Critical Discourse Studies and/in communication: theories, methodologies, and pedagogies at the intersections

ABSTRACT

In this introductory essay, we interrogate the relationship between Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and communication studies, ultimately arguing for a firmer cross-fertilization between the two. We start by tracing the events that led to this special issue as a way to document the relatively brief, scattered, but at the same time promising trajectories of CDS within communication scholarship. We then take a step back and outside of the discipline to locate different precursors, practitioners, and outlets that contributed to shaping a unique approach to sociodiscursive phenomena first labeled as Critical Discourse Analysis. Next, we identify the more recent, broadening turn toward CDS, and its implications in terms of theories, methods, and objects of study. Drawing on scholarship in communication studies and related disciplines, as well as on the contributions to this special issue, we end by reviewing different challenges and possibilities for the traversing trajectories of CDS and communication studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical Discourse Studies
• communication studies
• theory
• methodology
• pedagogy

In this introductory essay to the special issue, “Critical Discourse Studies and/in Communication: Theories, Methodologies, and Pedagogies at the Intersections,” we examine the relationship between Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and communication studies, ultimately arguing for a firmer cross-fertilization between the two. We start by tracing the events that led to this special issue as a way to document the relatively brief, scattered, but at the same time promising trajectories of CDS within communication scholarship. We then take a step back and outside of our discipline to locate different precursors, practitioners, and outlets that contributed to shaping a unique approach to sociodiscursive phenomena first labeled as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Next, we identify the more recent, broadening turn toward CDS, and its implications in terms of theories, methodologies, and objects of study. Drawing on recent scholarship in communication and related disciplines, as well as on the contributions to this special issue, we end by reviewing different challenges and possibilities for the traversing trajectories of CDS and communication studies.

Perhaps the most telling example of the (non)place that CDS holds in (U.S.) communication scholarship has to do with how we, the coeditors of this special issue, first met, and with the different steps that—slowly but steadily—brought us to this special issue. In 2014, we were put together on a National Communication Association (NCA) panel for the International and Intercultural Communication Division titled “Global Politics, Media, and Immigration Policy.” It was not until we heard each other’s presentations that we realized that, apart from sharing a particular context of study, we also drew on similar literatures to inform our analyses—literatures that were, for the most part, overlooked in NCA circles, and that took as their starting point the relationship between specific discursive practices and broader social arrangements.¹ It was like finding a fellow traveler on a lonely road, and it gave us hope that we were not alone.

After that encouraging panel, we were motivated to find a way to reach out to other fellow critical discourse scholars who, like us, were swimming around NCA with no apparent connections to colleagues who were, perhaps, engaged in similar projects. That reaching out resulted in us coorganizing a 2015 NCA Seminar titled “Critical Discourse Studies in Communication: Embracing Opportunities for Research and Pedagogy.” At that meeting, and thanks to the fine contributions of both invited and peer-reviewed participants, we were able to deepen our conversations about CDS’s theoretical legacies and futures, methodology and pedagogy, and emerging research topics. One of the presenters at the seminar, almost jokingly, called it an “institutionalization moment,” and in many ways, it certainly was. It allowed us to start thinking about the potentiality of embedding CDS more firmly in (U.S.) communication scholarship and vice versa, and the necessary and productive transformations that this could entail for both fields. The follow-up to those conversations helped generate this special issue.

Based on these experiences at NCA, the initial set of questions that we hope to address through the articles in this special issue includes: What is the relationship between CDS and communication studies? What are some of the theoretical and methodological frictions that inform the (dis)connections between the two? Can we work with them in a productive way? If so, how? And what could the implications be for our research and pedagogy, both within academia and beyond? Our overall goal in addressing these questions is to dig deeper into CDS as a potentially useful way to place theoretically informed practices and practice-informed theories at the forefront of different areas in communication studies. More specifically, we hope this issue will be a resource for readers who wish to explore how some aspects of CDS—such as its explicit political project, its constitutive transdisciplinarity, or its commitment to grounded critique—may represent an attractive path for scholars in communication studies, and especially for those who identify with critical perspectives, broadly conceived.

At the same time, we are convinced that distinctive and important insights developed across communication studies can enhance the CDS project by encouraging a more consistent and productive engagement with philosophical, methodological, and pedagogical tensions such as those between “realism” and “constructivism,” “analysis” and “critique,” or “self-reflexivity” and “transparency.” Thus, our ultimate goal in coediting this special issue is to create a space for convergence that strengthens both CDS and communication studies. But before we get to that part of the argument, it is important to locate CDS historically and contemporarily, as a way to understand its past, present, and potential trajectories better.

Critical trajectories in discourse studies

Critical linguistics and CDA

It was not until 2011 that a publication in Communication Yearbook—converted in 2017 into the International Communication Association journal Annals of the International Communication Association—explicitly tried to argue for productive synergies between critical approaches to discourse on the one hand, and U.S. communication studies on the other. Karen Tracy et al.’s “Critical Discourse Analysis and (U.S.) Communication Scholarship” thus constituted the first attempt, in our discipline, to map the theoretical contours of CDA—the most widely used label at the time—and place them alongside different research traditions emerging from U.S. communication departments. However, as these authors made clear in their piece, “discourse analysis with a critical thrust” had been performed across disciplines and continents for quite a while.²

Likewise, many of the participants in the NCA seminar that we coorganized in 2015, as well as other scholars across the discipline, had been contributing to CDS literature in communication studies long before those labels were explicitly used or connected.³ In this sense, our goal in this essay—or in coediting this special issue—is not to reify CDS as a pre-existing, exclusive brand of research, but to examine its constitution as a distinctive approach in relation to, first of all, the particular historical conditions in which it arose and developed, and second, the different practices, within and outside of academia, that are commonly associated with it. These conditions and practices, in a way, define CDS relationally by identifying what it is not. Thus, the dialogue and tensions with other linguistic and discursive approaches, and with different strands of critical theory—as well as communication scholarship—have shaped and continue to shape CDS’s evolving assumptions, emphases, and priorities when posing and addressing a variety of research questions.

