Critical Discourse Studies with Professor Ruth Wodak

(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of this podcast, Doing Critical Discourse Analysis. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Farreley, and joining me today is Emeritus Professor, Dr. Ruth Vodak, Distinguished Professor and Chair and Discourse Studies at both Lancaster and Vienna University. - Yes. - Welcome. - Thank you. - Ruth, I'm delighted that you're on the podcast. I wanted to start off with going right back to the very beginning, your start in Critical Discourse Analysis. - Well, that's actually quite, well, that quite an interesting start because various people were working in a similar way at the same time, but didn't really connect. And first, basically turned one day and I connected because I was invited to Amsterdam to give a talk at that time. I was doing a big project on the so-called "Waltime Affair" in Austria, 1986. And we were analyzing various genres about the way the candidate for presidency at that time, court-waltime. Was hiding or lying about his past in the German bear march. And that episode in Austrian history was extraordinary important because the myths that Austria had only been the first victim of Nazi Germany was challenged. And obviously we all know that many Austrians were Nazis that they fought in the bear march that they were responsible for terrible war crimes and leading people like Eichmann or Hitler himself were Austrians. So that was a very interesting project. I was invited to talk about this in Amsterdam at the Anne Frankhaus. And turn one night turned up there. And we got talking and turn is a wonderful person in networking as we say today. We didn't call it networking that time. We said just, you know, making friends. I got this invitation by turn to come to a workshop. And he had invited Norman Fairclough until the 11th and Gantr Kress. Now, of course, I knew Norman's and Gantr's work because I had met them. And basically Norman's book, "Language and Power" had just also been published. And we know that Gantr's work at the Institute of Education in London had been published. And then also, "Teo Van Løvenig" was invited who I had never heard about, who basically came from Sydney, but was Dutch, and had worked together with Gantr, but who also lived in Sydney and turned new Teo. So the five of us assembled at that workshop and we were supposed to each present something from our research and then just talk to each other. We decided maybe this group should become bigger. We should invite other people as well and meet in a regular way, which we did. So there was a meeting in Vienna, then there was a meeting in Madrid and so forth. And we expanded. So there were other people invited like Malcolm Coolthard and Carmen Caldas Coolthard and then Bessiden Greenos from Greece, Pairlenelle from Sweden and so forth. And it came quite a large group and distinguishing on a distinct moment or as one would say the USP of this group was that we were all problem oriented. I think that was kind of the frame that we were not the usual linguists. We were not interested only in analyzing, I don't know, metaphors or transitivity and so forth, but we were interested in complex social issues and they didn't have to be all negative. I think many people think that critical means we are very negative about everything, which is not the case, but we were just challenging what was taken for granted. And so we got together and then turn who is always the guy who gets everybody together and starts organizing things. He's very good at that and many other things decided we should have a journal. And then this way the journal, the Scorsion Society came about and turned, is still editing this journal and we were all on the editorial board. I'm still co-editor and Mick Billick is one of the co-editors. And then we started publishing this different kind of approach, this problem oriented and very interdisciplinary approach. But the differences remained. I mean, I was interested in field work and big projects turn, we did a project together but much later but turned, didn't do big projects, but he did do interviews, tail and gunther actually did multimodal analysis and Norman did more qualitative analysis and basically only in the book about new labor, he also sampled more data and also in a little project we did together where you sampled the data Michael on the Bologna policy papers. And so this started off and it was totally new experience because it was this group of critical scholars who were also friends who supported each other in many ways. And we had very good discussions theoretical and also about the data and the way of analysis. So yeah, that's the long story in a short way. Yeah, well that's fantastic, it's great to hear that actually. I don't think I've ever asked you about that before. So it's good to hear that background story and also interesting that you've picked out the problem orientation as being a distinguished feature that is a common across all the different approaches to CDA and that brings us into why it necessarily needs to have an interdisciplinary orientation because as you said, it needs, you can't just look at the language to understand what the language is doing and what effects there are upon the language. Which I think more of our listeners would be interesting to hear about because people come to CDA from all sorts of places. Socialism, politics, policy, geography, all sorts of things. Yeah. Yeah, well it's important, I think, to first emphasize that I would prefer to say critical discourse studies, not just analysis because that kind of incinuates that this is just a way of looking at text. Yeah, so it's a method. But it's not just a methodology or method. It's basically very different theoretical backgrounds and also different methodologies, which are used in this paradigm, as I would say. And it actually means that one has to define what discourse is supposed to be, what this notion implies, and also the question you asked, why interdisciplinarity? Well, if you look at a different social phenomena, like the same migration, which is very big. a topic