Chapter Eighteen - Discourse Analysis

1

What are the main roots of the discourse analysis approach?

  • Post-structuralism - holds as central tenet that meaning is not static and fixed, but is fluid, provisional and context dependent
  • Semiology and semiotics - the study of signification through language and symbols
  • Social constructionism - philosophy that reality is not in any sense "given" but is built up through social processes and linguistic practices, therefore is context dependent
  • Foucauldian philosophy - the world has a structural reality that is best described in terms of power relations. Dominant discourses privilege versions of social reality that accord with and reinforce existing social structures
  • Discursive psychology - Language as a form of social action and purveyor of social functions
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2

What kinds of research domains are appropriate to discourse analysis?

  • Establishing how actions and practices are linguistically represented in particular settings
  • Investigating how particular accounts of events or activities are made to seem factual or "objective" and challenging these seemingly factual accounts
  • Studying how psychological concepts such as "paranoia" or "mental illness" are framed, in order to deconstruct established definitions, categories or meanings
  • Examining how oppressive ideologies or prejudices are manifest in text and discourse, and how that discourse reinforces those systems
  • Investigation of identity, selfhood, ideology, power relations and social change (particularly Foucauldian discourse analysis)
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3

What is the role of language according to discourse analysis?

  • Language does not represent psychological and social reality but actively constructs it
  • Language is composed of discourses, which are "interpretive repertoires"
  • Psychological phenomena are public, linguistic phenomena, not private interior phenomena
  • Language serves social functions, often power-relation functions, and can serve to maintain the status quo through "dominant" discourses
  • All spoken and written material can be conceptualised as texts
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