In the contemporary state of critical discourse analysis, theory, and method,
researchers need to make their own way in their analytical decision-making (Lemke,
1995; Mills, 1997). There is no common approach to discourse analysis. Like
many forms of qualitative research, it is interpretive, and the quality of the
research may be judged on the explicitness of the approach adopted and on the
strengths of its arguments rather than on a set of pre-determined criteria.
Foucault referred to the conceptual tools he developed as a tool box and invited
scholars to use those tools in ways that were most useful for providing insights
into power/knowledge connections (Foucault, 1978, cited in Mills, 2003). However,
as Mills (2003) argues, Foucault’s work cannot “simply be used in
any particular way”
(p. 7). The stances that discourse analysts take as
they interview texts must necessarily be adapted to a variety of concerns, including
the topic adopted, the social locations from which they analyse texts, and the
aims of the research. The necessity to be reflexive and innovative in the use
of tools does not preclude the need in discourse analysis for consistent, systematic,
and explicit analytic strategies (van Dijk, 1985). The remainder of this chapter
describes how such strategies were applied in this research.
Although Foucault did not articulate a method for his approach to discourse
analysis, he did outline the main strategies and concepts associated with a
genealogical approach to it (Foucault, 1972; 1978; 1984). Like other forms of
critical discourse analysis, a genealogy seeks to reveal the ways in which power
circulates in discourses. However, in its concern for discursive continuity
and discontinuity, a genealogy is also a historical method, pursuing a history
of the present. In his most well known genealogical works4, Foucault concentrated
his efforts on showing how ideas and practices become “regimes of truth.”
He detailed as well the strategies that were used to keep these truth regimes
in place over time. Foucault was particularly interested in discursive discontinuities
— the ruptures and breaks in dominant discourses that reveal them as social
constructions. Other critical discourse analysts have seized upon this notion
of discontinuity and developed strategies such as multi-vocality to understand
how discourses change as well as how they stay in place (Fairclough, 1995; Mills,
2003). Multi-vocality entails analyzing texts with attention to the different
“voices” that have contributed to the meaning of the text —
not just what the text says and what the author who wrote it means but the ideas
and practices the text aims to support and to counter. It is this attention
to the processes of discursive change that links to a broader interest among
many proponents of critical discourse analysis and to its potential for contributing
to positive social change. In this sense, critical discourse analysis is political
work. Indeed, Foucault believed that analysis of texts as discourses offers
“keys to the relations of power, domination and conflict within which
discourses emerge and function, and hence provide material for an analysis of
discourse which may be both tactical and political and therefore strategic”
(Foucault, 1980, p. 134).
4 See for example, Foucault, M. (1989) A history of sexuality. London: Random House