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Develops critical discourse analysis (CDA) methods that expose how language reproduces or resists inequality, marginalization, and ideology. Covers textual, discursive, and social practice levels of analysis, with applications to media, policy, and organizational communication.
Apply CDA to media representations of a marginalized group, analyze policy documents for normalizing language, conduct interviews and analyze discourse for ideology.
From your work on Foucauldian discourse analysis, you understand that discourse is not merely language — it is a system of knowledge-power that determines what can be said, by whom, and with what authority. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) builds on this foundation but adds an explicitly political dimension: it treats language as a site of struggle over meaning, asking not just what discourses exist but who benefits from them and whose interests they serve. Where Foucauldian analysis tends to map the architecture of discourse across historical time, CDA focuses on concrete texts — a news article, a policy document, a speech — and reads them for the ideological work they do.
The most influential framework for CDA, developed by Norman Fairclough, analyzes discourse at three nested levels. The textual level examines the micro-features of the text itself: word choice, grammar, metaphor, passive versus active voice, presuppositions embedded in phrasing. The discursive practice level examines how texts are produced and consumed — what genres are combined, what intertextual references are made, how texts circulate. The social practice level situates the discourse within broader power relations, ideological formations, and institutional contexts. A CDA of welfare policy, for example, might note the textual shift from "unemployment" to "welfare dependency" (word choice naturalizing individual failure), trace how this language migrated from think-tank reports to newspaper coverage to legislation (discursive practice), and connect it to neoliberal ideological hegemony (social practice). Each level informs the others.
The key technique that distinguishes CDA from ordinary textual analysis is naturalization: CDA looks for the ways that contingent, historically produced power arrangements are presented in language as natural, inevitable, or common-sense. When media coverage of a strike habitually describes worker demands as "militant" while employer lockouts are described as "management decisions," these asymmetric framings reproduce a picture of industrial relations in which capital's power is neutral background and labor's resistance is abnormal. CDA makes this visible by asking: what would the text look like if the power relations were reversed? What is being silenced or marginalized? Who is grammatically positioned as agent versus object?
A frequent objection is that CDA is not systematic — that any reading reflects the analyst's prior political commitments. CDA practitioners respond with two moves. First, systematic analysis of textual features (frequency counts, grammatical analysis, corpus methods in corpus-assisted CDA) grounds interpretation in observable patterns rather than impressionistic readings. Second, CDA is transparent about its normative commitments — it aims not for a view from nowhere but for what Foucault called parrhesia, speaking truth to power from an acknowledged position. The analytic task is not to pretend neutrality but to show one's interpretive moves clearly enough that others can assess and challenge them. This is what separates CDA from mere political commentary: it builds a layered, evidence-anchored argument linking textual features to social consequences.
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