1.1 General Definition of CDA, CDS and CDA/CDS
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA1), along with Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), is a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement, school, or field ( Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 3) which studies language and other semiotic systems in use and subsumes “a variety of approaches, each with different theoretical models, research methods and agenda” (Fairclough, Mulderrig, & Wodak, 2011: 357). It is interested in “analyzing hidden, opaque, and visible structures of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language” (Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 12). Its objective is to examine critically the relationship between language, ideology , power and social structure, for example, social inequality as it is constructed, re-produced, legitimized, and resisted in language and other modes of communication.
CDA emerged after a small symposium in Amsterdam as a loosely networked group of scholars in the 1990s and has since then developed into a broadly based international program with a set of approaches that explores the relationships between discourse (language use) and the people who create and use it, and the social and political contexts, structures, and practices in which it occurs. It aims ( Flowerdew and Richardson (2018: 1) “to advance our understanding of how discourse figures in social processes, social figures, and social change”. By critically studying discourse, it emphasizes the way in which language is implicated in issues such as power and ideology that determine how language is used, what effect it has, and how it reflects, serves, and furthers the interests, positions, perspectives, and values of those who are in power. From this point of view, discourse perpetuates social patterns like domination, discrimination, exploitation, dehumanization, naturalization, and (ideologically driven) ‘common sense’—unless its usually hidden effects are exposed so that awareness, resistance, emancipation and social action can bring about social change and social justice. Thus, CDA typically is ‘normative’, in that it judges what is right and what is wrong and “addresses social wrongs in their discursive aspects and possible ways of righting or mitigating them” (Fairclough, 2010: 11).
While we have been using CDA up to now in this introduction, we must note briefly that some scholars have begun to use the acronym CDS (for Critical Discourse Studies) for various reasons, such as to denote the expansion of CDA into a larger transdisciplinary/cross-disciplinary research domain, and/or to convey a rejection of language or language-based analysis as its major focus (see further discussion in Sect. 4.1). This means that CDS has recently replaced CDA for some (but not all) major scholars in the field in their most recent publications. In this book (see below Sect. 1.3 and Chaps. 2 and 3) we are taking a historical look at CDA, starting from its origins in Critical Linguistics (CritLing) in the 1970s to its development into CDA in the 1990s and early 2000s, to currently, when it is referred to as either CDA or CDS or both (and we use either one in our discussion, depending on the scholar or approach). And when we talk about general trends in this research area, we use our own acronym ‘CDA/CDS’, which recognizes the historical and intellectual ties between them and at the same time is a more inclusive way of referring to all the scholars and all the approaches in this domain.
As we will see, many of the statements in these three opening paragraphs (and not just the issue of CDA vs. CDS) are highly contested, not only by those who have had sometimes very strong critiques of CDA/CDS (see Chap. 5), but also by those who practice it. There are many different approaches to CDA/CDS and not all their adherents agree with others on basic questions or even recognize their affinity with each other. As said above, scholars differ on whether or not language (or linguistics) should be central and, as a result, some bring in semiotic and multimodal approaches which deal with the meaning potential of modes besides language and analyze them differently. Furthermore, scholars differ in their definitions of the terminology they use (e.g., ‘discourse’, ‘critical’, ‘context ’). These, and other differences will be discussed in Chap. 4 and elsewhere, but for a more detailed description see Wodak and Meyer (2016a).
an interest in the properties of ‘naturally occurring’ language use by real language users (instead of a study of abstract language systems and invented examples)
a focus on larger units than isolated words and sentences, and hence, new basic units of analysis: texts, discourses, conversations, speech acts, or communicative events
the extension of linguistics beyond sentence grammar towards a study of action and interaction
the extension to non-verbal (semiotic , multimodal, visual) aspects of interaction and communication: gestures, images, film, the internet and multimedia
a focus on dynamic (socio)-cognitive or interactional moves and strategies
the study of the functions of (social, cultural, situative [situated] and cognitive) contexts of language use.
an analysis of a vast number of phenomena of text grammar and language use: coherence, anaphora, topics, macrostructures, speech acts, interactions, turn-taking, signs, politeness, argumentation, rhetoric, mental models and many other aspects of text and discourse.