Here, we are reminded of Simon During’s distinction among “precursors, sources, and past practitioners,” which he uses in his critical introduction to Cultural Studies, but that can be equally applied to the project of CDS.⁴ During defines “precursors” as those who have produced work that may be similar to contemporary recognizable labels such as CDS, “but in different institutional settings and often with relatively little acknowledgment.” Nevertheless, he argues, “they can now be seen to prefigure a field that they themselves could not imagine.”⁵ In the case of CDS, this kind of work is located within linguistics, and more specifically, within a group of scholars who, influenced by the work of M. A. K. Halliday but also by French semioticians such as Roland Barthes, started to develop an approach in the 1970s that they labeled Critical Linguistics.⁶ This kind of scholarship is represented by now classic works such as Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress’s Language as Ideology, or Roger Fowler et al.’s Language and Control.⁷ The main premise of the analyses developed in these publications was that language was an important instrument in the structuring of power relations in societies. Accordingly, they focused on uncovering the ways in which specific linguistic practices played key roles in legitimating different mechanisms of social control.

Despite strong resistance within their discipline—much informed by an objectivist stance toward “science”—the work by Hodge and Kress and Fowler et al. paved the way for the development of a critical mass of linguists who would embrace and extend the different theoretical and analytical principles put forward by these scholars. The initial label of Critical Linguistics began to be used interchangeably with that of CDA. Eventually, CDA became the preferred term, popularized in the 1980s by a new generation of scholars we locate here as CDS’s “past practitioners.”

According to During, “past practitioners” are embedded within the academic institution “and have played a role not only in developing concepts, methods and case studies but may have provided guidance and patronage to later students and scholars.”⁸ In the case of CDS, it was the work of Norman Fairclough, Teun A. van Dijk, and Ruth Wodak that served these important functions. All three were key figures in the institutionalization of CDA as a recognizable branch of research, and their work—alone or with their collaborators—continues to be taken up widely across contexts, disciplines, and continents.⁹ The publication of books such as van Dijk’s Prejudice in Discourse, Fairclough’s Language and Power, and Wodak’s Language, Power and Ideology, or the 1990 launch of the journal Discourse & Society, as well as several edited volumes thus consolidated the growing interest in studies with a shared focus on how discourse practices constitute an important (although not isolated) site for the reproduction of material inequalities in different societies.¹⁰

When thinking of trajectories, it is also important to locate here several CDS “sources,” keeping in mind, as During argues, that “whom you regard as a … ‘source’ depends on your interpretation of the discipline’s project.”¹¹ Sources in this context are “the academic theorists who have provided the concepts that have been used in one [scholarly] branch or another … although their own overall project and disciplinary orientation falls outside the field.”¹² In the case of CDS, the influence of several European philosophers, sociologists, and literary and cultural critics mostly shaped its broader, “critique” dimension in different but also coherent ways, grounded as this influence was in continental thought across the humanities and the social sciences.¹³ In this sense, it is quite safe to argue that, although originally anchored within linguistics, CDS’s theoretical core is essentially transdisciplinary—although, as we develop below, not necessarily transcontinental.

This hybrid intellectual heritage, according to van Dijk, stems from CDS’s issue-oriented mission and its explicit commitment to social justice. As he puts it, CDS is “problem-oriented rather than discipline- or theory-oriented.”¹⁴ Nevertheless, and for different reasons that we explore later, the intrinsic links between CDS, cultural studies, and the humanities more broadly have been progressively de-emphasized in its encounters with U.S. communication studies, where it has most commonly been adopted across a variety of subareas as a useful methodological guide, but rarely as a holistic project encompassing the entire process of research.¹⁵ Next, we turn to an overview of CDS’s most recent scholarship as perhaps a suitable first step in enabling these more wide-ranging and mutually strengthening connections.

CDA and CDS

The second trajectory that we briefly trace here has to do with the turn, since the early 2000s, toward CDS as a comprehensive, umbrella term encompassing quite a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as preferred objects of study.¹⁶ The theoretically eclectic—although anchored in continental thought—character of CDS sources as identified earlier certainly informed the efforts of “past practitioners” to (re)shape it along common political goals rather than specific methodological procedures, and of a new generation of scholars to critique it with the aim of destabilizing the European foundations of the CDS project.

In terms of theoretical and methodological eclecticism, both Wodak and van Dijk have repeatedly argued against the idea of a single “method” that can be simplistically “applied” to the study of different issues, and toward a more comprehensive conceptualization of CDS that acknowledges its complexities and nuances. Along these lines, Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer propose the terms “school” or “approach,” whereas for van Dijk, the term “studies” allows for a broader inclusion of both theory and method as indissoluble parts of the whole of CDS.¹⁷

The initial (mostly male) Eurocentric core of CDA has also, since the 2000s, slowly given way to a series of rethinkings along Global South-centric, feminist, queer, nonwhite, and postcolonial perspectives that, different scholars argue, need to be seen as constitutive elements of CDS. For example, Shi Xu argues for a questioning of dominant assumptions in discourse theory and methods, as well as a quest for alternative starting points that can lead researchers toward a much needed “multiculturalist scholarship.”¹⁸ As part of this project, he introduces a Cultural Approach to Discourse as a way to overcome the “universalism” and “aculturalism” that, according to him, permeate most foundational scholarship in discourse studies. The Journal of Multicultural Discourses that he founded and currently edits has done much to place these marginalized perspectives on the Western academic map.¹⁹

Along similar lines, Laura Pardo considers “the influence of westernisation and academic colonialism on Latin American discourse studies.”²⁰ For her, “Latin American researchers … take their subject-matter often unreflectingly from European studies, leaving out a wide range of vital local issues.”²¹ As a way to “reflect on our academic practices in order to generate a new paradigm for Latin American discourse studies,” she proposes a renewed look toward Asia and Africa that can allow scholars from the Global South to “perceive common experiences where we used to see only differences.” This shared background, she argues “might lead to new paradigms of dialogue that would enhance both our mutual understanding and our discursive studies, provided that we learn the lessons from our colonial past and reach a balanced judgement about it.”²²

