Summary
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a way of studying language that asks how everyday talk and text help keep relations of power in place. It grew from the ‘critical linguistics’ of Roger Fowler and colleagues in the 1970s and is closely tied to the Lancaster linguist Norman Fairclough, alongside Ruth Wodak and Teun A. van Dijk.
Fairclough’s premise is that discourse helps make social life as well as describing it. His method, set out in 1992, treats any instance of language as “simultaneously a piece of text, an instance of discursive practice, and an instance of social practice”: the words, how they’re produced and interpreted, and the institutions around them.
Rationale
A set of tools for one thing we suggest: noticing “the assumptions embedded in stories, environments, everyday practices”. Its reach is language, though; we find dispositions carried by bodies, buildings and habits too.