The interdisciplinarity of critical discourse studies research

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity has been a core tenet of critical discourse studies—a group of approaches to the analysis of texts in their social contexts—since its inception, in what may be seen as a reaction against the sometimes staid and rigid disciplinary boundaries of linguistics and other disciplines. Interdisciplinarity has also been seen as necessarily accompanying analyses of complex social problems such as racism, sexism or other forms of discrimination and social domination. The concept has been multiply re-examined, challenged and reaffirmed by critical discourse scholars (for instance, in Weiss and Wodak, 2003), and the present article continues this work by mapping out the present-day dimensions of interdisciplinarity in different approaches to critical discourse studies. It also attempts to juxtapose these various disciplinary developments, and consider whether interdisciplinarity in and of itself has come to be taken for granted. Finally, it raises questions about whether the move away from an emphasis on the analysis of social wrongs within some of the newer approaches to critical discourse studies may in time lead to a disciplinary schism, or whether the increasingly disciplinary nature of critical discourse studies itself may have become a problem. This article forms part of an ongoing thematic collection dedicated to the concept of interdisciplinarity.