The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies

There are two ways to set up a discussion of critical discourse analysis and media studies.First, we would privilege something called Critical Discourse Analysis, the capitalized identity embodied in the acronym "CDA".This approach has some obvious advantages.It gives an immediate focus and coherence to the discussion.It suggests reflection on a particular research tradition now well-known across the social sciences.The second approach would be wary of an institutionalized CDA identity.This impulse is sometimes discernible in CDA scholarship itself -in looser descriptions of CDA as a research "network" (Fairclough cited in Rogers, 2004), "movement" or "attitude" (van Dijk 2015), or, as this collection illustrates, in the embrace of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) as an alternative master category that seeks to signify greater theoretical and methodological openness than the CDA label.Instead of positioning media studies and critical discourse analysis as discrete fields, this perspective highlights the importance of the concept of discourse to the emergence of media studies in the 1970s and 1980s.It encourages us to see interdisciplinary affinities in a genealogical way; reframed as a lower-case category, we might say media scholars were already doing a kind of critical discourse analysis before "CDA" became an established identity.It also invites consideration of other discourse analytical traditions that depart from the linguistic underpinnings of CDA.For all its