nowadays, but has been for the past, I would say, 30 years at least. And especially a topic always talked about by the far right and is used to mobilize their voters. Migration as a complex phenomenon means you have to know something about the context where people come from, why they migrate from A to B. What kind of people migrate, why does somebody decide to migrate gender issues, which are salient in this, when studying this topic, age, then the host country, what does the host country do about migration do different laws exist, have these changed over the years, because migration is a century old phenomenon. People have always migrated from A to B and to C. It's not a new phenomenon. So how was this experienced in other times and other places? And so you come to very many different dimensions of this very complex issue. And then you can ask why is it used by the far right to mobilize? Why does it mobilize? What are people afraid of? How do different governments deal with this? And so forth and so on. And in just asking these questions, which are all very important when looking at this topic, you necessarily have to start reading about this from a sociological point of view. You have to look at numbers and demographics. You have to look at history. You look at legal issues and so forth. And then you could do it inography or interview or just look at the media reporting and so forth and so on. So or you could look at narratives of refugees and migrants and you could look at what the EU is just now doing and proposing a new migration and asylum pact. And all of this implies that without all these other knowledges, you wouldn't understand even small pieces of text and even narratives or just focus group discussions. Because people always rely on other epistemic knowledge and assume that you know that. And when they talk, they insinuate that you know that and refer to different other events or episodes or networks or experiences, which you then need to know to understand why they're doing this in that specific text and talk. And the same is true for images as well. And in that way, it became very clear that all the data which we have, different ways of sampling, I'm not discussing this right now, but that we need to look also at the context in a more differentiated way and that linguistics or the analysis of image or text, whatever visual written spoken signs is just an entry point to this bigger phenomenon. And so we have not big discussions about is it interior or trans or whatever disciplinarity. But I'm a very big believer in interdisciplinarity, which is why I've also worked in different teams with different experts, historians, sociologists, political scientists or we consulted them to be able to sit to weight whatever kind of texts we were analyzing into this larger context and different knowledge. Yeah, very interesting. And that takes us towards. You'll be very prolific and you've worked on lots of different topics with different people. And so it's difficult to pick out a particular thing, but one of the things you're most famous for is the discourse historical approach to critical discourse studies. And what you've started to describe there is. The beginnings of what you would recognize as that approach. So what could you tell us about what is distinctive about the DHA and that kind of orientation? If somebody was interested in taking that path, what would it imply? Yeah, well, there are different, again, there are different aspects which I think are important and not all of them always have to be applied. But first of all, the interdisciplinary, we just talked about and one distinct feature is the context model which I proposed with the four kind of levels, which is of course only analytic. I mean, you can't really distinguish them in that way and they influence each other, but with every piece of text, we look at sort of the historical roots, but they can of course also be just an entire focus group discussion. So it's not always going back for centuries or decades. It really depends on what makes sense in that particular analysis or study. And then sort of the socio-political context in which, let's say, a politician gives a speech. It's very important to know if it's an election campaign, what kind of campaign, what are they campaigning for or against and so forth. So that you can again situate that speech in this particular context who is the speaker and what kind of party is this and so forth. And then we need to know the specific, situative context where is that happening? Is that a big audience, small audience, what kind of location is this? And then really important the context. I mean, really what is the context in that text? And that needs us to the very detailed analysis of that text in whatever kind of way. And the notion of discourse really goes back a lot to Habermasian communicative confidence, but especially what is important. And here I work together with Martin Rezigl, a lot, who's now professor in Vienna and was one a student of mine. And we developed that this notion that it's always a discourse about something. So you can have very different perspectives, ideologies, belief systems involved in debating this specific topic. And in that way, we don't have to sort of maintain a definition that there are left wing discourse or right wing discourse or Nazi discourse or racist discourse, which would kind of imply that they're very specific, linguistic elements always say that you could have a grammar of racist discourse or something. Well, you can't because there is this, we have language in the elements which we use can be combined in different ways. And so it made a lot of sense to say we have a topic in different ways how people can talk about it in different, coming from different backgrounds. And sort of the realized text image, et cetera, is then the text. And we distinguished between this discourse and text, which actually is also fucodian because discourse would be the knowledge about something and then you would have it realized in different texts. And then we are not holidayians, yeah, in the way that we were socialized in, although transits