Sunday 4 November 2012

Discourse Analysis - Risky Business


I found it interesting that Dijk in her essay, “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis”, discusses the relationship between discourse, power, dominance, social inequality and the position of the discourse analyst. Dijk calls this study domain “multidisciplinary” and it’s true – so many aspects of social structure are involved in defining dominance – economical, political, cultural, etc. I am surprised to hear that not a lot of research has been done on the role text or talk play on creating the dominance of elites.
            Second of all, Dijk made me think about the American-Cuban article that I am peer reviewing this week. The authors of the article had also set off to use discourse analysis as a method to identify the role media plays in American-Cuban population’s views on Cuba. When reading the paper for the first time it struck me that the question the researchers pose is extremely complex. Now I have the proof that it, in fact, is complex.  The authors of my peer review paper, like Dijk, need to think of many aspects of social structure – economical, political, cultural - if they want to answer a research question on the role media, or any discourse, plays in setting people’s views. Dijk very carefully offers disclaimers, such as “the relationships involved and the conditions on reproduction are complicated” while the Castro article authors do not. In general, I think discourse analysis is a risky undertaking and has to be carried out with multiple considerations of meaning. Otherwise the data collected is just raw and unconcerned quantity.

No comments:

Post a Comment