They also go on to say that “the significant difference between DS and CDS (or CDA) lies in the constitutive problem-oriented, interdisciplinary approach of the latter, apart from endorsing all of the above points” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 2)—as well as its critical stance. These will be discussed throughout this book, but we would like to note here that some scholars also refer to this approach as “multidisciplinary” (e.g., van Dijk, 1998, 2009, 2016), “cross-disciplinary” (Wodak, 2001) or “transdisciplinary” (see Fairclough, 2009, 2015) when referring to CDA/CDS, or at least their own approach to CDA. In addition, Wodak and Meyer (2009a, 2009b/2016a, 2016b) distinguish between “interdisciplinary” as characteristic of the “theoretical framework ” as a whole vs. its application to “the collection and analysis of data” (see Sect. 4.5 for more on this in relation to Wodak’s discourse-historical approach). We have decided to use inter-/multi-/cross-/trans-disciplinary interchangeably, in relation to the way that scholars we discuss use the terms themselves, without differentiation and without attempting to take sides. In this case, we adhere to the adage “let a thousand flowers bloom”.
In principle, CDA/CDS can be used in relation to any type of topic, in any type of discourse, in any type of medium (discourse modality), adopting a variety of types of methodology —although a given CDA/CDS scholar or group of analysts will prefer/focus on one or more of these, according to their own predilections. With these provisos in mind, we can say that many of the topics that CDA/CDS takes up include the unjust or biased treatment of people based on differences (e.g. religion, race, sexual orientation, gender , social (or socioeconomic) class/status, nationality/citizenship status and stereotyping) and the related use of language, discourse and other semiotic phenomena by groups (e.g. Wall Street CEOs, corporations, Mafia, politicians, governments, media) to gain power, stay in power, or oppress minority groups. In addition, much CDA/CDS work often focuses on capitalism, globalization, and/or neoliberalism (which are all highly inter-connected), as well as nationalism, language planning/policy and pedagogy, including the analysis of teaching materials and policy documents, and more recently, environmental (climate change) discourse. These are treated in a wide variety of discourse contexts including media discourse of all types (e.g. film, newspapers, TV news broadcasts, internet, email, social media—e.g., Twitter and other social media), as well as elite, literary, and narrative discourses, government policy meetings, advertising, legal/courtroom, medical, cross-/inter-/transcultural, parental/family discourses and conversational interaction. The discourse modalities studied are equally wide: e.g., written texts, monomodal and multimodal texts, visual, oral/aural/spoken, musical, natural/mechanical, etc.—although the majority of work in CDA/CDS is on linguistic and visual modalities.
1.2 Three Recent Examples of CDA/CDS
In order to grasp more concretely what CDA/CDS is and does, we begin by giving brief synopses of three recently published articles, which in no way represent all approaches; rather, they provide a quick glance at both how CDA/CDS works and three different trends in the field. In doing so, our intention is not to restrict the description of the field to only these specific applications of CDA, but rather to aid readers in understanding the range of research being done that calls itself CDA or CDS. Furthermore, the examples illustrate CDA/CDS and its use and need in society as well as the different types of topics and issues covered and the range of countries and disciplines of CDA/CDS scholars. The articles were chosen as suitable examples of CDA/CDS based on the following criteria: (1) The article specifically mentions CDA or CDS and clearly fits within our definitions of what CDA/CDS is and does; (2) The article was published in 2018, the year much of this book was written in order to show the most recent trends and issues, and in a well-regarded journal ; (3) The three examples together represent different topics, as well as genders, nationalities and locations of the authors; (4) The articles vary in theoretical framework and disciplines of interest; and (5) The articles represent high-quality research that poses important and interesting questions for our readers to ponder. In our discussion below we use some technical terminology that is contained in the articles and which we will define later in the book.
