ABSTRACT
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a form of critical social analysis. Critical social analysis shows how forms of social life can damage people unnecessarily, but also how they can be changed. CDA's contribution is elucidating how discourse is related to other social elements and offering critique of discourse as a way into wider critique of social reality. CDA offers better explanatory understanding of relations between discourse and other components of social life. Explanatory critique identifies the problem in the existing state of affairs, in this case the marketisation of universities. This provides a normative view of problematisation: in political deliberation, problematisation is often open to critique for lacking this explanatory basis. The movement from problematisation to advocated solution is itself characterised by dialectical relations between discourse and non-discursive social elements. The chapter suggests how the 'epistemological' dialectic of debate connects with a 'relational' dialectic and thereby 'ontological' and 'practical' dialectics.
