eradicate alternatives or end resistance,
and are thus constantly having to be
reproduced.. Discourses are regulated: discourses have
coherence and systematicity, though they
often contain contradictions, and are
marked by their own ‘regimes of truth’
that police the boundaries that legislate
inclusions and exclusions and establish
criteria of acceptability.
. Discourses are embedded: discourses are
not free-floating constructions produced
by thought alone, but are performances
that materialize social life; they are embed-
ded in institutions, practices and subject-
positions, but typically cut across and
circulate through multiple institutions and
subject positions.
. Discourses are situated: discourses, their
formations and economies are the product
of historical practices and geographical
location. As such, they providesituated
knowledges, characterized by particular
constellations of power and knowledge al-
ways open to contestation and negotiation,
even as they seek to obscure their histor-
icity and specificity.
Discourses thereby shape the contours of
thetaken-for-granted world, naturalizing
and universalizing a particular subject forma-
tion and view of the world. Theories of
discourse have thus greatly enlarged the
interpretive horizon of human geography.
Insofar ascritical human geographyis con-
cerned with the connections between power,
knowledge and spatiality, discourse will be a
vital concept.
Discourse has also altered the self-
understanding of the field. It has revivified the
history of geographyin which ‘great men’ or
‘paradigmatic schools’ have given way to a con-
cern with the discursive production of geo-
graphical knowledge. It has made obvious the
complicity of human geography incolonial-
ismandimperialism(seepost-colonialism)
and the way in which traditional geographical
knowledge effaced the contribution of non-
Westernsubjects(Barnett, 1998). Theories
of discourse have also played an important part
in exposing the asymmetries of power that are
inscribed within contemporary geographical
discourses (notablyethnocentrismandphal-
locentrism), elucidating the role ofrhetoric–
and of poetics more generally – in legitimizing
intellectual practice (Crush, 1991) and in
allowingideologyto congeal as ‘unexamined
discourse’ (Gregory, 1978a). dca
Suggested reading
Foucault (1984); Howarth (2000).discourse analysis The analysis of dis-
course; methodologies for studying the pro-
duction and meaning of discourses. Discourse
analysis involves a wide array of approaches to
the construction and interpretation of mean-
ing. These approaches understandlanguage
as a social practice, and are concerned with
language use beyond the semantic units that
are the domain of linguistics. The differences
between the approaches to discourse analysis
depend on the extent to which they (a) under-
stand themselves to be a formal method-
ology(hence the sometimes capitalized term
‘Discourse Analysis’) as opposed to a critical
interpretative approach; and (b) the extent to
which the formal components and properties
of linguistic representations, as opposed to
the social practices made possible by language,
are the primary concern
The more formal, methodological approaches
that comprise Discourse Analysis focus on the
structure of spoken or written texts, and
confine their study to those texts – often in
terms of content analysis – leaving questions
of context and how much can be inferred from
the linguistic data to others (see van Dijk,
1997). One prominent approach deals with
the role thatmetaphorsplay in social life, and
highlights the frames of reference through
which problems are understood; for example,
‘war’ versus ‘crime’ in the struggle against
terrorism, or ‘choice’ in the debates about
public services and reproductive rights
(Lakoff and Johnson, 2003 [1980]).
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), exem-
plified in the work of Fairclough (2001),
extends the range of interpretive concern
beyond the structures of language to the social
and political context. While beginning with an
analysis of language texts, CDA also includes
the processes of text production, distribution
and consumption in its approach. Finally,
CDA is concerned with the way in which
sociocultural practice is comprised of discur-
sive events. As such, CDA argues that lin-
guistic and social resources are controlled
institutionally and access to them is unequal.
While CDA extends the concern with
language to the social, it perhaps does not go
as far as more interpretive and less formal
approaches to discourse analysis. Allied with
the conception of discourse asperformative,
these approaches largely shun the idea of
discourse analysis as a specific methodo-
logy, because they argue that all analysisGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_D Final Proof page 167 1.4.2009 3:15pmDISCOURSE ANALYSIS