A text is always produced in social settings where
a great deal more than language is present.
Gee, Michaels & O’Connor, 1992.
This chapter describes the research methods and conceptual framework adopted in this study. I begin by describing the core tenets of critical discourse analysis and the influence of Foucault’s theories of discourse upon this study. I then consider the contributions of post-structural feminist theory and new literacy studies to critical discourse analysis in general, and to the analysis of literacy advice to mothers in particular. Third, I describe my own social location as a researcher and its impacts on the data analysis and interpretation. This situatedness also informs a conceptual link that I propose between the study of literacy and the study of mothering as socially-situated practices. Finally, I bring these diverse components of the research together by describing the concepts and analytic tools adopted in this study, and the steps I followed in carrying it out.
Discourse is commonly understood as language-in-use and reflective of social relations beyond the unit of a sentence or phrase. Texts constitute the data for discourse analysis and are seen as artifacts of particular patterns of language-in-use, whether oral, written, or signed (Gee et al., 1992). What makes discourse analysis “critical” is the illumination of the ways in which unequal power relations are produced and naturalized in discourse (Lemke, 1995). A critical approach to discourse analysis explores texts not as truths but as discourses that act in the world in ways that both define and distribute power. Such approaches are concerned not just with what texts say but also with what texts do. Drawing attention to texts as discourses is thus one way of problematizing and perhaps re-configuring truths about mothering and literacy that have the effect of marginalizing some literacy and mothering practices and privileging others.