1.2.1 “Fabricating the American Dream in US media Portrayals of Syrian Refugees: A Discourse Analytical Study” (Bhatia & Jenks, 2018)
This first example by two associate professors of English from Hong Kong Polytechnic university—Aditi Bhatia and Christopher J. Jenks—investigates media portrayals of refugees within the context of the ‘American Dream’ and argues that the political climate in the era of President Trump of the US (2017-present) demands a new understanding of “how the refugee construct is connected vis-à-vis the political rhetoric of the Trump Administration, as well as to the Syrian refugee crisis” (2018: 221). The authors analyze opinion, editorial, and news pieces from American mainstream media as well as independent news sources from both liberal and conservative perspectives. Selected data focuses on Syrian refugees or refugees in the context of the Syrian war and is examined in terms of: (1) Historicity (e.g., how events are recontextualized based on how participants connect actions to the past); (2) Linguistic and semiotic action (e.g., conceptualisations of the world via critical metaphor analysis); and (3) Social impact (e.g., the categorizations of people according to the way they are represented in the text ).
The analysis reveals how the American Dream is used as a rhetorical tool to inform the media’s respective audiences as to how individuals come to understand policy decisions. Furthermore, Syrian refugees are shown to fit within two largely opposing narratives: they are (a) hardworking victims of war in need of protection, or (b) a threat to American life that must be feared. Bhatia and Jenks carefully reveal the rhetorical tools by which these narratives are portrayed, demonstrating how in the case of (a), the media acts as “social educator”, evaluating the crisis through the frame of past war experiences and reminding Americans of the consequences of war; but at the same time, it invokes in audiences “not only a sense of guilt, but also the need for White saviourism” (2018: 227). This narrative represents a “humanistic perspective on the crisis while at the same time exploiting a banal understanding of the American dream” (2018: 221). In the case of (b), the authors show how the opposing narrative fits within the Trump campaign discourse of ‘Make America Great Again’ by positioning Syrian immigrants as “not great” and as a result, Americans must meet Syrians with “disdain, anger, and fear” in order to protect the “American way of life” (2018: 234). Bhatia and Jenks come to a revealing and foreboding conclusion about the value of the media in general, noting that, regardless of political affiliation, media sources compete to project their story (which typically differs from the opposing political view) and do an excellent job of persuading readers to support their viewpoint. Yet, even though they make it easy for readers to align with their view, this obviously does not mean that the media sources are trustworthy.
1.2.2 “Traces of Neoliberalism in English Teaching Materials: A Critical Discourse Analysis” (Babaii & Sheikhi, 2018)
This study by Esmat Babaii , an associate professor of applied linguistics at Kharazmi University in Iran, and Mohammad Sheikhi, who has an MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, is one of many CDA/CDS articles that take up Fairclough’s call (2015: 252, see Sect. 3.5.5) to expose neoliberal ideologies and fight back against them. Here they study those ideologies as manifested in English language textbooks used in Iranian private language institutes. Rather than taking a sweeping approach that condemns all “Western” values seen in English teaching, Babaii and Sheikhi (2018) use systematic and careful analysis to show exactly how neoliberal thinking is manifested in textbooks and how it shapes (or attempts to shape) learners’ views of the world2. In an informative discussion of neoliberalism and the way that multicultural competence is viewed as another type of human capital in a world where market values reign, the authors show how English is commonly portrayed as a commodified skill and teachers are the providers of this skill to learners. On the basis of a corpus consisting of 67% of the English language teaching materials in the language institutes of Tehran, the authors use Fairclough’s approach to analyze the constraints that are put on Iranian learners by American and British publishers on content (e.g., type or category of information provided in the books) and the relations/subjects (e.g., type of social relationships and roles ascribed to the people—aka ‘social actors’—depicted in the material). Their findings expose language examples that convey high value placed on competition among individuals, hypothetical scenarios that give importance to economic concerns over healthcare and well-being, and that in highlighting a cosmopolitan and globalized world, English-speakers are valued over non-English speakers and Anglo-American cultures/locations are shown in more positive ways and are advocated for over “Eastern” ones. The authors conclude by calling for teachers to utilize critical pedagogy to counter the “inculcation” found in the textbooks that naturalizes “partial and interested practices to facilitate the exercise and maintenance of power” (2018: 261). Hence, by teaching critical thinking and sensitizing students to the “overt as well as covert messages they encounter in the media and teaching materials”, teachers can use the textbooks they are given while employing critical pedagogy to counter the neoliberal thinking expressed in them.
