Ruth Wodak

Methods of critical discourse analysis

What CDA is About - Ruth Wodak A Summary of Its History, Important Concepts and Its Development Between Theory, Method and Politics - Michael Meyer Positioning of the Approach to CDA Discourse and Knowledge - Siegfried J[um]ager Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of a Critical Discourse and Dispositive Analysis The Discourse - Historical Approach - Ruth Wodak Multidisciplinary CDA - Teun A van Dijk A Plea for Diversity Critical Discourse Analysis as a Method in Social Scientific Research - Norman Fairclough Action and Text - Ron Scollon Towards an Integrated Understanding of the Place of Text in Social (Inter)action, Mediated Discourse Analysis and the Problem of Social Action

A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press

This article discusses the extent to which methods normally associated with corpus linguistics can be effectively used by critical discourse analysts. Our research is based on the analysis of a 140-million-word corpus of British news articles about refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (collectively RASIM). We discuss how processes such as collocation and concordance analysis were able to identify common categories of representation of RASIM as well as directing analysts to representative texts in order to carry out qualitative analysis. The article suggests a framework for adopting corpus approaches in critical discourse analysis.

The Discursive Construction of National Identities

The concept of the nation as an imagined community has gained importance in the relevant literature during the last decade. How do we construct national identities in discourse? Which topics, which discursive strategies and which linguistic devices are employed to construct national sameness and uniqueness on the one hand, and differences to other national collectives on the other hand? These questions were investigated in our study on the Austrian nation and identity. Taking several current social scientific approaches as our point of departure, we have developed a method of description and analysis of these phenomena which has applications beyond the discursive production of national identity in the specific Austrian example studied. By focusing particularly on the discursive construction of (national) sameness, this study has broken new ground in discourse-historical analysis, which until now has mainly been concerned with the analysis of the discursive construction of difference.

Qualitative discourse analysis in the social sciences

Introduction: Discourse Studies - Important Concepts and Terms R.Wodak Analyzing Newspapers, Magazines and Other Print Media G. Mautner Analyzing Communication in the New Media H. Gruber Analyzing TV documentaries A. Pollak Analyzing Political Rhetoric M. Reisigl Analyzing Interaction in Broadcast Debates G. Myers Analyzing Research Interviews J. Abell and G. Myers Analyzing Focus Group Discussions M. Krzyzanowski Discourse Analysis and Ethnography F.Oberhuber and M. Krzyzanowski Glossary

Recontextualizing European higher education policies: the cases of Austria and Romania

This paper explores, in some detail at the European Union scale, processes and relationships of recontextualization between higher education and other EU policy fields, including for instance the recontextualization of ‘competitiveness rhetoric’ and ‘globalization rhetoric’ in HE policy documents. We trace the implementation of the Bologna Process in two EU member states, Austria and Romania, illustrating the effects of these very different socio-political and historical contexts on EU standardization processes through a detailed discourse analytic study of recontextualization processes of policy documents. This paper integrates two approaches in critical discourse analysis, Faircloughs dialectic-relational approach and Wodaks discourse-historical approach, by introducing recontextualization as a salient critical discourse analysis category and explaining its relationship to other categories within a discourse-analytical approach to (or ‘point of entry’ into) trans-disciplinary research on social change.

`We are Dealing with People Whose Origins One can Clearly Tell Just by Looking': Critical Discourse Analysis and the Study of Neo-Racism in Contemporary Austria:

This article focuses on the discourse of neo-racism towards foreigners in Austria between 1989 and 1991. It summarizes the preliminary results of an ongoing interdisciplinary project, and offers illustrative examples of official discourse (politicians), newspaper texts and anonymous conversations on the street recorded during the Waldheim campaign of 1987 and the Viennese municipal election of 1991. The study suggests that the neo-racist discourse occasioned by the population migrations after the collapse of communist Eastern Europe not only targets the specific Eastern European ethnic outgroups, but is elastic enough to combine these prejudices with those against other existing traditional and functionally determined outgroups. In the example cited, prejudices against Jews, Turks and bicycle riders merge into a generic neo-racist discourse.

Introduction: Theory, Interdisciplinarity and Critical Discourse Analysis

The aim of this volume is to critically examine the foundation and basic elements of discourse-analytical research as it has been developing for roughly two decades. The focus is therefore on the elementary and paradigmatic. This is both an opportunity and a danger. There is the danger of virtually losing contact with the ground, that is, the concrete reality of research, in the Olympian spheres of the fundamental. At the same time this offers an opportunity to go beyond one’s own research practice, to reflect for a moment on the basis of this very research practice and, by doing so, ultimately reap a benefit for this practice. The range of contributions included in this volume and the quality of the authors will hopefully guarantee that the opportunity will prevail against the danger.

Mediation between discourse and society: assessing cognitive approaches in CDA

While reviewing relevant recent research, it becomes apparent that cognitive approaches have been rejected and excluded from Critical Discourse Analysis by many scholars out of often unjustified reasons. This article argues, in contrast, that studies in CDA would gain significantly through integrating insights from socio-cognitive theories into their framework. Examples from my own research into the comprehension and comprehensibility of news broadcasts, Internet discussion boards as well as into discourse and discrimination illustrate this position. However, I also argue that there are salient limits to cognitive theories which have to be taken into account, specifically when proposing social change via rational/cognitive insights. Examples from recent political debates on immigration and from the election campaign in the US in 2004 serve to emphasize these arguments.

Performing success: identifying strategies of self-presentation in women’s biographical narratives.

The biographies of eight highly professional women form the material for discussing how women live, understand, and ‘perform’ success. After identifying macro-topics related to success, the authors carry out an analysis of the womens discursive strategies of self-representation. They examine features that are indicative of suppression or backgrounding of social actors and, related to this, sources of ambivalence, activeness, and passiveness. The authors also describe the metaphors the women use for constructing specific event models, which serve to establish coherent self-representations and unique life trajectories. Four event models were identified, systematizing the narratives: symbiosis, self-made woman, creating ones space and work, as well as coincidence and luck. Finally, the article investigates the ways in which the womens stories reflect relevant aspects of the professional and organizational cultures they find, concluding that although all of them are cooperating and non-antagonistic, they build their own success stories in small but important ways.

Recontextualising fascist ideologies of the past: right-wing discourses on employment and nativism in Austria and the United Kingdom

In this article, we trace the histories of discourses supporting ‘jobs for natives’ in the UK and Austria using the discourse-historical approach (DHA) to critical discourse studies. DHA uses four ‘levels of context’ as heuristic devices in critical analysis. In this article, we focus our attention predominantly on the broadest of these, largely eschewing the text internal analysis typical of CDA, in favour of a wider contextual sweep. In this way, we deconstruct and trace the conceptual history of British and Austrian slogans of the extreme right related to issues of un/employment. We argue that slogans such as ‘British Jobs for British workers’ and ‘Austria First’ have been recontextualised into current political rhetoric while carrying historical context-dependent connotations, stemming from pre-World War II colonialism and antisemitism. Hence, we further claim that – although such rhetoric is currently widespread across EU member states – the ideologies and traditions drawn upon are distinct and create specific subtexts to be exploited for political ends; this is part of the discursive strategy of ‘calculated ambivalence’ employed in such rhetoric.