The work I have done is based on academic work from a number of different schools, In particular Text Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis.

I have derived the Discourse Toolbox particularly from the works list HERE, and of these authors, I am particularly influenced by van Dijk and Jaeger. I am also indebted to Bob Jessop

However, the toolbox I have produced is certainly not what these authors may have expected - I have derived it in different ways based on their work, for example:-

• Power is a major theme in Critical Discourse Analysis, however, there it is there "in the background" as an approach, and as a discourse within CDA. However, I have taken it out of this context and used power as a basis for several of the questions used in the toolbox, such has
  Who has power
  Who does NOT have power
  How is power being applied
  As far as I know this method is an original "offshoot" of CDA, but I confess that I cannot readily verify this claim. Whatever the background, the above questions on power seem to be valid in looking at the meaning of a text..
• The other tools in the toolbox have been derived by similar processes of "mining" - please contact me if you want a further archaeology of this process
• The Context method has been derioved from work by Allan Howard at the UIA, Brussels. This work is currently unpublished. He began to use cut and paste methods to extract informatiopn from sources on the internet, and to let them speak for themselves rather than quoting them. In the context survey of food and farming, I have done the same as much as possible - using typical pages from typical organisations to build a "collage" of what is there in the context. Sometimes there was no suitable pages, so I have made a precis myself from the printed materials quoted, or from my personal history.
• The Dispositive is used in a non-standard way, as a method of triangulation and of discovering the "cracks in reality" in an investigation, but again, I think this is well enough based on the theoretical work on the dispositive

In general, my method has been to use academic material as a resource which I have "mined". I discuss the validity of this further on this page, and I discuss my own authorial discourse here, and give some biographical details here to help you evaluate my own position,

Links:

Teun van Dijk personal website
Siegfried Jaeger
Bob Jessop for a list of his online papers

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