1.2.3 “The Selfie as a Global Discourse” (Veum & Undrum, 2018)
This final example of recent CDA/CDS work, by Aslaug Veum , an associate professor in Text and Communication Studies at the University College of Southeast Norway, and Linda Victoria Moland Undrum (2018), who holds a Master’s degree in Text and Communication Studies and is a critical multimodal discourse analysis (CMDA, see Sect. 4.6)3 of meaning-making as it occurs through digital self-portraits known as ‘selfies’.
Utilizing CDA/CDS, social semiotics , and multimodality, and drawing on a number of scholars from these areas, the authors examine the meaning potential of the selfies with regard to Halliday’s (1994) “meta-functions” of language (discussed in Sect. 2.3.4). Additionally, their study frequently draws on Kress and van Leeuwen’s work (1996, 2001, which we discuss in detail in Sect. 2.6, especially Sect. 2.6.3). With a corpus of 100 selfies published on Instagram, the authors examined interaction with viewers via gaze and camera shot/angle, whether the person was represented within a contextualized setting and as performing an action (or not), and whether or not the images appeared to be digitally edited. The findings show that the majority of selfies are of single individuals who are largely under the age of 30 and that more women than men were selfie producers. Interestingly, most of the selfies were images of the subject in passive positions, although the few selfies that showed the subjects to be participating in an ongoing act or in essence, doing something, were of men. Typically, the selfies were shown in settings that don’t indicate time or place and are highly de-contextualized; moreover, they were also “designed, calculated and generalized” through digital editing (2018: 93).
The authors also found that the majority of the images were “demanding images” in which the person gazes directly at the viewer, and most of the images had high angles, communicating power on behalf of the viewer, and they presented themselves horizontally and frontally, with no intent of expressing power for the person in the image, but rather constructing themselves as friends. Additionally, the meaning potential of the texts balanced between making the statement of “this is me” to “this is how I want to be” (2018: 93). Text analysis revealed the common use of hashtags as well as slang and abbreviations (e.g., #wbu? [what about you?]), and a “style of the street” that conveyed a particular identity and resembled “advertising style”, as discussed by Fairclough (1992, 1995, see Sects. 3.5.4 and 3.5.5) (2018: 97). The authors conclude that image banks have influenced the visual norm of social media, leaving traces of globalization and the marketization of discourse. In essence, even though selfie-makers do not have to fulfill commercial targets such as in advertising, they seem to adapt a homogenized multimodal language co-opted from commercial venues, thereby “spreading values and interests of global corporations” (2018: 100). As a consequence, social media users receive a limited view of how people (especially young women) should behave and look.
1.3 What is in this Book
As we mentioned in our Preface, this book aims to help scholars and students understand what CDA/CDS is and what it does. As such, we synthesize many major publications that take up this topic, comparing and contrasting definitions and categorizations, demonstrating patterns and overall tendencies in terms of how scholars define the field and what they do, as well as discussing different (and often overlapping) approaches to CDA/CDS. Because our goal is to inform readers about what the field consists of and what has been published in it, we do not provide our own critique of particular approaches or trends (but we do highlight critiques by others in Chap. 5) nor do we take sides in disagreements about terminology , approaches or aims. Rather, we highlight what we believe each school of thought/approach and each interdisciplinary connection contribute to scholarship in this area.
