Analysing Political Discourse I: Theories, Concepts and Research Designs

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a way of carrying out social research with a focus on ‘discourse’ i.e. on text and other forms of semiosis analysed in their contexts of use, production and reception.

CDA has become extremely popular in recent years as one of the key largely qualitative approaches to analysing social and political change across social and political sciences.

This course offers a comprehensive introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis as an approach to research dynamics of contemporary political change. It outlines key theoretical foundations, methodological premises and analytical pathways in CDA. In doing so, it highlights aspects of critical-analytic studies which make them particularly useful to interdisciplinary and context-related explorations of contemporary politics.

By showing similarities and differences between CDA – and especially one of its major traditions known as the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) – and other discourse-based approaches widely used in social and political studies, the course highlights advantages of CDA/DHA research as, inter alia, a systematic approach to analysis or its clear relation to the levels of pre-analytical theorising and post-analytical interpretation.

The course also aims to clarify several widespread misconceptions and misinterpretations of CDA. Because CDA is often approached as simply a ‘method’ rather than a coherent approach with a distinct theory and methodology, this course aims to show a variety of theories, methods and analyses deployed in critical-analytical explorations, including those at the intersection of qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Also, because CDA is also often regarded as a homogeneous approach, the course aims to discredit such criticism, showing CDA as a heterogeneous research tradition that consists of several schools which, while sharing general principles (on, for example, the relation between language and power, ideology), differ in their theoretical and methodological ontology as well as their analytical pathways and foci.

However, the major aim of the course is practical because it is geared towards teaching you how to analyse political and related discourses from a critical-analytic as well as discourse-historical perspective. For this reason, whether in lectures or the related discussion, or in hands-on analysis workshops, the course aims to show the practical application of theories, methods and analyses. These will be related to studies of a wide array of genres including those from within the political field itself (e.g. parliamentary and other speeches, party programmes, etc.) as well as related fields of policy-making and administration (regulations, policy documents, etc.) or of media and its representations of politics (reporting, interviews, debates, etc.). The analyses of those genres will be guided by such DHA principles as, inter alia, ‘interdiscursivity’ or ‘recontextualisation’, which allow for relating discourses produced synchronically and diachronically as well as across different contexts and within different texts and genres.

You can take this course and Analysing Political Discourse II independently of each other, or as a single two-week module (strongly advised if you want to acquire a thorough theoretical and practical knowledge, as well as in-depth analytical skills in CDA).

Day 1
We start with a series of sessions introducing critical discourse studies and their relationship to other approaches in text and discourse analysis, both in linguistics and in social sciences more broadly. The opening lecture discusses the key developments that contributed to the development of critical-analytic approaches in text and discourse studies.

Day 2
The morning lecture looks in detail at Critical Discourse Analysis. Further to discussing its central concepts such as text, discourse or context, it also introduces the main trends – or approaches – in CDA. It points to similarities and differences between various strands of CDA and highlights the common ground of critical-analytical research traditions.

We begin a series of sessions devoted to concepts and theories in CDA and other, especially social scientific, approaches to text and discourse studies. The noon session and tomorrow’s morning session look at the key approaches to analysing discourse as practiced in linguistics and related social sciences (e.g. sociology or anthropology). The sessions present their varied, micro/macro positioning of discourse in the course of socio-political analysis.

Day 3
We continue our look at the key approaches to analysing discourse as practiced in linguistics and related social sciences. In the afternoon, we discuss relationships between CDA and social theory. The latter is considered from the point of view of its key influences in/on CDA, especially with regard to, inter alia, theories of Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as in a wider context of parallel developments in social-scientific approaches to discourse (such as e.g. the ‘Discourse Theory’ of Laclau & Mouffe or Grounded Theory, Content Analysis, Hermeneutics, etc).

Day 4
A two-part lecture introduces key premises and central concepts of the DHA before discussing it from the point of view of its contribution to the interdisciplinary connections within/beyond CDA. We then tackle criticisms of DHA in different social sciences. The focus is on key DHA concepts: ideology, power, critique, discourse, interdiscursivity and recontextualisation. We pay special attention to the DHA-specific notion of ‘discursive strategies’ from the perspective of their role in self- and other-presentation, legitimation and pre-legitimation, and in political and other identity-building processes.

Day 5
The morning lecture focuses on a general placement of CDA and wider Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) including the DHA within the landscape of contemporary qualitative research methods. We discuss the key features of CDS/DHA research from the point of view of such standard qualitative methods as interviews, ethnography and text/document analysis. The lecture also focuses on issues related to possible research designs in CDS/DHA and to hypothesising and constructing research questions, as well as conceptual puzzles in research projects founded on CDS/DHA.

We close with an individual consultation hour (noon session) during which you can discuss your research projects with me. This session is for those taking only SD102A (Week I). If you are taking SD102B (Week II) or both weeks in succession, we will run individual consultations at the end of Week II.

The aim of this course is to transfer and generate knowledge from discussions and interactions between the instructor and participants.

I expect you to ask critical questions, complete all obligatory readings, participate in all in-class tasks and discussions, complete out-of-class assignments, and relate the knowledge gained to your current and future research.

You should be familiar with selected aspects of social theory, especially those relevant for the discourse-analytic approaches we will discuss (see outline for details).

You should also be open to new, interdisciplinary qualitative methods of research in social and political sciences and interested in synchronic and/or diachronic analyses of contemporary national and supranational politics in Europe and beyond, also in relation to other fields such as media, institutions, policy-making, etc.