Critical Discourse Analysis

Reading Teun A. van Dijk’s “Principles of critical discourse analysis” I was struck by the attention that the author paid to power relations. In my past experience with discourse analysis (finally, something I have experience with), I have found this focus on power relations to be pertinent.

The following quotation seemed to me to sum up the most important part of the relationship between discourse and power relations: “Critical scholars should not worry about the interests or perspectives of those in power, who are best placed to take care of their own interests anyway. Most male or white scholars have been shown to despise or discredit such partisanship, and thereby show how partisan they are in the first place, e.g. by ignoring, mitigating, excluding or denying inequality” (Dijk 253).

The idea that male scholars would “discredit such partisanship” is one that I personally found true in my own research. In undergrad, I spent a fair amount of time taking English classes in the women’s studies field and researching in the field. Frequently my male classmates (and once in a while male teachers) would claim that my research into the marginalization of female writers was not necessary--they claimed just as van Dijk explains in the above quotation that their was no inequality in the way women writers were treated throughout history. This attempt to ignore an existing inequality, in addition to their frequent attempts to discredit a field like women’s studies illustrates the author’s point about the importance of power relations and critical discourse analysis.

About research diaries ...

Happy Halloween :)

Just a quick thought on research diaries to end the week. After the class discussion this week, I have become uneasy with the thought of keeping a research diary. The example of the man who died, and whose diary was read and research subsequently reanalyzed really made me think. To me, this situation ruins the research. It is the author that becomes a research topic, rather than the actual work s/he did.

Knight on Reflective Inquiry, Image-Based Research Techniques

Knight's short discussion about reflective inquiry was interesting to me as a former literature student. I know that Knight, along with most of our other readings, are coming from the field of social sciences specifically, but it is interesting to me to think about the great extent to which certain fields within the arts, like English , are largely performed through what might be called reflective analysis (except in most undergrad courses where the ease of teaching fledgeling scholars some form of "new criticism" results in little to no secondary reading).

It would be interesting to take a close look at how funding affects the ways in which producing brand-new findings in the art vs the sciences. Sciences usually require a large budget, and stakeholders want to see where their money is going. Having original findings to justify a budget would be preferable in this case.

Finally, I also felt that Knight's treatment of image-based research was scant; considering that my research area is heavily concerned with using digital images as scholarly aids, I was excited when I saw the heading, but was quickly disappointed to read nothing that was relevant to my interests. All in all, considering how popular image-based research such as visualization techniques is getting, I expected much more coverage in this area.

Titles are for people who are creatively able

I actually thought the Knight material this week was a little slim, and the two articles (the artifact one and the critical discourse analysis one) were great supplements. (Is the Knight coverage of DA slim and the Luker coverage nonexistent because they privately think discourse analysis is unimportant?) I found it thoroughly amusing that discourse analysis is allegedly thought of so poorly in the social sciences (can this be true?), since it sounds much more manageable to me than field work of any kind. ("Field" work always conjures up images, in my mind, of strapping on your hiking boots for a three-week stay in the wilderness, struggling to figure out which plants can be used medicinally and which will kill you. No one here gets out alive, etc., but perhaps I am just lazy.)

Two thoughts about the readings this week: My first thought while reading Knight and then the Thomas (artifacts) article was how simply the criticisms she alleges are levelled against artifact analysis could be levelled agianst ethnography, focus groups, or any other research method we've talked about.  To this extent, I thought her assertion that research methods "only provide data that may be interpreted as reflecting [an individual's meaning-making-and-subsequent-application] processes" (685) to be an important recognition for any researcher seeking to de-legitimize discourse analysis or artifact studies.

[Insert personal anecdote: I was once part of a research study that combined interviews and focus groups. The researchers had sought out people in a "support group" setting who were dealing with a sensitive issue. Nearly every person interviewed and/or in the focus group told the researcher some combination of the "truth," what they thought the researcher wanted her to hear and what they thought presented themselves in the best light. I came away wondering what sort of research this could possibly produce, or if social science researchers were somehow trained to detect when a group of people are lying through their teeth. I was wondering if this is what Knight meant when he said that research participants might "fake good" (108). End anecdote.]