of course very important also has been adopted strongly. But we, from the way we were socialized in linguistics, it's much more argumentation and also syntax and semantics, pragmatics. So you will, in the detailed analysis, you will find less holidayian notions and more sort of notions from polite. or from other presuppositions, other pragmatic notions. We did quite a lot of analysis on Topey and other ways of argumentation, the Toulman model, mostly, but also looking at Waldman. And we did a lot of orthocorpus assisted analysis in the way, but that the corpus analysis tells us a lot about certain distributions, but it doesn't tell us anything or very little about the complex structure of text. So the corpus assisted discourse studies, I think, is very important. And a lot of the research which we then did was, for example, looking at large data samples of media texts over, we did a study on the use of migrant asylum seeker and so forth in 10 years of national newspaper in the UK together with Tony McHenry and Paul Baker. And it was fascinating to see this distribution over 10 years, but then to look at the peaks, for example, due to specific historical events and then try to find out what the specificity of these smaller samples were. And in that way, we could combine the more qualitative analysis actually very well with the sort of corpus assisted analysis. So to sum up, I think the approach is very much onto looking at bigger data samples, to use some methods and tools provided by corpus linguistics, but then to really look at the text and the structure of the argument made by speakers' writers in whatever kind of larger, how would I say, larger threat of discourse? And to look at the different kinds of ways people were dealing with the same kind of topic, yeah? And I think that was quite innovative, because we used to sample different genres to triangulate different perspectives on the same topic. So if you look at the state of migration, that one would look at the laws, but also interview people, but maybe do some ethnography at a train station where they arrive, and so forth. So that depends on how much time you have and how much money you have and how big the team is, but ideally the triangulation was very important. - That's fascinating, I was to hear that. And the triangulation is very important there. That takes me to the next question. You've described a huge research project, huge areas of trying to understand very complex topics. And you've also hinted there that part of the practical demands of doing research are how much time, how much resource do you have to do a particular research project? But I did want to ask you four people who are starting off on a research project. Of course they have to think about how much time, how much other people can be in a team, or it might be a PhD student who's doing something largely by themselves, but with a supervisor. Is there nonetheless a starting point that you would recommend for people who are thinking of using critical discourse studies, or have any critical discourse studies approach to their, the problem that they are interested in looking at? What would your advice be to people starting off a project? - So my suggestion is always to have very clear research questions. And if you remember, I was always coming back to the research questions when supervising my PhD students because they guide you through the research. And they also define what kind of perspective you have on this particular problem. And why you're interested in this issue. And my advice is always never to research when you're not really interested. I mean, sometimes you have to do some research just to earn money, and of course then it's like a job, which you do, but if you do your PhD thesis or if you really want to write a book or whatever kind of other project, you should do something which at least lasts, your interest lasts for over a year or something. So that you sometimes really get kind of passionate about a topic which you want to know more about. And it's this curiosity, which I think is so important. And I think it's really important. It might sound bad now, but it's not bad now because research is always exhausting and they're always ups and downs. And then people don't turn up for the focus group or this and that and or part of the team leaves because they get a better appointment elsewhere. And so you have to carry it through. And that means you really want to know something, something which you're interested in and curious about. And these research questions are not assumptions or hypothesis yet. They're just to be aware of your interest and why you want to know this. And when you do your research, you should always come back to your research questions because everybody gets lost in the data and there are different stages of analysis. And then it's very useful to kind of sit back and rethink and say, well, why did I start doing this at all here? So that's one important issue. And of course, that can be a small, it can just be a paper you want to write about something or it can be a thesis or it can be a book or whatever. But this is certainly the first step. And the second step then is to be aware of have other people already done research in this area. And of course, you read the literature about whatever topic and you get more knowledge about sort of the whole context in which you are located looking at that specific issue. You might find other people who are doing something similar than what I always did. I got in touch with other people. Other people sort of think, well, if there are other people doing that, then I just stop. Well, you shouldn't stop because your data are always unique and there's always something new which you can add. Nobody in the social sciences or very few people actually invent in the sense of really innovative approaches. So you add knowledge and you contribute knowledge. And then it's important to do a pilot study and that can be it or you can continue after the pilot study. And what we usually do in Bachelor's BA dissertations or possibly also in the PhD is that you actually look at smaller, bigger