CDA/CDS as a field is growing very fast, and new publications that touch on various issues within the field seem to be coming out continuously. As such, as our readers digest the contents of this book, we would like to note that it is impossible to cover everything, or mention everyone, and if we have overlooked anyone’s work in the process, it is not intentional. In addition, in February 2018, we had to stop collecting new studies in order to finish the book and prepare it for the publication process, and so in this regard, we invite new and well-established scholars alike to write about what we have missed, as well as new frontiers of the future. Before we outline the other chapters in this book, we would like first to say a few words about the Foreword written by Ruth Wodak, since it is an important addition that puts our book into context and underscores the importance of CDA/CDS in the current political/social climate of tensions, contradictions, and challenges, such as the rejection of fact-based knowledge and the people who produce it. She also provides her own up to date version of CDA/CDS: the definitions of ‘discourse’, the difference between DA and DS and critical DA, concern with explaining in detail how one’s critique is “reliable” (Forchtner 2011: 2), and also the difference between ‘discourse’ and ‘ideology’. She encourages CDA/CDS scholars to have conversations with, and listen to, different groups of people, while at the same time insisting on principles of pluralistic democracies and human rights. We now turn to the other chapters in this book in order to provide readers with a road map to what they will find as they continue to read.
In Chap. 2, we provide the foundation for understanding CDA/CDS by first taking a brief look at British linguistics in the 1970s, especially Bronislaw Malinowski’s and Firth’s ideas. We then discuss Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), and Language as Social Semiotic (SocSem), including his stratal-functional model, notions of text and context (and register and genre), the three metafunctions, grammatical metaphor and ‘appliable linguistics’, as well as some ideas originated by James Martin. Next, we consider critical linguistics (CritLing): its definition, its relation to other approaches, its interdisciplinarity, important works such as Language and Control (Fowler Hodge, Kress, and Trew (1979) and Language and Ideology ( Kress and Hodge 1979), its practicality and applicability as an approach, and its elaboration in the later work by Gunther Kress (1985/1989) on Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice. We then focus on the complex relationship between CritLing and SocSem, especially the further development of SocSem in Robert (Bob) Hodge and Kress’s book, Social Semiotics (1988) and, especially in Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s work on the three metafunctions of visual design in Reading Images (1996). We conclude by reflecting on the development of multimodality in their book, Multimodal discourse (2001) and on the relationship between CritLing , SocSem and CDA.
In Chap. 3, we introduce the general domain of discourse analysis (DA) (including text linguistics) and discuss van Dijk’s role in propagating DA and discourse studies (DS) as well as his (1985) Handbook of Discourse Analysis , which helped pave the way for the development of CDA. We then describe a small symposium in Amsterdam in January 1991 about DA and a ‘critical’ approach to DA—which eventually became critical discourse analysis (CDA). We describe briefly the events that led up to the symposium and what was achieved there followed by the consolidation and development of CDA. Next, we describe the five participants in the symposium, beginning with a short description of Kress’s work in the late 1980s/early 1990s, before he decided to pursue his interests in education. We then continue with a discussion of the work of Norman Fairclough, van Dijk, and Ruth Wodak, which includes detailed descriptions of their most important contributions before 1991, their work in the 1990s, in general their relation to what is now CDS/CDA, the productive professional collaboration of van Dijk and Wodak, and special attention to Wodak’s role as promoter, biographer and historian of how CDA has developed and changed over the years. We complete the chapter with a look at van Leeuwen’s work in SocSem, multimodality, and its relation to CDA.
