This course offers a comprehensive, practical introduction to qualitative critical discourse studies and invites you to consider how you can integrate it into your own research. The course is for anyone interested in analysing how language is used (and abused) in different socio-political contexts. Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is now a well-established, but heterogeneous approach to the analysis of text and talk in different socio-political spaces. CDS understands language as a form of social practice and that language use cannot be understood without looking at wider contexts of power relations. Though CDS has a basis in sociolinguistics, it offers set of a theories and methodologies that can be applied by researchers in different fields (e.g., Political Science, International Relations, Media & Communication, and Sociology). During the course you will learn how (1) the fundamental concepts of CDS (2) a range approaches to analysing materials, that suit different projects, (3) how to interpret your findings, and (4) how to build a CDS-oriented research project.
- Instructor: Stavros Assimakopoulos