Absences and Silences in Critical Discourse Analysis: Methodological Reflections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a qualitative methodology frequently taken up by researchers to explore complex questions of how discursive power drives inequities. Across approaches to CDA, the emphasis of methodological directions has consistently been centred on examining and illuminating dominant discourses in texts. This paper argues that alongside the analysis of dominant discourses, it is crucial to examine absences and silences that are located within and beyond the text. The exploration of absences and silences can support more fulsome analysis of discourse, and is essential for challenging power structures and illuminating discourses of resistance. In this paper, three analytic strategies for attending to absences and silences in CDA are presented: (i) the lens of the theoretical framework; (ii) interrelation between dominant and excluded discourses; and (iii) positionality and local knowledges. Across each analytic strategy, an exemplar from the author’s research is presented to illustrate the practice of engaging with absences and silences in CDA research. Ultimately, this paper contends that the analysis of absences and silences can support researchers in conducting inquiry that enacts resistance to power structures that perpetuate inequities, and envisioning possible paths toward equity and justice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.101 | 0.090 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".