The diversification of the core of CDS has pushed scholars toward previously unexamined sites of research beyond CDA’s initial emphasis on elite Western political texts.²³ These sites not only call for different analytical tools, but also have served as ground to re-examine fundamental CDS concepts that are also of interest to many communication scholars, such as discourse, analysis, politics, ideology, or critique. The academic journals Critical Discourse Studies and Journal of Language and Politics, both first issued in the 2000s, have been at the forefront of many of these additions, publishing articles and special issues on emergent topics such as social class, (new) media, ethics, or social movements, addressing their corresponding methodological challenges, and tackling broader theoretical conversations about the potential role of scholarship anchored in social semiotics, feminism, queer theory, poststructuralism, or Marxism in advancing CDS.²⁴

Based on—in our view—these constructive debates regarding theories, methodologies, and objects of study, the shift to CDS has also brought with it what we could call a CDS metadiscourse—or a discourse analysis of a discourse analysis, as Tomasz Zarycki, echoing Pierre Bourdieu, puts it.²⁵ Such discourse involves, on the one hand, an auto-critical reflection on the different linguistic practices that CDS scholars often (ab)use, and on the other, a concern for the assumptions about analysis, critique, and knowledge more broadly, that such practices rely on and reinforce. Starting with Michael Billig’s “Critical Discourse Analysis and the Rhetoric of Critique,”²⁶ there has been a growing unease among scholars regarding the apparent mismatch between the subjective/constructivist view of discursive practices that CDS scholars embrace, and their objective/realist stance toward the social realm that often assumes a clear-cut separation between analysts and the texts they study.²⁷

These dilemmas have been posed not only in relation to the credibility of the different analyses, but also as they apply to the notion of critique.²⁸ For example, Benno Herzog questions the “external” normative arguments—such as a defense of “human rights”—that often guide CDS’s “corrective critiques,” arguing instead for a “transcendental immanent critique” that stems from existing societies and thus helps researchers better understand the normative, and simultaneously contradictory, content of discursive and nondiscursive practices in a particular context, while at the same time revealing the “systemic difficulties” hindering structural social change.²⁹ For Herzog, discourse analysis is key in revealing the implicit norms present in different practices, and thus constitutes a necessary ground for such immanent critique.

Along similar lines, Martin Nonhoff focuses specifically on the relationship between analysis and critique, which he sees as “external” or “integrated” depending on whether the potential for critique is located in the analyst (i.e., in his or her “attitude”) or in the discourse analysis itself, that is, in the fact that “discourse analyses produce what they also examine: discursive statements.”³⁰ The real significance of CDS work, he argues, lies in this second possibility, and in its potential to “[break] with the fetishism of methodology by allowing for heterogeneity and disparity, thus upholding the potential for ongoing irritation [of mainstream social scientists]”—an irritation that makes it “possible to re-open and newly debate the scope of what is permitted, possible and useful in academic work.”³¹

Regardless of where one’s sympathies lie, the existence of these debates suggests that the route from CDA to CDS has become broader, more uneven, less straightforward, and more multidirectional—and thus, we would argue, more akin to a critical project in communication studies. These complicating moves would not have been possible without the solid and recognizable base provided by “past practitioners.” It was only from this academic stability and reputation that necessary and challenging “meta” questions about CDS could begin to be asked. In the next section, we propose that this trajectory necessarily traverses that of communication studies, and of its critical scholarship more specifically, both in terms of perceived tasks and relevant topics.

CDS and communication: traversing trajectories

Traversing tasks

Perhaps paradoxically, even though CDS as an enterprise nowadays holds a secure place in academia as a whole, its presence in U.S. communication departments is still inconsistent. For some, its potential is limited to providing a series of analytical guidelines that can enhance the “credibility” of critical work. For others, it remains a suspect “in betweener,” drawing from distinct and incompatible traditions as they are understood in U.S.-centered (centric?) academic circles. Both of these understandings, in our view, have combined to create important barriers to CDS’s consolidation as a coherent enough orientation to research in our discipline. Thus, the characteristics briefly addressed above—its constitutive transdisciplinarity, its overt politics, or its calls for grounded critique—even though they potentially allow for productive synergies, also result in an inevitable vulnerability in the highly professionalized and stratified world of U.S. universities, the neoliberal model of higher education par excellence. The still widespread questioning of the simultaneous embracement of social scientific and humanistic tenets, together with an academic division of labor within and across departments that encourages methodological and/or disciplinary commitment, thus results in a view of CDS as too eclectic for some, and too subjective for others, for it to be a valuable intellectual and practical path.

Nevertheless, we would argue that CDS’s current trajectory can be not only productively embraced, but also enhanced by a long tradition in communication scholarship—within the U.S.A. and beyond—that, informed by critical humanism, places the struggle for more equal societies, as well as the (limited) role of the critic in this project, at the forefront of inquiry. Thus, whereas in CDS literature, the debates surrounding issues such as reflexivity, critique, or the mediated relationship between texts and objects are relatively recent, many scholars in communication studies have been historically attuned to the triple crisis “in representation, legitimation, and praxis,” and the consequent need to acknowledge the fundamental ways “the self”—researcher, reader, speaker—shapes knowledge.³² Although with different emphases, both bodies of scholarship are thus suitable partners in a perspective that emphasizes “language as activity,” as well as the “history of language”³³ in its quest to account for the intrinsic, contradictory, and multilayered relationships between societal dispositions and specific discursive practices.³⁴

Despite their a priori philosophical compatibilities, one of the main obstacles disconnecting the trajectories of CDS and these critical perspectives in communication studies stems from the perceived tension between method-driven analysis, and theory-driven critique. The former brings with it the shadow of a potential “scientization” process that many in U.S. humanistic circles, for example, reject,³⁵ whereas the latter is often associated in discourse studies with a lack of specific tools for, or even interest in, examining the specifics of actual language use and/or interactional dynamics.³⁶ A two-way suspicion then arises, although close examination of both literatures shows that it is not based on what to study, or even why to study it, but mostly on how it is studied.³⁷ Discussing critique, Helene Shugart, for instance, warns about the dangers of separating subjects from objects when conducting research, and ties that process to “analysis,” arguing that:

the staunch impulse to objectivity on the part of the critic, mandated by conventional standards of scholarship, inevitably results in the objectification of the subjects of study—they become one-dimensional, passive objects of analysis, rendered inferior by the controlling, impartial expertise of the scientist–critic.³⁸

