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Critical Discourse Analysis

Course Dates and Times

Monday 25 ꟷ Friday 29 July 2022
Minimum of 2 hours live teaching per day
Mon ꟷ Thurs: 10:00 ꟷ 12:00 CEST
Friday: 10:00 ꟷ 14:30 CEST
Times are tbc and can be adjusted depending on student time zones etc. 

Michal Krzyzanowski

michal.krzyzanowski@im.uu.se

Uppsala Universitet

This online course provides a highly interactive teaching and learning environment, using state of the art online pedagogical tools. It is designed for a demanding audience (researchers, professional analysts, advanced students) and capped at a maximum of 20 participants.

Purpose of the course

This course offers a comprehensive introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) – and its central, Discourse-Historical Approach – as the key critical, qualitative approaches to analysing discourse within and beyond the field of contemporary politics. 

The course highlights how deploying CDA/DHA can help to critically and systematically analyse and deconstruct discursive dynamics and the recontextualisation of discursive strategies in traditional and online (including social) media and across other modes of political, policy and institutional communication.

ECTS Credits

3 credits Engage fully with class activities
4 credits Complete a post-class assignment


Instructor Bio

Since 2020 Michał has held the Chair in Media and Communication Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Michał is a leading expert in critical discourse studies. His key areas of interest are political, policy and organisational communication as well as media and journalism. He is particularly known for his work on right-wing populism, anti-immigration rhetoric as well as for his research on neoliberal discourses and dynamics of democracy in the context of socio-political transformations.

Michał is also widely recognised for his work on methodological innovations in qualitative research, including discourse-ethnographic analysis of organisational and journalistic practices or discourse-conceptual analysis of dynamics of policy and political discourse.

@mwkrzyzanowski
Day 1

The course starts with a general introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis and its (interdisciplinary) origins, its key concepts, and on the key approaches in CDA.

Day 2

The introductory focus continues with discussion of CDA’s Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). We discuss DHA’s distinctive features or standard research designs, and introduce key DHA-specific levels and categories of analysis. 

Day 3

The course moves its focus to discussing application of CDA/DHA in relation to various political discourses and contexts, and showcasing different pathways of context-specific and comparative analysis. At first, we focus on the notion of ‘discursive shifts’ and show how their analysis, connected to exploration of a wider set of discursive strategies, can help in, for example, exploration of contemporary (right-wing) populism. 

Day 4

On the other hand, a DHA-based analysis of discourses and concepts – within the so-called Discourse-Conceptual Analysis (DCA) – is showcased while using the examples from, inter alia, media discourse or policy analysis.

Day 5

The final stage is devoted to the possibilities of deploying CDA/DHA in students’ own research projects, focussed on analysing contemporary political discourses in and beyond the political field and across various forms of mediated communication.


How the course will work online

The course will be organised in a number of sessions and run as a combination of pre-class activities and live, online lectures/seminars and interactions.

Pre-class activities will include, inter alia, pre-recorded short lectures in Panopto of 30ꟷ45 minutes max, assigned background readings or sample individual analyses performed on online-based materials such as videos. 

Online lectures/seminars via Zoom, max 2 hours each, will take place on Days 1ꟷ4. These cover in-depth discussion of methods and analytical categories along with their application to specific, problem-oriented research projects. 

Day 5 will also include a live Zoom session roughly three hours long, in which you will briefly present and discuss with the Instructor and other participants your research projects and application of CDA/DHA in your analyses.

The main prerequisite is genuine willingness to learn new methods and approaches, as well as openness to critically tackle complex research questions.

The course is designed for people with a solid foundation in social science research methods and designs and, ideally, some prior basic experience of qualitative text and discourse analysis. 

Some good background theoretical knowledge of critical and other aspects of social theory of discourse (Foucault, Habermas, etc) would be helpful but is not essential.