Welcome to the inaugural issue of the new journal Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines. In 2006, the University of East Anglia, where research first began thirty years before into what would become Critical Linguistics, hosted an international conference CADAAD 06. The conference was a resounding success, attracting nearly eighty scholars from four continents. The success of CADAAD 06 can perhaps be attributed to two principal factors. Firstly, it having been the only international event of its kind in Europe in a decade. And secondly, its cross-disciplinary reach.
An overarching objective of CADAAD 06 was to bring together scholars united by a critical agenda in discourse research but otherwise separated by arbitrary academic boundaries. This objective was reflected in the choice of plenary speakers and further realised in the range of papers delivered, with scholars from analytic disciplines as diverse as linguistics, communication studies, philosophy, psychology and political science all presenting critically informed discourse research.
At a more subordinate level, the conference sought to assess and develop the state of the art in two ways. On the one hand, where Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics has provided the prevailing methodology in Critical Discourse Analysis, perhaps the dominating trend on the critical discourse research plane, CADAAD 06 aimed to highlight current critical discourse research in which alternative methodological perspectives are adopted and, thus, illuminate and assess the wide range of potential methodologies available to critical discourse researchers, including cognitive linguistics, argumentation theory, and post-modernist social theory. On the other hand, where racism, for example, has typically been subject to investigation in Critical Discourse Analysis, CADAAD 06 aimed to expand the areas targeted by critical discourse research to include especially applied and professional areas, such as the environment, health, education, and law.
What became immediately apparent, then, was that the wish to meet the goals set out by the conference organisers was shared by a large number of scholars. Furthermore, the need for a permanent stage upon which members of this new ‘community’ could interact became increasingly obvious. Thus, to this end, www.cadaad.org was born. In developing this ongoing project, a proper publishing platform was seen as essential. As part of our commitment to a freely accessible online space serving the critical discourse research community, we decided that this publishing platform should take the form a free but formal, peer-reviewed electronic journal, the aims and scope of which mirror those outlined for CADAAD 06.
We are hoping that Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines fills a gap in publication opportunities for critical discourse researchers who may have heretofore found only an uneasy acceptance either in their home applied disciplines or in the more methodologically restricted journals dealing with one or another incarnation of (Critical) Discourse Analysis. Disciplinarity provides useful theoretical frameworks for research and necessary organisational frameworks. In both senses, however, it can be restrictive, often leading to insularity and even incestuousness. This journal hopes to take advantage of disciplinarity whilst at the same time challenging the boundaries autoimposed by it. This inaugural issue is a special extended issue comprising selected papers presented at CADAAD 06. Papers applying cognitive linguistic methods in critical discourse research were presented during a theme session at the conference and will appear in a separate volume Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Studies: Application and Theory to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
In accordance with the themes of the journal, great variety is evident in the individual methodologies employed and explored by the contributors, ranging over relevance theory and pragma-dialectics (Oswald), cognitive pragmatics (de Saussure), discursive psychology (Goodman), register theory (Pagani), postmodernist philosophy (Caborn), and, most predominantly, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Teo, Macgilchrist, Määttä, Magistro, Lean). However, although CDA provides a banner for many of the papers in this issue, it should be noted that its canonical analytic methods are often not applied. Rather, a number of other methodological approaches are developed or employed within CDA thus enriching it as a discipline. These include blending theory (Macgilchrist), discourse model theory (Felberg), and politeness theory (Magistro).
The applied areas subject to investigation are similarly varied. They include architecture (Caborn), European law (Määttä), higher education (Teo), international conflict (Felberg, Macgilcrist), European and national identity (Magistro and Goodman respectively), health (Lean), and local-government communication (Pagani).
Finally, the editors would like to express their gratitude to all those involved with CADAAD'06 without whom this whole project would not have received its initial impetus. Acknowledgment is also due to the eminent scholars who have agreed to act on the journal's advisory board and who will inevitably bring to the journal an international and cross-disciplinary perspective. We must also thank the members of the CADAAD community whose continuous support and participation will ensure the project's long-term success. We are hoping that this community will continue to grow and that the journal will publish critical discourse research exploring the application of a wide range of methods to a variety of discourses thus continuing the trend set by this inaugural issue.