Conversely, Richard Johnson et al., while addressing cultural studies more broadly, claim that, in this strand of scholarship, “method is carried in practical skills, ways of reading, for instance, that remain unacknowledged—except perhaps as theory.”³⁹ The authors go on to interpret this as a “lack of transparency” that avoids explicitly focusing on “the doing, the process, the production” and can thus “function as intellectual privilege or cultural capital, making the difference between being inside or outside a cultural studies club.”⁴⁰ The “deferral of engagement at the level of the empirical,” as Alison Lee and Kate Poynton put it, is thus tied to a lack of explicit acknowledgement of the analytical steps followed when examining “the ordinary everydayness of the contemporary world.”⁴¹

A related source of disconnection has to do with the relationship between the particular “objects” chosen for analysis or criticism—the different terminology is not accidental—and the claims that are made based on them. For example, CDS is often seen as concentrating on specific texts, treating them as final products and paying little attention to their production, reception, or relationship with other texts, thus implicitly assuming a straightforward relationship between linguistic structures and social meanings. Even though, in more recent studies, some CDS scholars have attended to these tensions, the general perception from a humanistic perspective is that the different CDS studies tend to reify the text, in the sense that, often, the meanings and effects attributed to particular collocations, rhetorical strategies, or discursive devices are treated as the final diagnosis and rarely analyzed in the broader context of a controversy.⁴²

Rather than being “resolved” by fragmenting intellectual inquiry into little niches, we believe that these and other tensions can be engaged productively. For instance, the different theoretical debates informing critical communication scholarship can certainly aid in problematizing in-between stages, foregrounding the textuality of the analytic text, treating talk as text and not as evidence, or acknowledging the situated nature of the “knowledge” that the different analyses produce, rather than assuming a mostly transparent and unidirectional move from social order toward texts and eventually the consumers of those texts.⁴³

At the same time, grounding (situated) critique in the specifics of discursive practices and their interactions, as CDS is committed to doing, can help in the necessary task of balancing the tension between the rejection of absolute values and the (absolute) rejection of all values,⁴⁴ which may lead to a substitution of the “tyranny of the whole by the dictatorship of the fragment.”⁴⁵ Although the evaluation stage is a necessary move within a project committed to critique and/as social justice, evaluation is also importantly tied to the ability to identify the cause(s) of a particular phenomenon so that politics cannot be used as an excuse for not figuring out “what is going on” with our texts in a way that does not “determine in advance the answers.”⁴⁶

Traversing topics

As we described earlier, the genesis of this special issue lay in our sense that CDS lacked institutional representation in the U.S. academy and that addressing this lack would be beneficial to both CDS and communication studies. Four years later, our convictions have been, if anything, strengthened. CDS is certainly in an expanding stage across disciplines and the world.⁴⁷ A search of the Communication & Mass Media Complete database for articles containing “Critical Discourse Studies” published from 2013 to present yields 299 articles from journals including Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse and Society, Language Sciences, International Journal of Communication, and Visual Communication with the first journal—not surprisingly—being by far the most prominent in the results. These articles draw on CDS to explore a variety of subjects including the environment, racism, public memory/museum studies, policy analysis, and feminism.⁴⁸ Political discourse, still an important object of study for CDS, is also well represented.⁴⁹ This sample also illustrates the geographic variety of the different studies including China, Singapore, Australia, Russia, South Africa, Finland, and Lithuania.⁵⁰ Based on this limited survey, the academic and intellectual position of CDS appears secure.

When trying to locate CDS within communication studies in the U.S.A., searching through NCA’s recent conference programs provides more confusion than clarity due to the lack of a consistent set of tools for searching previous convention programs. The program for the 2010 annual convention maintains an online search tool that shows 12 results that used “critical discourse analysis” as a methodological and theoretical tool. Subsequent years, however, are limited to PDFs of the convention programs, therefore limiting results to those who used the term “Critical Discourse Analysis” in their titles. The searches show a high of five entries for the year 2015 (the year of our seminar) to four in 2012 and two for all remaining years (2000 to present). These limited entries cover a variety of divisions including Intercultural and International Communication and Critical Cultural Studies divisions. Nevertheless, CDA has found an apparent home in the various area divisions including Black Caucus, LGBTQ Caucus, Feminist and Women’s Studies, and Visual Communication. These results suggest that some areas of U.S. communication studies are more receptive to CDS.

NCA’s journals show a similar lack of balance. Conducting a search for the term “critical discourse analysis” in articles across all 11 NCA journals yields 116 total articles published between 1995 and 2018. However, the 1995 article published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies was written by van Dijk and is followed only in 2000 by a single piece in Critical Studies in Media Communication. In addition, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies contains by far the most articles, with a total of 91, or 78.4% of all articles. This certainly supports our argument that it is in terms of philosophical and political affinities that CDS and communication’s trajectories mostly traverse. Critical Studies in Media Communication and Journal of International and Intercultural Studies are the next most prolific, with 13 and 10 articles respectively. Journals devoted to pedagogy, Communication Teacher and Communication Education, contain a total of four articles.

Non-NCA journals seen in the search that are not expressly devoted to CDA do publish articles containing “critical discourse analysis” in their text from 2010 to 2018. Foremost among these are the Journal of Language & Politics, Text & Talk, International Communication Gazette, Journalism Studies, Journalism, International Journal of Communication, Environmental Communication, Visual Communication, Media Culture and Society, and New Media & Society. However, the frequency of publication ranges from 75 articles in Journal of Language & Politics to just six in New Media & Society. Just as Critical Discourse Studies and Discourse & Society illustrate the geographic diversity of CDS, our search shows that several area-specific journals publish CDS-oriented articles, including: Language in India, Australian Journal of Linguistics, European Journal of Communication, Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research, and China Media Research. Outside of its traditional dedicated outlets, CDA and CDS seem to have more room to expand.

Given these results, several of the concerns expressed in our call remain. First is the relative paucity of CDS scholars and work in the U.S.A. Critical Discourse Studies, the most prominent journal in the sample above, has a review board composed primarily of European editors with only three out of 35 editors from U.S. institutions. While we do not suggest that this is unfair, it does illustrate that the institutional home of CDS remains solidly in Europe. Second, the uptake of CDA and CDS in the U.S. academy appears to be focused mostly on critical deconstruction with an emphasis in politics writ large or area disciplines. In this sense, these scholars continue the work of Wodak and others in opposing oppressive discursive regimes. Nevertheless, it is also clear that areas such as pedagogy, law, and rhetoric, as represented in NCA journals, have not participated in the uptake of CDS. Third, while a recent issue on ethics in CDS shows an interest in injecting a new framework into the approach, many of the articles featured in it draw on CDS as a means of unmasking power relations.⁵¹ In a sense, CDS is thus fully formed and moves outward to attack unjust power.

