Critical Analysis

Overview of Critical Analysis

Critical analysis is a heterogeneous approach to theory and practice that examines the historical and socio-political dimensions of texts (e.g., spoken and written words, nonverbal communication, images). During the late 1980s, linguist Norman Fairclough and colleagues theorized a pluralistic, intertextual approach aimed at understanding how individual and collective texts create and reproduce social power and privilege. By the mid-1990s, critical analysis had become a well-established approach or movement in academia.

Although critical analysis is employed in specific ways in different disciplines, critical analysis distinguishes itself from most quantitative and qualitative methodologies or approaches in several ways. First, critical analysis is primarily concerned with the relationship between power and language. Critical analysis interrogates how language reproduces power and social inequality in ways that seem “normal” and “natural.” Critical analysis assumes that language not only creates reality but also that our reality is premised on social hierarchy, privilege, and the unequal distribution of material resources and political power. It also assumes that texts are interrelated and, thus, should not be evaluated using experimental isolation. Critical analysis does not limit its analytic approaches to particular types of texts or talk but, rather, aims to systematically and rigorously connect everyday language practices to the sociopolitical contexts in which they happen.

Second, critical analysis is a resistant form of research. In contrast to quantitative and qualitative approaches that aim to describe and explain social phenomena, critical analysis attempts to expose hidden power and taken-for-granted assumptions. Critical analysis also embraces multiple perspectives, gives space to unheard voices, and stimulates social criticism. Thus, social change and the redistribution of power are fundamental to scholars who engage in critical analysis. Finally, critical analysis is a subject-centered approach to research. Unlike most social scientific research, which privileges a data-centered focus and minimal researcher interference, scholars embrace their own subject position when conducting critical analysis. Researchers are expected to make their subject position transparent to the reader and to evaluate how their own social privilege (or lack thereof) offers a specific vantage point when interpreting a text. This acknowledgment of subjectivity challenges the possibility of “value-free” observation but also the assumption that value-free research is necessary for discovering knowledge.

Despite its importance and prominence in academic research, critical analysis remains an ill-defined concept that continues to inspire scholarly debates regarding its definition and application. A primary source of academic contention concerns the frameworks for theory and methodology. Critical analysis creates a subjective research environment that is designed to inspire different ways to think about knowledge production and research. Within the scientific and social scientific traditions, theory functions as a tool for discovering and explaining knowledge and practice describes the methodological process by which theory is applied in a controlled, object-centered way for the purpose of uncovering knowledge that meets the standards of reliability and validity. By design, critical analysis challenges the epistemological, ontological, axiological foundation of science and social science by blurring the long-established distinctions [Page 295]between theory and practice and challenging the “knowledge-as-discoverable-object” principle.

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