Although discourse analysis still requires the researcher to take into account the "positioning" (can't think of a better word) done by the subject/producer of the discourse/artifact/etc, the process of dealing with a "researcher" in any official way (being interviewed, being studied, etc.) is typically removed. This might eliminate some aspect of power-positioning that happens when people are faced with someone that looks/sounds/seems "authoritative." (This isn't to say the two are in any way equal, or that one can be a substitute for the other. It's just a different set of problems, I suppose.)

Second thought: Whereas "artifact study" might be a method of discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis doesn't seem like a "method" on its own. It seems that one might incorporate any number of discourse analysis "methods" to produce a critical discourse analysis? For example, it would be possible to incorporate image or artifact study or document analysis to produce a critical discourse analysis. This is probably totally obvious but by virtue of it having popped into my head it is being recorded here for all to see.

FINALLY: What are the rules around the ethics of discourse analysis? I'm thinking of the paper given to us for Assignment 3. I imagine that with a little bit of determination it would be pretty easy to find this Facebook group, presuming it still exists, and locate all of the people the authors were talking about. I don't think consent was mentioned in the article, and since the group is "public" perhaps it isn't necessary. I know this is only one particular kind of discourse analysis, but it kind of stood out to me.

Image-based Research

After reading Knight's article, I was shocked to see just how little he focused on image-based research. I was even more shocked to discover that he did not even mention artifact research as some students at the iSchool are in the Archives or Museum stream, where exhibits and research are drawn from images and artifacts. Although a History major myself, I never really saw the usefulness of images but after reading Thomas I began to understand the importance they could hold. Also, I believed that artifacts were limited to material that was found on archeological digs and didn't even consider using other cultural material for research, such as Thomas mentions TV shows etc. This type of research method would be valuable to use in order to strengthen your research and give the reader prime and current examples.

People thinking about people

Sorry for the ramlyness and possible lack of sense, my brain short-circuited three days ago and the electrician hasn’t been in to fix it yet…

I found Thomas’ article to be wonderfully relevant for me as it dealt with the study of artifacts, which as a historian has always been my favourite method of study for obvious reasons. I found Thomas’s criticism of scholars like Mead - who assert that the study of artifacts is insufficient in studying human culture in comparison to ethnographic studies that measures behaviour - to be very pertinent as Thomas once more touches upon the recurring theme of this course, the issue of truthiness. Thomas specifically points out that the criticism by other scholars of the study of artifacts, in reference to them as reliable sources for attributing cultural meaning, is an issue of interpretation in relation to the data. Yet as Thomas astutely demonstrates all data regardless if its gathered from ethnographic studies or artifacts is subject to interpretation. A notion I have always personally believed; everything is subjective and in turn interpretive. As such it always makes me wonder why some people choose to attribute greater value to one method over another with the belief that it offers more objective results when it is the context, as Thomas says, which alters the value of the method.

Sometimes I think that interpretation or rather the lens/rules through which we interpret data is of greater importance than the method of its collection. To that end I’d like to share with you a quote by Douglas Adams from his Mostly Harmless that I found relevant … and I just thought it was funny and wanted to share.

“I know that astrology isn't a science,” said Gail. “Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what's the strange thing you British play?” “Er, cricket? Self-loathing?” “Parliamentary democracy.” The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all difference it would make. It's just a way thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of the paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people...”

A descriptive science...

As a bear of very little brain I continue to be somewhat uncomfortable with ethnography. That's after having covered some aspect of it in almost all of my classes, mind you. Despite Luker's nod to Foucault and acknowledgement of doxa, etc., the notion of "field" research somehow rings a little false in my mind. (Although I will acknowledge the two assumptions I was making when reading this chapter: First, that "field" research meant human-human interaction. I was somewhat surprised when Luker mentioned her friend who was a primatologist doing ethnographic work with baboons. I think part of my discomfort with the notion of "field" research is that it seems a little bit like putting the human "other" in the zoo. I suppose that, of course, I could extrapolate that ethnography could include animals or any number of other environments, but I keep focussing on the human environments. Second, although Luker has made acknowledgements aplenty of the need for social scientists to be careful about exerting the "special kind of power" that social science has over readers/consumers of the research, I was encouraged by the Shaffir article which says that ethnography is meant to be descriptive, and "attempts to... diminish the subjective component" of that research are folly. Equally interesting is the expansion of ethnographic research to include the researcher's motivations for pursuing the study, which does seem to remove some of my concern about the possibility of privileging the account of the researcher at the expense of "the whole story." I'm an English student, and I guess my concern is that an ethnography runs the risk of reading like a good novel.