Present issue and future directions

The five articles in this special issue illustrate, in their own way, the affinities between CDS and communication studies, not only by their authorship inside academic (media and) communication departments within and outside of the U.S.A., but also by their commitment to move the critical portion of CDS to the fore. Mariaelena Bartesaghi and Kate Pantelides’s contribution addresses what they call “CDS’s a priori failproof, self-validating ‘critical’ arguments” that presume the omniscience of the critic. In this approach, as we pointed out, they join a long line of rhetorical scholars who have questioned the critic both ontologically and socially, in addition to recent engagements in CDS itself.⁵² Nevertheless, their approach is novel. Through an analysis of their own previously published research, they argue that “CDS always asks us to confront how we are in fact complicit in the critiques we enact.” Through a reading, via a CDS lens, of their previous scholarship, they find that the critical/emancipatory promise of CDS is seriously challenged by their own privileged positions. Thus, they propose “a concerted pursuit of reflexivity, multimodality, and interdisciplinary associations” and recommend that scholars must “colabor” across disciplines and recognize that those we claim to speak for can, and should, be invited to speak for themselves.

Many scholars have commented on the fragmentation of texts and audiences in a media system characterized by the establishment of social media.⁵³ Gwen Bouvier and David Machin tackle this phenomenon head on with an in-depth analysis of methodological difficulties caused by what they call the “decline of the ‘big Other.’” Social media’s arguable democratization of text production reframes authorial power from a monolithic institutional entity to a distributed network and also undermines CDS’s core interest in the role of ideology in creating hegemonic unequal relations of power. Based on this premise, they analyze scholars of journalism to complicate CDS’s traditional approaches to analysis. While they do not provide a blueprint as other CDS scholars have,⁵⁴ they do provide a needed overview of the monumental shifts in journalism production and text reception.

The final three contributions bring varied theoretical perspectives to address one of CDS’s most discussed shortcomings: the challenge of fully living up to its critical mission by crafting antihegemonic discourses.⁵⁵ Jessica M. F. Hughes examines discourses of neurodiversity to emphasize this final, necessary step. She uses “progressive discourse analysis” to show the value and necessity of both deconstruction and (re)construction in challenging unjust power structures. Likewise, Etsuko Kinefuchi brings CDS into conversation with intercultural communication to develop a “fifth juncture” that incorporates environments and ecologies as equally worthy of consideration as oppressed people. Her “CDA irrealis” unveils how different discourses of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests show different orientations to the environment as coequal to humans. Kinefuchi suggests that incorporating an ecological turn into intercultural communication and CDS is the first step toward moving the latter past its rut of deconstruction and toward contributing to emancipatory politics. Finally, Jolanta A. Drzewiecka and Marouf Hasian explore national memory in the context of Polish–Russian relations via the dual tragedies of the Katyń massacre (1940) and Smoleńsk plane crash (2010). Applying Lacanian psychoanalysis and discourse theory more broadly, they interrogate the “open wound” of Polish–Russian relations and find an incommensurable distance between the two nations, which can only be addressed if both recognize the other’s need for reconciliation within their own framework of national suffering. While they do not provide a positive/progressive example for others to follow, they do suggest a diagnosis of the problem and thus a starting point.

Overall, all five of the contributions collected here speak to the value of interdisciplinary theory building. Whether through ecological turns, a focus on progressive discourse, self-reflexivity, or innovative methodologies, these articles encapsulate the promise of bringing CDS and communication studies closer together. CDS’ position in the broader academy, specifically in Europe and Latin America, is secure, and scholars continue to make productive use of its theories and methods. Nevertheless, its uptake into communication studies has been uneven to say the least. It was this feeling that inspired us to embark on our journey to bring together communication scholars to share their experiences, ideas, and ultimately their valuable scholarship in this special issue. Their contributions, and the selected further reading list, serve as an entree for (U.S.) communication scholars to the complex history of CDS. They also emphasize the continuity between CDS and other approaches—in sociolinguistic, discourse, and rhetorical studies—that build on similar assumptions in order to develop detailed analyses of discursive practices in their attempts to map the interrelation between the sociological and the textual—or between “Discourse and discourse.”⁵⁶ To those unfamiliar with the project, we hope you will find this material enlightening and edifying.

For those, however, who are already aware of CDS and its endeavor, we feel that there is much more to do to foster productive intersections. Our analysis of NCA conference presentations, NCA Journals, and non-CDS-oriented journals shows that there are still many areas of communication that have, as yet, not turned to CDS as a potential way to develop their scholarship. Conversely, and as the articles in this special issue illustrate, there is much potential in incorporating progressive or positive steps more fully into the deconstruction in which CDS still trucks. Doing so can aid CDS in living up to its critical and political potential. Moreover, the pedagogical potentialities of CDS need to be explored more fully. Our analysis shows that education remains underexplored in CDS, and thoroughgoing analysis of pedagogical contexts would appear to support our contributors’ position that CDS must work—alongside other approaches—to shed light on politically transformative discourses.⁵⁷

Despite the work that remains, we are excited about the development of CDS over the last 50 years. The field has gone from a relatively niche offshoot of linguistics in Europe to a global enterprise uniting academics of diverse interests and backgrounds. Further, its success shows the positive potential of the “critical” mission of so much humanistic scholarship. The essays published here, and the broad scope of CDS scholarship besides, illustrate the value of the enterprise in addressing a variety of political, cultural, and economic dynamics and their intertwining with discursive practices. In the current context of simultaneous urgency and discrediting of intellectual work, we need as many tools as we can muster to establish convincing, significant connections across different spheres of society, different contexts and topics, to translate back and forth between our academic niches and the rest of the world, as well as into the classroom. We hope you will find some of those tools in these pages.

