Can discourse analysis techniques adequately deal with complex social phenomena? What does 'interdisciplinarity' mean for theory building and the practise of empirical research? This volume provides an innovative and original debate on critical theory and discourse analysis, focussing on the extent to which CDA can and should draw on the theory and methodology of a range of discilplines within the social sciences. The contributors to the volume are themselves international and multi-disciplinary, and the collection is organised to address in turn the development of CDA over the past two decades, the deabte on interdisciplinarity, impliactions for discourse - analytical theory and applications.

CONTENTS: Preface - Introduction; G. Weiss and R. Wodak - SECTION ONE: CRITICAL - Critical Discourse Analysis and the Rhetoric of Critique; M. Billig - Critical Discourse Analysis and the Development of New Science; C. Gouveia - Reflexivity and the Doubles of Modern Man - The Discursive Construction of Anthropological Subject Positions; M.W.Jorgensen - SECTION TWO: DEBATING AND PRACTISING INTERDISCIPLINARITY - Critical Discourse Analysis and Evaluative Meaning; Interdisciplinarity as a Critical Turn; P. Graham - The Discourse-Knowledge Interface; T. A.van Dijk - Texts and Discourses in the Technologies of Social Organisation; J. Lemke - Identities in Flux: Arabs and Jews in Israel; M. Dascal - Political and Somatic Alignment: Habitus. Ideology and Social Practise; S. Scollon - Voicing the 'Other': Reading and Writing Indigenous Australians; J. Martin - SECTION THREE: FROM THEORY TO SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PRACTISE? - Activist Sociolinguistics in a Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective; P. O'Connor - Discourse at Work: When Women Take on the Role of Managers; L. Martin-Rojo and C. Gomes-Esteban - Cross-Cultural Representation of 'Otherness' in Media Discourse; C. C. Coulthard - Interaction Between Visual and Verbal Communication - Changing Patterns in the Printed Media; C. Anthonissen GILBERT WEISS is a Research Associate at the Research Center "Discourse, Politics, Identity" at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Recent publications include European Union Discourses on Un/employment: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Employment Policy-Making and Organisational Change (together with Peter Muntigl and Ruth Wodak, Amsterdam 2000).

RUTH WODAK is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna and Director of the Research Center "Discourse, Politics, Identity" at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Most recent publications include Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (together with Martin Reisigl, London 2001), and Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (together with Michael Meyer, London 2001).