Texts and Practices

This collection offers a guide to critical discourse analysis, covering both its underlying theory and its use in practice. The contributors examine how language functions as a tool of social control, drawing on the approach to study how meaning is shaped in everyday communication.

The essays apply critical discourse analysis to a wide range of written and spoken material, including data drawn from many different situations, nations and areas of public life. Through these case studies, the authors bring to light concealed patterns of discrimination and the unequal distribution of power.

The volume includes papers written specially for it by a group of established scholars. It is aimed at advanced students of language, media and cultural studies and presents a current overview of a field that is still developing. Contributors include Dr Norman Fairclough of the University of Lancaster, Prof. Roger Fowler of the University of East Anglia, Prof. Michael Hoey of the University of Liverpool, Prof. Gunther Kress of the University of London, and Mary Talbot of Odense University, Denmark.