Critical Discourse Analysis Of Ruth Wodak

A sub-discipline of DA is CDA. As discussed in “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory, and Methodology”, Ruth Wodak states that in addition to analyzing how texts are designed to enact social activities and social identities, CDA analyzes how language is used to reproduce certain ideologies in texts. Although there are several different definitions of ideology, in this paper I use the term to mean specific positions, attitudes, beliefs, and perspectives held by a group of people with regard to the social world that guide their interpretation of events, monitor their social practices, and can contribute to the domination of one group over another. Like DA, CDA has developed over time as both a theory of and a methodology for
In other words, how are nonhuman animal rights being marketed within these two groups?
• How are these two groups capitalizing nonhuman animal rights?
• How does placing nonhuman animal rights within the marketplace impact how activism is defined?
• How does each organization construct a nonhuman animal rights activist identity?
• How does each reproduce or conserve these identities?
• How do they change or dismantle these and other types of activist identities?
• Who is included in and excluded from these identities?
• What is being communicated as to what is taken to be “normal”, “right”, “good”, “appropriate”, or
anthropocentrism, racism, classism, sexism, environmentalism, altruism, etc.)?
• Paying close attention to how race, class, and sex manifest in the texts, do PETA and The Vegan Society make the intersections of race, class, sex, and species visible?
• What sorts of situated meanings might a critical race/feminist scholar give to these texts if she chose to interpret the text from the point of view of her own Discourse?
• What Discourse models and social voices are present or absent from the text?
• What must PETA and The Vegan Society value and believe, consciously or not, in order to produce the type of text that is included on their websites?
• What do PETA and The Vegan Society’s ideologies suggest about nonhuman animals, activism, the nonhuman animal rights movement, the relationship between nonhuman animals and humans, and any other prominent agents, actors, entities, or beings embedded within and affected by them?
• To whom have the campaigns targeted as their primary audience (looking at intersections of race, gender, class, age, geographic location, etc.)?
• What sort of relationship or relationships is the discourse seeking to enact with its readers (i.e. customer, consumer,