Chapter 6: Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

Michael Arribas-Ayllon & Valerie Walkerdine

Foucauldian discourse analysis Since the late 1970s the term ‘discourse’ has come to refer to an expansive and diffuse field of qualitative research concerned with the analysis of language and text. Some have referred to the emergence of discourse as a ‘growth industry’ among Anglo-American academics (Hook, 2001a, 2001b) and the product of ‘marketing’ aimed at undergraduate pedagogy (McHoul, 1997). Either way, what has become known as ‘discourse analysis’ is understood here in terms of its own unique conditions of emergence which have been shaped and transformed by different intellectual desires, problems and institutional demands. The result is that doing discourse analysis can mean very different things and often subject to competing interpretations. We are not interested in policing boundaries of what ought to constitute discourse analysis, nor divining what Foucault really meant by discourse. Nonetheless, a ‘Foucauldian’ approach to discursive analysis is distinguished from other versions of analysis to ...

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