Selected further reading

Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. “All of the Above: New Coalitions in Sociocultural Linguistics.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12, no. 4 (2008): 401–31.

Caldas-Coulthard, C., and R. Iedema, eds. Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contested Identities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Carpentier, Nico, and Erik Spinoy, eds. Discourse Theory and Cultural Analysis: Media, Arts, and Literature. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008.

Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Norman Fairclough. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Angelos Kissas. “The Communication of Horrorism: A Typology of Isis Online Death Videos.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 1 (2018): 24–39.

Chun, Christian W. The Discourses of Capitalism: Everyday Economists and the Production of Common Sense. London: Routledge, 2017.

de Fina, Anna. Identity in Narrative: A Study of Immigrant Discourse. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2003.

García Agustín, Óscar. Sociology of Discourse: From Institutions to Social Change. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2003.

García, Ofelia, Nelson Flores, and Massimiliano Spotti, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

JESSOP*, BOB. “Critical Semiotic Analysis and Cultural Political Economy.” Critical Discourse Studies 1, no. 2 (2004): 159–74.

KhosraviNik, Majid. “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies.” In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, edited by John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson, 582–96. London: Routledge, 2017.

Koller, Veronika. “Critical Discourse Studies of Language and Sexuality: The Past Ten Years.” Paper presented at 9th British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Language, Gender, and Sexuality Special Interest Group Event, Liverpool, U.K., 8 April 2016.

Krzyżanowski, Michał, and Bernhard Forchtner. “Theories and Concepts in Critical Discourse Studies: Facing Challenges, Moving Beyond Foundations.” Discourse & Society 27, no. 3 (2016): 253–61.

Lazar, Michelle M., ed. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender, Power and Ideology in Discourse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Lemke, Jay L. Using Language in the Classroom. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Macgilchrist, Felicitas. “Fissures in the Discourse-Scape: Critique, Rationality and Validity in Post-Foundational Approaches to CDS.” Discourse & Society 27, no. 3 (2016): 262–77.

Martín Rojo, Luisa. Constructing Inequality in Multilingual Classrooms. New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010.

Martínez Guillem, Susana. “Race/Ethnicity.” In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, edited by John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson, 359–71. London: Routledge, 2017.

Milani, Tommaso M., ed. Language and Masculinities: Performances, Intersections, Dislocations (London: Routledge, 2015).

Motschenbacher, Heiko. “Sexuality in Critical Discourse Studies.” In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, edited by John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson, 388–402. London: Routledge, 2017.

Padovani, Cinzia. “The Media of the Ultra-Right: Discourse and Audience Activism Online.” Journal of Language and Politics 15, no. 4 (2016): 399–421.

Pardo, Neyla. Cómo Hacer Análisis Crítico Del Discurso. Una Perspectiva Latinoamericana. Santiagio de Chile: Frasis, 2007.

Pérez-Milans, Miguel, and Carlos Soto. “Reflexive Language and Ethnic Minority Activism in Hong Kong: A Trajectory-Based Analysis.” AILA Review 29 (2016): 48–82.

Piazza, Roberta, Monika Bednarek, and Fabio Rossi, eds. Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2011.

Richardson, John E. “Sharing Values to Safeguard the Future: British Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration as Epideictic Rhetoric.” Discourse & Communication 12, no. 2 (2018): 171–91.

Rogers, Rebecca, ed. An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2011.

Strom, Megan, and Emily Alcock. “Floods, Waves, and Surges: The Representation of Latin@ Immigrant Children in the United States Mainstream Media.” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 440–57.

Thurlow, Crispin. “‘Forget About the Words’? Tracking the Language, Media and Semiotic Ideologies of Digital Discourse: The Case of Sexting.” Discourse, Context & Media 20 (2017): 10–19.

van Dijk, Teun A., ed. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011.

van Leeuwen, Theo. Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge, 2005.

Wodak, Ruth, and Bernhard Forchtner, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge, 2017.

Zappettini, Franco, and Jeffrey Unerman. “‘Mixing’ and “Bending”: The Recontextualisation of Discourses of Sustainability in Integrated Reporting.” Discourse & Communication 10, no. 5 (2016): 521–42.

Zotzmann, Karin, and John P. O’Regan. “Critical Discourse Analysis and Identity.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, edited by Siân Preece, 113–28. London: Routledge, 2016.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ramsey Eric Ramsey for the opportunity to put together this special issue, Sohinee Roy for her thoughtful guidance throughout the process, and all the colleagues who agreed to review the essays we sent them.

Notes

1 Norman Fairclough, “CDA as Dialectical Reasoning,” in The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2017), 13–26; Susana Martínez Guillem, “Precarious Privilege: Indignad@s, Daily Disidentifications, and Cultural (Re)Production,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 238–53; Karen Tracy et al., “Critical Discourse Analysis and (U.S.) Communication Scholarship,” Communication Yearbook 35, no. 1 (2011): 241–86.

2 Tracy et al., “Critical Discourse Analysis and (U.S.) Communication Scholarship,” 246. See also Jan Blommaert, Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Mary Bucholtz, “From Mulatta to Mestiza: Passing and the Linguistic Reshaping of Ethnic Identity,” in Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, ed. Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz (London: Routledge, 1995), 351–74; Lilie Chouliaraki, “Witnessing War: Economies of Regulation in Reporting War and Conflict,” The Communication Review 12, no. 3 (2009): 215–26; Viviane Resende, Análise de Discurso Crítica e Realismo Crítico: Implicações Interdisciplinares (Campinas, Brazil: Pontes, 2009).

3 See Mariaelena Bartesaghi, “Conversation and Psychotherapy: How Questioning Reveals Institutional Answers,” Discourse Studies 11, no. 2 (2009): 153–77; Bernadette Barker Plummer, “News as a Political Resource: Media Strategies and Political Identity in the U.S. Women’s Movement, 1966–1975,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, no. 3 (1995): 306–24; Hamilton Bean, “Organizational Culture and U.S. Intelligence Affairs,” Intelligence and National Security 24, no. 4 (2009): 479–98; Sara Cobb, “A Critique of Critical Discourse Analysis: Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Role of Intention,” Communication Theory 4, no. 2 (2006): 132–52; Stanley Deetz, Renee Heath, and Jessica MacDonald, “On Talking to Not Make Decisions: A Critical Analysis of Organizational Talk,” in Interacting and Organizing: Analyses of a Management Meeting, ed. François Cooren (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007), 225–44; Michael Huspek, “Dueling Structures: The Theory of Resistance in Discourse,” Communication Theory 3, no. 1 (1993): 1–25; J. L. Lemke, “Ideology, Intertextuality, and the Communication of Science,” in Relations and Functions Within and Around Language, ed. Peter H. Fries et al. (London: Continuum, 2002), 32–55; Martínez Guillem, “Precarious Privilege”; Craig O. Stewart, “Social Cognition and Discourse Processing Goals in the Analysis of ‘ex-Gay’ Rhetoric,” Discourse & Society 19, no. 1 (2008): 63–83.

