ABSTRACT
Discourse analysis is a name given to a variety of approaches that study texts, talk and language in use or discourse, via different epistemological and theoretical traditions (e.g. social constructionism, post-structuralism) and within different disciplines (Fairclough, 1992; Wetherell, Taylor & Yates, 2001). Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a specific, though still broad, form of discourse analysis which began developing in the late 1980s as a ‘problem-oriented interdisciplinary research programme, subsuming a variety of approaches, each drawing on different epistemological assumptions, with different theoretical models, research methods and agenda’ (Wodak, 2013, p. xx), to examine the social and political context of discourses. Despite CDA being firmly established within the social sciences, owing to such diversity, there is no one prescribed method, singular or ‘best’ approach to CDA (Wetherell et al., 2001).
