ruth Wodak & Michael Meyer (eds.)

Wodak Ruth & Michael Meyer, eds. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2009.

Each chapter presents a different approach to critical discourse analysis from influential researchers in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis and the 'CDA Group' where the uniting concepts of this heterogeneous, eclectic field of investigating social phenomenon are power, ideology, and critique.  Principles include interdisciplinary problem-orientated approaches, making ideologies and power transparent,  and making research positions explicit through self-reflection. Most approaches assume linguistic background knowledge and position the researcher as advocate.  As presented by Wodak and Meyer in the introduction, the main research agenda of CDA is to analyze, understand, and explain the following:

• the impact of the Knowledge Based Economy and its recontextualization
• new phenomena in media and transnational developments
• the impact/change of modes and genres according to new spatio-temporal conceptions

...while integrating:

• cognitive approaches and differing epistemologies
• qualitative & quantitative methods (11)

The approaches in the chapters that follow are quite diverse including:

Dispositive Analysis (DA) from Siegfried Jäger and Florentine Maier
Socicognitive Approach (SCA) within Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) from Teun van Dijk
Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) from Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak
Corpus Linguistics Approach (CLA) from Gerlinde Mautner
Social Actors Approach (SAA) from Theo van Leeuwen
Dialectical-Relational Approach (DRA) from Norman Fairclough

#Discourse #ResearchMethods #Power #Empire #Language #Multi-modal