The value of sourcing social work journals for critical discourse analysis

Abstract

Using the contents of journals has been an underutilized research approach in social work. Journal archives represent what has been legitimated in the discipline as well as what forms the dominant social work canon. To theorize about journal archival sourcing as a research method, we cite the limited extant examples, drawing out from these the methodology used. We then make a case for the value of journal mining and in particular from the vantage point of critical social work and critical discourse analysis, position the Foucauldian history of the present as an appropriate tool for analysis. We draw this article together by describing how to employ this research method and argue that this might be an exceptionally useful tool at this point of the discipline’s history.