Links of interest
Navigating the web looking for good information is
a tiresome task. Here you can find some sites I have
personally found useful or interesting. That is no guarantee of
fitness for any particular purpose, so read the comments to see
what any specific site may have to offer.
Journals
Critical Discourse Analysis
If you are interested in discourse analysis, there is little
doubt that you will already be familiar with the main print
journals in the field. If you aren't (familiar, that is; if you
aren't interested, I wonder what brought you to this site), you
would do well to read Kimberly K. Emmons concise and accurate survey
of journals carrying CDA. I limit my discussion here to online
or otherwise unconventional media.
- Studies in Language and
Capitalism is an online journal devoted to, well, the study of the
language of contemporary capitalism, although its focus has been so far much
wider than a strict reading of the notion would seem to entail; there is
interesting writing on CDA methods, postcolonialism, gender and racism besides
work specifically addressing capitalism/liberalism/globalisation
- Critical Approaches to Discourse
Analysis Across Disciplines is also an interesting read. It claims to
seek to establish links with related disciplines, such as media studies or
philosophy. I guess I am not so certain that this isn't what CDA has been all
about since the label took over from Fowler and Kress' critical
linguistics, but whatever may be the case, the journal's content is solid
and engaging
- Discurso & Sociedad is
one of the few Spanish-language journals carrying CDA nowadays. My involvement
with the project is evident, so I will refrain from further comments here
Critical Management Studies
Critical Management Studies are that oddest of beasts: a theoretical
approach focusing on the critique of established social practices and
institutional arrangements, and the challenge to systems of domination, coming
from that most late capitalist of disciplines, management. It is singular,
anomalous, and very much a fringe phenomenon still, but it exists and is
growing. It seems that not all is lost for Business majors yet.
- The Electronic
Journal of Radical Organisation Theory is sort of a print organ for the
work presented at the biennial CMS conferences. Publication is irregular (there
was a two-year hiatus before the latest number came to light), but material is
consistently good. And interdisciplinarity is really the name of the game here
- ephemera is, in
contrast, much more strictly limited to its claimed field of theory &
politics in organization. It manages to cram quite a lot of material in
its four yearly issues
- M@n@gement seems to
have slowed down a bit lately, but it has consistently published interesting
material with a qualitative and critical bent in several languages. It is far
less radical than the preceding ones, so perhaps readers exclusively interested
in ideological matters may find it less useful
Metaphor
- Metaphorik is exclusively
devoted to conceptual matters of metaphor and metonymy. Good German is a must,
specially if one's interested in the earlier issues. Blessed be the editors for
their good taste in providing HTML versions of the published articles besides
the customary PDF
Personal sites
Research articles tend to give an overly finished and polished image of
research. Sometimes what one needs isn't an elegant summary of findings, but
rather some offbeat guidance, an instructive reflection or a good glimpse of
how things stand in a particular field. Good homepages (which are sadly scarce)
sometimes offer this. I have found the following of particular note:
- Jay L.
Lemke's page at the University of Michigan site is a treasure trove of
interesting materials. It may not be the be-all, end-all of design, and some
sections are awfully outdated, but Jay's guide
for doctoral students and young researchers is invaluable, and his
reflections on the status and trends in semiotic research are excellent
- Teun A. van Dijk's homepage
contains a wealth of resources about CDA. It is very much about Teun and his
interests, but it deserves careful examination
Institutional and project sites
Everybody and their grandmother have a website nowadays (even the author of
this lines!), and most of them are nothing but sheer promotion (if you need to
know the fancy term for this, it is marketisation
of discourse). Occasionally someone has the bright idea to actually
add some content. I like the signal-to-noise ration in the following.
- The Language in the
Workplace Project is Janet Holmes' project to research
communication at work, the most thorough one I know from a linguistic
perspective and a hugely interesting one to discourse analysts and
organisational researchers alike
- Ever wondered why is it that people calling themselves discourse analysts
and semioticians research the same topics, have the same interests, focus on
the same phenomena but nevertheless do not read each others? If you do, that
makes it two of us. And if you want to help reverse the trend, you can find
heaps of interesting material at the Proceedings of the 2004
Congress of the International Semiotics Association.
Mostly in French, so monolinguals beware