Poststructuralist Discourse Studies: From Structure to Practice

Abstract

Poststructuralist Discourse Studies: from structure to practice Poststructuralism has brought social, cultural and political theories into a productive exchange with methods and tools for analysing text and talk. My contribution outlines the contours of Poststructuralist Discourse Studies (PDS), which is an interdisciplinary field of discourse research inspired by poststructuralism. It gives an overview of poststructuralism, trace its evolution and identify its key questions. I then spell out the consequences of poststructuralism for Discourse Studies, where it has given birth to the new field of PDS. PDS critically relates to the structuralist, top-down tendencies, which have characterized some of the pioneering ‘French School’ and ‘Critical’ strands in Discourse Studies. It defends post-humanist and anti-essentialist views on power and knowledge. Perceiving language as a socially constitutive practice, it places emphasis on the critical and reflexive dimensions of discourse research. Situated at the interdisciplinary intersection of language and society, PDS aims to bridge structure- and practice-oriented strands of discourse research and to overcome the divisions between linguistics and other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.