4 Simon During, Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2005), 35.

5 Ibid.

6 M. A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (London: Edward Arnold, 1994); Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957).

7 Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, Language as Ideology, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1993); Roger Fowler et al., Language and Control (London: Routledge, 1979).

8 During, Cultural Studies, 35.

9 A search on Google Scholar for number of citations since 2015 yields for 27,313 for Norman Fairclough, and 25,221 for Teun A. van Dijk. The site did not contain information for Ruth Wodak.

10 Teun A. van Dijk, Prejudice in Discourse: An Analysis of Ethnic Prejudice in Cognition and Conversation (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 1984); Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London: Longman, 1989); Ruth Wodak, ed., Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 1989); Teun A. van Dijk, ed., Discourse as Social Interaction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997); Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, eds., “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 1–33.

11 During, Cultural Studies, 36.

12 Ibid., 35.

13 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009); Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Barthes, Mythologies; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the “Prison Notebooks” of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1992); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture & Society 2, no. 1 (1980): 57–72; Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious, trans. Harbans Nagpal (London: Macmillan, 1982); Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

14 Teun A. van Dijk, “Multidisciplinary CDA: A Plea for Diversity,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 63 original emphasis.

15 For two recent exceptions, see Lilie Chouliaraki, “The Theatricality of Humanitarianism: A Critique of Celebrity Advocacy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 1–21; Martínez Guillem, “Precarious Privilege.”

16 John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

17 Wodak and Meyer, “Critical Discourse Analysis”; van Dijk, “Multidisciplinary CDA.”

18 Shi Xu, Discourse and Culture: From Discourse Analysis to Cultural Discourse Studies (Shanghai, China: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2013), 76.

19 Shi Xu, “Editorial,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 4, no. 3 (2009): 239–41.

20 Laura Pardo, “Latin-American Discourse Studies: State of the Art and New Perspectives,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 5, no. 3 (2010): 183.

21 Ibid., 187.

22 Ibid., 188. See also Viviane M. Resende, “Decolonizing Critical Discourse Studies: For a Latin American Perspective,” 2017, http://www.academia.edu/35750120/Decolonizing_critical_discourse_studies_For_a_Latin_American_perspective.

23 Tracy et al., “Critical Discourse Analysis and (U.S.) Communication Scholarship.” See also Manuel Alcántara-Plá and Ana Ruiz-Sánchez, “Not for Twitter: Migration as a Silenced Topic in 2015 Spain General Election,” in Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse: Empirical Approaches, ed. Melani Schröter and Charlotte Taylorn (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 25–64; Rahul Mitra, “The Neo-Capitalist Firm in Emerging India: Organization–State–Media Linkages,” International Journal of Business Communication 50, no. 1 (2013): 3–33; Nicolina Montesano Montessori and Esperanza Morales-López, “Multimodal Narrative as an Instrument for Social Change: Reinventing Democracy in Spain—The Case of 15 M,” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 7, no. 2 (2015): 200–21; Alexandra Pinto, “Towards a (Dis)Integrated Europe: The Constructs of ‘Europe’ and ‘Troika’ versus ‘Portugal’ and ‘The Portuguese’ in a Corpus of Portuguese Opinion Articles,” in National Identity and Europe in Times of Crisis: Doing and Undoing Europe, ed. Christian Karner and Monika Kopytowska (Bingley, U.K.: Emerald Publishing, 2017), 187–209; Bryan C. Taylor and Hamilton Bean, “Conceptualizing Multicultural Discourses of Security: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 12, no. 4 (2017): 312–31; Cindy S. Vincent and Sara Straub, “Structures of Dissent: Social Media, Resistance Journalism, and the Mobilization of Poverty Activism,” in Social Media and Politics: A New Way to Participate in the Political Process, vol. 2, ed. Glenn W. Richardson Jr. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 1–19.

24 See Fairclough, “CDA as Dialectical Reasoning”; Xu, Discourse and Culture; Thomasz Zarycki, “For a Relational Critical Discourse Analysis,” The Central European Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 12 (2017): 302–28; Jan Zienkowski, “Reflexivity in the Transdisciplinary Field of Critical Discourse Studies,” Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): 1–12.

25 Zarycki, “For a Relational Critical Discourse Analysis.”

26 Michael Billig, “Critical Discourse Analysis and the Rhetoric of Critique,” in Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity, ed. Gilbert Weiss and Ruth Wodak (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 35–46.

27 Fairclough, “CDA as Dialectical Reasoning”; Xu, Discourse and Culture; Zarycki, “For a Relational Critical Discourse Analysis”; Zienkowski, “Reflexivity in the Transdisciplinary Field of Critical Discourse Studies.” See also Mariaelena Bartesaghi and Kate Pantelides’s essay in this special issue.

28 See Jessica M. F. Hughes’s essay in this special issue.

29 Benno Herzog, “Discourse Analysis as Immanent Critique: Possibilities and Limits of Normative Critique in Empirical Discourse Studies,” Discourse & Society 27, no. 3 (2016): 282.

30 Martin Nonhoff, “Discourse Analysis as Critique,” Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): 2.

31 Ibid., 9.

32 Stacy Holman Jones, “Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 763–91.

33 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21.

34 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination; Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology; Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the Addition of “Practice of the New Science”, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948); Lev Semyonovich Vigotsky, Thought and Language, ed. and trans. Alex Kozulin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Valentin Nikolaevič Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973).

35 Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91–111; William L. Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary A. Copeland, eds., Critical Questions: Invention, Creativity, and the Criticism of Discourse and Media (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “Critical Rhetorics of Controversy,” Western Journal of Communication 63, no. 4 (1999): 526–38.

