Doing Critical Discourse Analysis

In this episode, I talk with Professor Veronica Koller about her CDA-related research across corporate and workplace discourse, language/gender/sexuality, political discourse, and metaphor.   Veronica explains metaphor as talking about one thing in terms of another and shows how metaphors shape experience and do ideological work (e.g., illness as battle/journey; migration as viruses/tsunamis). We discuss metaphor clusters and mixed metaphors. We hear examples from current and recent projects, including the MANTRaP project (Misogyny and the Red Pill) on online misogyny, and Voices of Supporters, which analyses social media comments around European populist parties.   In the subscriber edition, we briefly discuss scaling metaphor analysis with corpus methods, emerging work on metaphors and large language models, and developing research projects.    00:00 Welcome and Introductions 00:48 Research Themes Overview 02:07 Current Projects and Data 03:40 What Metaphor Means 06:41 Why We Use Metaphors 08:12 Ideology and Power Effects 09:40 Metaphor Clusters and Mixing 12:52 Critical Metaphor Analysis 15:27 Identifying Metaphors Systematically 21:18 Worked Example Leadership and Space 26:48 Metaphors That Disguise Vagueness 28:16 Using Metaphor in Research Projects —— 31:51 New Directions Corpus and LLMs 34:29 How Research Questions Begin 38:46 Wrap Up and Where to Find More   Metaphors AIs live by - Brigitte Nerlich MANTRaP - Misogyny and the Red Pill Voices of Supporters - book Veronika Koller - Lancaster University Words & Actions podcast  Discourse Academy

In this episode, Professor Aaron Stibbe discusses ecolinguistics, including how his approach emerged from his experience of Japanese ecological wisdom and dissatisfaction with environmental textbooks. We hear how his current work on eco-poetry searches for inspirational language that can help people break from industrial “stories to live by,” and how ecolinguistics can be used to analyse influential discourses in economics, media reporting of growth, and the pork industry’s framing of animals. Importantly, we discuss ecolinguistics’ relationship to sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, arguing that ecolinguistics entails understanding how society is embedded in the ecological. We also explore selecting impactful data, the need for positive discourse alternatives, critiques of Western “light” environmentalism, and Stibbe’s use of an explicit ecosophy to evaluate discourses as beneficial or destructive.   The subscriber version has an extra 15 minutes of discussion including advice per people starting a project in ecolinguistics and more on Arran’s work on eco-poetry.   Ecopoetikon The Stories We Live By The Search for New Stories to Live By Discourse Academy

Ruth Wodak shares the  story of the beginnings of critical discourse analysis; the interdisciplinary nature of critical discourse studies; its problem-oriented approach and the importance of context. The conversation also covers the challenges and best practices for new researchers and the pressing need for critical research in the current global context.  Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to hear an exclusive longer version of the episode. Look at the Discourse Academy website for blogs, workshops, courses and more on critical discourse analysis.