pilot studies because you just can't sample so much data. And you want to operationalize what the assumptions which you have after having read about the state of the art, you have to look at these smaller samples. And I always advised my students to just look at four or six newspaper texts or parts of interviews so that they don't get immediately lost in their whole data sample. So that's one, yeah. In that pilot, the relationship between the pilot study and research questions I wanted to ask you. about I remember you speaking fairly often about iteration and an iterative approach. So would it be the case that if somebody started off with a research question they thought it was quite clear, started to do their pilot analysis, you go back to the original question, sometimes slightly amend that question because in life would be. Absolutely, that's what we call an abductive approach. So I was always in favor of an abductive approach because it's never very rarely the case that you start off, then you look at the data and you don't change or the data, the results of the analysis, don't have an impact on the assumptions or on the questions. And so you go back and forth. And of course your interests also guide what data you select. So it's. I mean there was a big debate in the 1970s and 80s between the so-called positivists and the people who are actually doing social sciences and said, well we always actually have our interests somehow projected into the data we select into the analysis. We just have to be aware of that and our analysis has to be reproductable. So somebody else should be able to see exactly what we did and in that way find a better way of analysis or agree or whatever but it has to be reproductable. Whereas in the positivists always said, you know there's a. the data are neutral and you don't project any of your interests into the data. So there was big debates, I was always on the side of the abductive approach, I think most of the social scientists would agree now. And that means that of course when you analyze and find out, well what you were actually looking for doesn't make sense, yeah, or it makes sense in a different way, then you go back and you refine your questions, you might have sub-questions, you detail them and then you go back again to the analysis. So the abductive approach I think makes a lot of sense also with the pilot studies and then if you have more time or if you're still interested in this topic and you want to use your dissertation as the background for your thesis then you would have more data, refine it, have some specific aspects which you want to elaborate, etc. Yeah, fantastic. I think we've got about. I think it does to add something, I mean I've talked also workshops for sociologists, political scientists and so forth and they always think that they can learn this in one day. Well basically you know you just do this, well you don't just do this, I really believe that you have to know some linguistics to be able to approach texts and of course linguistics is a field just like any other field like sociology or political science and of course we have certain terminology and so forth. So in some ways even if in other fields they want to as they say do this they have to realize that they are working in an interdisciplinary way and that they're adding a whole big field of knowledge to their research. Yeah, yeah that's interesting, yeah I'm very worthwhile, thank you for adding that. You've mentioned a couple of times, I don't know how you describe it, it's supplementing or using approaches like corpus linguistics which is analysing lots and lots of text all at once, using computers to do that these days but also ethnography in a different way. Are there any specific day-together techniques or analysis techniques that you're particularly excited about just at the moment? Well I can say two things about that on the one hand I think the methods you should never be dogmatic so I'm I always really emphasise that dogmatism is not helpful so if it makes sense for your specific data sample to do not to do argumentation but to look at I don't know metaphors then you should look at metaphors so and then learn something about metaphors so that really depends on how the specific phenomenon manifests itself in the specific genre which you're looking at. Coming back to migration I mean lots of people talk about waves and metaphors of nature and then metaphors of illness and you know metaphors are being used a lot so studying text and speeches about migration you won't be able to avoid metaphors and you should analyze them but in other texts they might be very much fewer metaphors or they might not have subsanions and metaphors for example are difficult to analyse but with the corpus approach because you don't find the metaphors that easily although of course these the software is being refined as we talk every every hour and minute and the second thing I want you to say about you know the specific methods or I'm really excited and I always was if you might remember about focus groups I really like focus groups although they are labor intensive to analyse but in a focus group you get it's quite like an experiment a real life experiment yeah because you put people together and then they discuss the topic and off the go discussing this spontaneously and then you get lots and lots of opinions very quickly about a specific issue which otherwise you won't get that quickly and they wouldn't really come in the same situation it would be difficult to compare them and so forth so you have a very good way of getting a debate about something which is important of course you the counter position is always you it's not representative because you cannot do I don't know hundreds focus groups would be terrible but I mean you can do at least four or five or six in in projects and you can just in that way find out about different existing opinions amongst many groups of people let's say you compare young people in in high schools from in different social classes in cities and in rural areas different rural areas and already you have gender specific you have might have