In the March meeting of the MediaEd Club, speakers Jan Zienkowski and Geoffroy Patriarche discuss their chapter, ‘Critical discourse studies for research on media and information literacy projects: An illustrated discussion of seven methodological considerations’.
This chapter is part of the volume ‘Media Literacy and Media Education Research Methods: A Handbook’ edited by Pierre Fastrez and Normand Landry, and published by Routledge
This chapter provides an illustrated discussion of seven methodological considerations for researchers setting up a critical discourse study (CDS) of media and information literacy (MIL) projects. These considerations relate to the construction of a CDS-informed problematic (how to choose an appropriate CDS approach; how to identify relevant discourses), as well as to matters of data collection (how to select cases; how to draw boundaries around discourses) and data analysis (how to choose relevant units of analysis; why coding might be useful; how to analyze the political and ideological dimensions of discourse). This chapter illustrates the implications of decisions concerning each consideration with reference to a study of the MIL project of the European Association for Viewers Interests (EAVI). In doing so, the authors do not seek to (de)legitimize EAVI’s project but to demonstrate how CDS allows researchers to render the political and ideological dimensions of MIL discourses explicit, enabling democratic debates about the discourses that shape our world.