Chapter 4 further discusses the relationship between CDA and CDS and then describes the seven most common and best known approaches that are frequently cited in the literature, are used in the most publications, have appeared in major journals in the field and are currently commonly used by scholars. The approaches (their acronyms in this book and one or more of the major scholars who are associated with the approach) are: discourse-historical (DHA, e.g., Wodak), dispositive analysis (DPA, e.g., Siegfried Jäger and Florentine Maier), sociocognitive (SCA, e.g., van Dijk), dialectical-relational (DRA, e.g., Fairclough), social semiotic /multimodal (MCDA, e.g., Kress and van Leeuwen, David Machin), corpus linguistic (CorpLingA, e.g., Paul Baker and Gerlinde Mautner) and cognitive linguistic (CogLingA, e.g., Paul Chilton and Jonathan Charteris-Black). We compare them and discuss how widely they are known and listed as ‘approaches’ across CDA/CDS scholarship as given in Table 4.1 (which also lists a few others). We then explain their origins and development over time, as well as the scholars associated with founding them or doing significant work in them and we include central concepts and distinguishing features . We also note the differing definitions of important terminology (such as ‘discourse’, ‘critical’, ‘context ’, ‘power’ ‘history’, and ‘ideology ’) since it varies widely across approaches. We end each section of this chapter by providing citations of articles so that readers interested in any particular approach to CDA/CDS can easily find some of the most recent work in that area.
Chapter 5 describes the critiques of CDA/CDS, especially those which have been well-documented through the years. Although we use CDA/CDS in this discussion, we note that much of the critique was published when CDA was the only designation used, but we also recognize that many, but not all, of the critiques are applicable to CDA/CDS or, in a few cases, were addressed by work in CDS. We begin with a discussion of Widdowson’s well-known critique of CDA and Fairclough’s (and later, Wodak’s) response to it, followed by critiques of what ‘critical’ in ‘critical discourse analysis/studies’ means, as well as the need for reflexivity within the field , particularly in terms of what it actually accomplishes outside academia. Additionally, we address methodological and theoretical shortcomings, the need for more contextually oriented analyses that attend to cultural influences, relationships between readers, text producers, researchers and texts, and the initial lack of attention paid to other fields and modalities. In addition, we address the various responses to different problems with CDA including recent changes (in CDA or CDS) in focus and direction, the emergence of Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA), the move toward ‘generative critique’, more attention to culture in the construction of discourse, researcher reflexivity, and how the field continues to redefine itself.
In Chapter 6 we clarify and underscore the importance of interdisciplinarity in CDA/CDS research and then describe the most salient and best known connections between CDA/CDS and many other disciplines or areas. This means that, on the one hand, we focus on CDA/CDS work that makes a connection to other disciplines and/or the integration of perspectives, etc. of other disciplines into CDA/CDS research, and on the other hand, we discuss areas of research that note their connection to CDA/CDS and the integration of CDA/CDS perspectives, theories, methods, etc. into their own scholarship. These connections include the following fields: critical applied linguistics, education, anthropology/ethnography, sociolinguistics, gender studies, queer linguistics, pragmatics and ecolinguistics. For each section, we describe the major focus of research as well as important concepts and how they connect to, or derive from, CDA/CDS. We then provide examples of work in each of these areas including a detailed list of references for each section for those interested in knowing more.
Finally, Chap. 7 asks the important question of how and why CDA/CDS matters in the world. It documents some of the ways in which well known CDA/CDS scholars, as well as emerging scholars in the field, see their work as connected to the world around them outside of academia. This includes (in many cases), ways in which scholars reach their students (who in turn, take action) through CDA/CDS scholarship. In particular, the chapter describes, in the words of 21 CDA/CDS scholars, the ways they attempt to make social change through many different types of actions, such as (to name just a few), writing political books, creating blogs, being an expert witness, consulting for activist organizations and anti-racist associations, writing and singing songs, analyzing discourse practices as a member of a public school board, being a consultant on legal texts, writing Op Ed’s about political discourse, and advising NGO’s on refugee issues related to xenophobic climates. We then encourage scholars to reflect on why and how their CDA/CDS work matters. We conclude the book with our Epilogue, which re-frames our work in light of the global pandemic, worldwide protests against systemic racism and many political challenges at this time (midway through 2020).
First, we begin with the history of CDA .