quite interesting range of opinions yeah so I always thought focus groups were really interesting what I also really like to do but I don't do anymore is ethnography in the sense that you really people think that doing interviews is already ethnography I don't think so ethnography means that you really do participants observation somewhere we did that in the European Parliament we've shadowed people there who had microphones on for the entire day and really could understand what people were doing all day what do politicians do yeah what do any piece do the backstage I was really curious about that that was a fascinating project so ethnography really in the social linguistic sense yeah or how anthropology goes about it that you really go somewhere and try to find out what are the meanings of the different things they do Yeah, what are rituals where every day conversations, the organization of their lives, you can find out by observing that. But that means, again, you have to have a lot of time and you have to learn to do that. Being trained as a social thing was we had classes about that. So that's really something which I find extraordinarily interesting and important. If you analyze migration, you have to, or I think you should know what migrants do. How do they survive in a different context? What are there problems? Where do they live? How do they live? What do they experience? And of course, you then are also able to interview them and maybe over time. So I think really you need to design your project in the way in what possibilities do you have, what time, money, et cetera. And what do you really want to know? And how can you get that knowledge? What is the best way to do that? Of course, many people rely on newspapers because the data are easy to get. Everything is online. And of course, you should do that. But we should be aware that very few people now read newspapers. So they don't-- they're important for the public space or spaces. But then you should go to social media. But then you're in a total new genre, which many people still don't know much about. And again, you have very different kind of social media. So this is a whole new field to look at. But I think just looking at newspapers, OK, you have the hegemonic voice. Maybe you the agenda of the government. But as I say, few people read newspapers. Very few people watch the news. So you just have to be aware of what you're doing when you analyze that. You mentioned your study of European Parliament. And so in that book, Politics in Action, you describe that. So if people are interested in reading the results of your ethnography and the microphones on the politicians that are seen there, did you also do interviews in that? It was part of that. But yes, so all of these techniques people can read about the results in that book. Yeah, we did interviews with MEPs. And we shadowed them. And what we also did was I had access to a small committee. That's not in that book. That's in that piece of elsewhere. So I could really look at and trace the way the policy paper was discussed and ended. How it was then formulated at the very end. And how the various discussions were integrated or avoided or neglected. Who had power in this meeting? That was also a fascinating project. But there, again, I had a huge amount of data. I had sort of the tapes of all the meetings of that meeting. I could interview the people who had been part of that meeting. I was able to interview the chairperson of that meeting. And we had the results in the policy paper, which emerged out of all of that. So I was very lucky to get that. I mean, sometimes you just have to be lucky to get something like that, because that is pure backstage. Very precious. And that's very difficult to access. Do you want to finish off by-- I was going to ask you about your view of critical discourse analysis, critical discourse studies. What's your view now with your wisdom looking back at what you've done and around you what's happening now and forward to the future? Well, I think that we need critical research now more than ever, especially when we see what's happening in the US to universities and elsewhere, that the independence of science is threatened. That's independent freedom of opinion is threatened. The freedom of press is threatened. This is terrible. So I think we need critical research now more than ever, challenging. People think is unavoidable, sort of the Tina argument. There's no alternative. Well, there's always alternatives. And speaking out is, of course, difficult. You have to be in a context where you can speak out. But doing research on all challenging all these new developments, I think, is really important. Especially also in a historic view, I have the sense that people have forgotten history. And the way migrants and refugees are dealt with-- many issues were I think hasn't that happened already. Don't we know that? So critical literacy is extremely important in education. So I think critical discourse that this should be really involved in developing materials, educating teachers, and so forth. And challenging the disinformation. We are overwhelmed now with disinformation. So to think about ways of dealing with disinformation with so-called fake news, I think, is very important. Thinking about why lies are accepted. We live in an age of lies. Yeah, so there are many questions, which I think can be dealt with. And of course, it depends where you live and what you can study. But at least in our world now, I mean, we can still choose those topics. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's one small positive to finish on in that. Ruth Vodak, thank you so much for giving us your time and your insights and your story and the sweep of what you've achieved in your career. And helping people, I guess, to have a little beginning insight into how they might themselves go about doing some critical analysis of text and discourse. So thank you so much. Well, thank you for inviting me. And it's wonderful to see you again. Hope we continue to see each other. Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. Take care. Bye bye. [MUSIC PLAYING]