36 Michael Billig, “From Codes to Utterances: Cultural Studies, Discourse and Psychology,” in Cultural Studies in Question, ed. Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 205–26.

37 See Karen Tracy, “Language and Social Interaction.” In International Encyclopedia of Communication, ed. Wolfgang Donsbach (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 2645–55.

38 Helene Shugart, “An Appropriating Aesthetic: Reproducing Power in the Discourse of Critical Scholarship,” Communication Theory 13, no. 3 (2003): 286, emphasis added.

39 Richard Johnson et al., The Practice of Cultural Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 3.

40 Ibid., 2; 3.

41 Alison Lee and Cate Poynton, eds., Culture & Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research and Cultural Studies (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 2.

42 See Blommaert, Discourse; Terry Threadgold, “Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis: Histories, Remembering and Futures,” Linguistik Online 14, no. 2 (2003): 1–36.

43 Threadhold, “Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis”; see also Gwen Bouvier and David Machin’s essay in this special issue.

44 Ben Agger, Cultural Studies as Critical Theory (Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press, 1992).

45 Steven Best, qtd. in Peter McLaren “Multiculturalism and the Postmodern Critique: Towards a Pedagogy of Resistance and Transformation,” Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (1993): 131.

46 Younghan Cho, “We Know Where We’re Going, but We Don’t Know Where We Are: An Interview with Lawrence Grossberg,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2008): 103.

47 Flowerdew and Richardson, The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies.

48 Andrea Sabine Sedlaczek, “The Field-Specific Representation of Climate Change in Factual Television: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 5 (2017): 480–96; Trevor Gulliver, “Canada the Redeemer and Denials of Racism,” Critical Discourse Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 68–86; Chaim Noy, “Memory, Media, and Museum Audience’s Discourse of Remembering,” Critical Discourse Studies 15, no. 1 2018): 19–38; Elise Remling, “Logics, Assumptions and Genre Chains: A Framework for Poststructuralist Policy Analysis,” Critical Discourse Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 1–18; Ewa Glapka, “‘If You Look at Me Like at a Piece of Meat, Then That’s a Problem’—Women in the Center of the Male Gaze. Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis as a Tool of Critique,” Critical Discourse Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 87–103; Kelsi Matwick, “Language and Gender in Female Celebrity Chef Cookbooks: Cooking to Show Care for the Family and for the Self,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 5 (2017): 532–47; Rowan R. Mackay, “Real Women: Objectivity versus Situatedness in Critical Discourse Studies,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 5 (2017): 548–68; Kate Lockwood Harris, Kellie E. Palazzolo, and Matthew W. Savage, “‘I’m Not Sexist, but … ’: How Ideological Dilemmas Reinforce Sexism in Talk About Intimate Partner Violence,” Discourse & Society 23, no. 6 (2012): 643–56.

49 John Flowerdew, “Understanding the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement: A Critical Discourse Historiographical Approach,” Discourse & Society 28, no. 5 (2017): 453–72; Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini, “Discursive Double-Legitimation of (Avoiding) Another War in Obama’s 2013 Address on Syria,” Journal of Language and Politics 16, no. 5 (2017): 706–30; Carola Schoor, “In the Theater of Political Style: Touches of Populism, Pluralism and Elitism in Speeches of Politicians,” Discourse & Society 28, no. 6 (2017): 657–76; Yannis Stavrakakis et al., “Extreme Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Revisiting a Reified Association,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 420–39; Minna Tiainen, “(De)Legitimating Electronic Surveillance: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Finnish News Coverage of the Edward Snowden Revelations,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 402–19.

50 Vincent Guangsheng Huang, “Organisational Change, Ideologies and Mega Discourses: ‘De-SMOisation’ of the Third Sector in Authoritarian China,” Journal of Language and Politics 17, no. 1 (2018): 70–91; Fengyuan Ji, “The West and China: Discourses, Agendas and Change,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 325–40; Carl Jon Way Ng, “Skilling the Nation, Empowering the Citizen: Neoliberal Instantiations in Singapore’s Lifelong Learning Policy,” Journal of Language and Politics 17, no. 1 (2018): 118–40; Changpeng Huan, “The Strategic Ritual of Emotionality in Chinese and Australian Hard News: A Corpus-Based Study,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 5 (2017): 461–79; Aleksandar Pavković, “Sacralisation of Contested Territory in Nationalist Discourse: A Study of Milošević’s and Putin’s Public Speeches,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 5 (2017): 497–513; Erez Levon, Tommaso M. Milani, and E. Dimitris Kitis, “The Topography of Masculine Normativities in South Africa,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 5 (2017): 514–31; Tiainen, “(De)Legitimating Electronic Surveillance”; Arunas Juska and Charles Woolfson, “The Moral Discourses of ‘Post-Crisis’ Neoliberalism: A Case Study of Lithuania’s Labour Code Reform,” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 2 (2017): 132–49.

51 Phil Graham, “Special Issue Introduction on Ethics in CDS,” Critical Discourse Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 107–10.

52 Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Celeste Condit, “Rhetorical Criticism and Audiences: The Extremes of McGee and Leff,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 330–45; Robert Hariman, “Critical Rhetoric and Postmodern Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 1 (1991): 67; Mckerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 91; Stephen E. Lucas, “The Schism in Rhetorical Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 67, no. 1 (1981): 1–20; Herzog, “Discourse Analysis as Immanent Critique”; Mackay, “Real Women.”

53 Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 274–89.

54 Anabela Carvalho, “Media(Ted) Discourse and Society: Rethinking the Framework of Critical Discourse Analysis,” Journalism Studies 9, no. 2 (2008): 161–77; Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 2010); Wodak and Meyer, “Critical Discourse Analysis.”

55 Michael Billig, “The Language of Critical Discourse Analysis: The Case of Nominalization,” Discourse & Society 19, no. 6 (2008): 783–800; H. G. Widdowson, “Discourse Analysis: A Critical View,” Language and Literature 4, no. 3 (1995): 157–72.

56 James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005).

57 Henry A. Giroux, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 59–79; Paola Giorgis; “Critical Discourse Analysis,” Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue 51 (2015): https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/key-concept-cda.pdf.