Abstract
This edited volume brings together leading scholars in critical discourse studies to showcase the field’s diversity, richness, and interdisciplinary reach. Throughout the handbook, the editors use the term critical discourse studies (CDS) rather than the more familiar critical discourse analysis (CDA). They explain that although CDA and CDS are often used interchangeably, CDS better reflects the field’s plural and evolving nature. In particular, the term avoids reducing CDA to a single method of analysis and instead highlights the broad range of approaches that shape the field.
In recent years, CDS has seen a growing number of monographs, edited volumes, and handbooks, such as Wodak and Meyer (2016), Flowerdew and Richardson (2017), Catalano and Waugh (2020), and Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard (2023). Many of these titles organize the field around relatively coherent methodological frameworks and concepts. In contrast, the handbook under review takes a different approach. Rather than presenting CDS as a unified paradigm, Forchtner and Zappettini propose a more dialogic and reflexive understanding of CDS. It maps the field through a combination of personal reflections, methodological discussions, and topic-based chapters, while remaining grounded in the work of key CDS scholars.
The handbook is organized into three interconnected sections: ‘perspectives’, ‘debates’, and ‘topics’. The first section consists of interviews with 12 influential CDS scholars, including Michael Billig, Michał Krzyżanowski, Kay O’Halloran, John E. Richardson, Teun van Dijk, Theo van Leeuwen, and Ruth Wodak. These conversations reflect on their intellectual trajectories, key contributions, and views on the future of CDS. Collectively, the second section considers the fundamental methodological differences among scholars working in CDS. This includes arguments about decoloniality, ethnography, multimodality, corpus-assisted approaches, argumentation, affect, and digitally mediated communication. The final section presents literature reviews, and focuses on empirical applications. The chapters encapsulate eight topics involving environment, neoliberal economy, media and democracy, gender, health, immigration, governance, and conflict.
The first section consists of extended interviews with 12 prominent CDS scholars. These conversations trace their intellectual trajectories, reflect on the development and diversification of CDS, and consider possible future directions. Across the interviews, CDS emerges as a flexible and evolving area of research shaped by theoretical borrowing, allowing for the addition of different ideas and disciplines. Several contributors discuss how the field has moved beyond its earlier linguistic foundations and increasingly engages with multimodality, digital communication, and broader social theory. At the same time, recurring themes such as discourse, ideology, power, and social inequality remain central. The interviews foreground a collective recognition of the need to further diversify CDS in order to avoid its application in an overly mechanistic way. This can be accomplished, it is argued, by ensuring theoretical and methodological openness. Such openness includes engagement with diverse approaches, ranging from corpus linguistics and humanities-based disciplines such as history, sociology, and political science to scientific fields including psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and neurolinguistics. It also involves expanding the sociocultural scope of research beyond a predominantly North-focused perspective through a lens of Southern praxis. Importantly, many contributors also adopt a reflexive stance toward the societal role of CDS. They acknowledge that producing social impact beyond academia remains a central ambition of CDS. But they also note that such an impact remains uneven and more efforts are needed to achieve this in practice.
The second section focuses on major methodological discussions within CDS. These contributions first include Ahmed’s decolonial approach, which challenges Eurocentric models of CDS and calls for greater contextual plurality, particularly within the African context. Another focus is the complementarity of ethnography and CDS, advanced by Galasiński and Ziółkowska. They foreground situated and context-sensitive analyses of discourse practices. Mayr supports this complementarity from a multimodality perspective, which examines meaning-making across semiotic resources beyond language alone. As for the combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches, McGlashan focuses on Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) as a way to scale up critical analysis while retaining interpretive depth. In addition, Polyzou looks at argumentation as a persuasive communicative practice, highlighting its cognitive dimensions and its potential for ideological manipulation during CDS. The subsequent chapter by Milani and Richardson examines the role of affect, emphasising how important emotions are to the circulation and reception of discourses. Finally, Unger addresses digitally mediated communication, framing social media as a dynamic site for producing, negotiating, and contesting meaning. Together, these expert authors show how CDS draws on disciplines like anthropology, corpus linguistics, rhetoric, cognition, and communication to expand its methodological resources. Ultimately, they encourage readers to engage deeply with the field’s epistemological foundations rather than simply applying its tools, choosing conceptual clarification and critical reflection over procedural guidance.
The third and final section has eight topics. It applies CDS to a wide range of contemporary social and political issues through a combination of literature reviews and empirical studies. The reviews by various expert authors discuss the major genres, contexts, theoretical contributions, future directions, and challenges of CDS. They look at key areas including the environment, neoliberal economy, democracy and media, gender, health, immigration, governance, and conflict. The empirical studies examine specific cases such as press representations of climate change in China, neoliberal political discussions, transgender women’s self-representation on the Chinese platform Bilibili, UK care home websites, Greek electoral campaigns on migration, EU water management texts, and the discursive construction of conflict by Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab. Overall, this section demonstrates the breadth and contemporary relevance of CDS across diverse social and political domains.
Although the editors have reframed the field to be more dialog-oriented and topic-driven, the handbook still has its limitations. First, it is somewhat brief in its introduction of key intellectual figures, particularly the interviewees in the first section. This is likely due to a deliberate departure from the traditional ‘schools and approaches’ model, which unfortunately results in a relatively limited engagement with some of the field’s foundational voices and trajectories. Second, while the handbook makes a concerted effort to reflect the diversity of CDS, certain research topics brought up in the interviews remain underrepresented. This is most notably so for semiotic technology (e.g. Chapter 12) and AI (e.g. Chapter 3, 5, 9, 12, 13).
In conclusion, this intellectually rich and wide-ranging handbook is likely to be of particular value to scholars working within CDS, as well as to researchers in communication, sociology, and linguists concerned with the social dimensions of language use. Its interdisciplinary orientation and reflexive design make it especially relevant to those seeking to situate discourse analysis within broader debates on power and ideology. It is also particularly useful for readers who already have a basic grounding in CDS and want to explore its changing methods and teams further. For such audiences, the handbook helps consolidate existing knowledge while encouraging critical engagement with new, emerging debates.