Critical Discourse Analysis

Theo van Leeuwen (born 1947) is a social semiotician widely recognized as a co-founder, alongside Gunther Kress, of multimodality an area of research concerned with the meaning-making potential and use of different semiotic resources, including both communicative modes such as language and visual design and media (i.e. physical materials and technologies) of communication. He is also a well known critical discourse theorist and analyst. His work in both these areas is transdisciplinary with foundations in social semiotics while also drawing on diverse theoretical and practice-based perspectives. Van Leeuwen’s work has extended the influence of multimodality, social semiotics and critical discourse analysis beyond semiotics, communication studies and applied linguistics, to fields such as education, the arts, and media, culture and business studies. This influence can be attributed to the strong connection it maintains between semiotic theory and semiotic practice as well as to its socio-political orientation.

Van Leeuwen is a Professor at the Centre for Multimodal Communication and Department of Languages (SG) and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, and Emeritus Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences from 2005 to 2013. Prior to that, he held professorships at Cardiff University (1999-2005) and the London College of Printing (1996-1999), where he commenced as principal lecturer in 1993. His academic career began at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, where in the period 1974-1993 he designed and taught courses in scriptwriting and film and television production and film and media theory (European cinema; documentary film; news and current affairs; media sociology; visual communication; language, music and media), and worked for the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. This work built on Van Leeuwen’s earlier and concurrent practice as jazz pianist and film/TV editor, scriptwriter and producer in the Netherlands and Australia.

Van Leeuwen has published widely on multimodality and social semiotics and critical discourse analysis. His books include: Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006 [1996]) and Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication (2001), both co-authored with Gunther Kress; Speech, Music, Sound (1999); Introducing Social Semiotics (2005); Global Media Discourse (2007, with David Machin); Discourse and Social Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (2008); The Language of New Media Design (2009, with Radan Martinec); and The Language of Colour (2011). In 1991, he co-founded the journal Social Semiotics and is a founding co-editor of the journal Visual Communication established in 2001 (with Carey Jewitt). He is also on the editorial boards of several other international peer-reviewed journals that provide publication platforms for research on multimodality and critical discourse analysis.

Van Leeuwen’s focus on the relationship between the interests/agency of meaning-makers and the ways in which specific institutional and broader social contexts govern people’s use of semiotic resources is inspired by Hodge & Kress’s (1988) Social Semiotics. Building on Halliday’s (1978) idea that language is only “one of the semiotic systems that constitute a culture” (p. 2) and on his model of the dynamic relationship between text (i.e. a social exchange of meaning) and context, this seminal publication charted principles for developing a social semiotic theory that could foster interdisciplinary dialogue on communication in all its forms and across different institutional contexts, a theory for which “texts and contexts, agents and objects of meaning, social structures and forces and their complex interrelationships together constitute the minimal and irreducible object of semiotic analysis” (Hodge & Kress, 1988, p. viii). This goal has motivated multimodal and critical discourse studies in the social semiotic tradition as well as more recent efforts to combine the two and explore the role that non-verbal semiotic resources and their interaction with language and with each other play in establishing and perpetuating or challenging social divisions, norms and stereotypes. These efforts have been spearheaded by Van Leeuwen’s independent and collaborative investigations of visual racism in history and society textbooks, stereotypes materialized in the visual and kinetic design of children’s toys, and global media discourse (Machin & Van Leeuwen, 2007; Van Leeuwen, 2000, 2009b; Van Leeuwen & Caldas-Coulthard, 2004; Van Leeuwen & Kress, 1995), to name just a few.

Like Norman Fairclough and many other critical discourse analysts, Van Leeuwen employs SFL for analysing the role of language in recontextualizing social practices. A distinguishing feature of his approach to CDA, however, is that it also explores the role non-verbal and multimodal representations play in (re)establishing dominant ideologies. To expose this role, Van Leeuwen (2008a) argues, CDA needs to consider not only what is or is not represented non-verbally or multimodally (e.g. whether ethnic minorities are represented in the media) but also how such representations are constructed. Van Leeuwen (2008a) presents many examples from his earlier research, including the use of oblique horizontal angle to depict a group of people as ‘other’, and create detachment between depicted social actors and image viewers, and ways that the visual and kinetic construction of toys can conform to racial and gender stereotypes. Focusing on women’s magazines and electronic war games, Machin and Van Leeuwen (2007) demonstrate that multimodal genres impose western values and homogenise the formats used to present local content, and Van Leeuwen (2005) reveals how advertising discourses employ combinations of signifiers such as dress, colour, smell and so on to construct and sell lifestyle identities that mask mass consumerism. Such work also highlights popular culture and discourses as a fertile ground for developing tools for productively uniting the agendas of critical and multimodal discourse analysis. Van Leeuwen (2013), for example, argues both that “the discourses that need the scrutiny of a critical eye are now overwhelmingly multimodal and mediated by digital systems that take multimodality entirely for granted” (p. 5) and that “racist stereotypes persist in visual rather than verbal texts, and in comic strips, advertisements and other forms of popular culture rather than in more factual and “highbrow” texts” (p. 2).