Critical Discourse Analysis and Citizenship
Norman Fairclough, Simon Pardoe and Bronislaw Szerszynski
Researching Citizenship
How does one empirically research the phenomenon of 慶itizenship? And how does one do so when notions of 慶itizen?and 慶itizenship?are highly contested in both theory and practice?
The many recent contributions from political theory, sociology and other disciplines to the reconceptualisation of citizenship tend to draw only indirectly on empirical research, and are predominantly normative in character. Against this background, it is useful to attend more closely to the practices of citizenship on the ground.
The PARADYS project is therefore concerned with empirically researching and theorising 慶itizenship ?as an ongoing communicative achievement?(Bora et al 2001b:3). The concept of citizenship is 搊perated in terms of the dynamics of social positioning?(Bora & Hausendorf 2000:1). The research focus is on 搕he ways in which participants themselves act and are treated by others as citizens?(Bora & Hausendorf 2001a:4).
One way of reading this emphasis on citizenship as a communicative achievement is that it is an attempt to get us away from preconceptions about what citizenship is, and to force us to look at how it抯 done ?at the range of ways in which people position themselves and others as citizens in participatory events.
However, the contrast between preconception and practice, between the theoretical and the empirical, is not simple. To illustrate this, let us take, as an example, the first participatory event that the present authors recorded as part of the PARADYS research ?a local public meeting called by a Parish Council, held in a village hall near a GM crop site, with three speakers from key organisations involved in the procedures and the wider public debate.[1] In many ways this was clearly a public sphere event ?an occasion where individuals formally gather together to debate and/or hear about issues of public concern. Yet during the meeting there was no evidence that participants were themselves working explicitly with the categories of 'citizen' or 'citizenship' (cf. Padmos/Mazeland/teMolder this volume with data extracts from public meetings in which participants explicitly do declare themselves 'as citizens'). They certainly did not use these terms, though they did use other terms one might think of as related, such as 慶onsultation? But they were nevertheless interacting in ways which analysts might see as the ongoing communicative achievement of citizenship. So where is this analytical category of 慶itizenship?coming from? Whose category is it?
In the next section we explore this question, and draw out some implications for the way that participatory events should be studied in order to understand the ways in which citizenship is enacted within them. We begin with the problem, as addressed by Bourdieu, of constructing the 憃bject of research?(in this case, 慶itizenship?within and around the procedures for the Field Scale Trials of GM crops). We argue that constructing citizenship as an object of research entails (i) recognising ontologically the dialectic between pre-constructions of citizenship and performance of citizenship within everyday practice, and (ii) recognising epistemologically the dialectic between theoretical insights on citizenship and empirical research practice, or 憁ethod?
We then present an analytical framework for this empirical research of citizenship as a communicative achievement, based upon Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The intention is to bridge the linguistic and sociological dimensions of the project, to incorporate the dialectical relationship between theory and method. It is a framework which can accommodate different repertoires of linguistic-analytic tools for the micro-analysis.
Constructing the Object of Research
In a discussion of the construction of the 憃bject of research? Pierre Bourdieu notes that
most of the time, researchers take as objects of research the problems of social order and domestication posed by more or less arbitrarily defined populations, produced through the successive partitioning of an initial category that is itself pre-constructed: the 揺lderly,?the 搚oung,?nbsp; 搃mmigrants,?nbsp; ?nbsp; The first and most pressing scientific priority, in all such cases, would be to take as one抯 object the social work of construction of the pre-constructed object (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 229, italics in the original)
Here Bourdieu is saying that, rather than researchers simply operationalising a term such as 慽mmigrants?in their research (by, for example, locating immigrants and interviewing and characterising them) part of the research process should involve identifying and characterising the processes whereby the term 慽mmigrants?has been given some determinate and/or functional meaning. This shift away from simply using socially pre-constructed categories or objects, towards exploring the practices involved in their construction and maintenance, is commonplace in disciplines germane to the PARADYS research, such as Science Studies and Discourse Analysis.
As Bourdieu puts it, the 慶onst