Wittgenstein Award Laureate
Wittgenstein Award Laureate 1996 Univ. Prof. Dr. Ruth Wodak
Discourse, Politics, Identity, University of Vienna
Curriculum Vitae 
Lancaster University - Department of Linguistics and English Language
r.wodak@lancaster.ac.uk
Events 2009
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JUSTICE AND MEMORY
Confronting Traumatic Pasts. An International Comparison
Thursday | 26. November 2009 | 19.00 h
Bruno Kreisky Forum für internationalen Dialog | Armbrustergasse 15 | 1190 Wien
März 2009
Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis provides a concise, comprehensible and thoroughly up-to-date introduction to CDA, appropriate for both novice and experienced researchers.
This new edition has been updated throughout, with a new introduction contextualizing the development of the CDA approach, and two entirely new chapters on the 'social actor approach' to CDA and the use of quantitative corpus linguistic methods. The editors have brought together contributions from leading experts in the field, who each introduce their own approaches to CDA. Examples are included throughout, demonstrating the value of the method in analyzing a variety of genres of written material on a whole range of topics, including global warming, leadership in management, and globalization.
This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in linguistics, sociology and psychology interested in interdisciplinary approaches to coping with topical social problems.
Februar 2009
The Discourse of Politics in Action - Politics as Usual - Ruth Wodak
Nowadays we have unprecedented levels of access to information; politics and the media share a
closer relationship than ever before, and the more successful politicians acquire the status of
quasi-celebrities. Despite this, there is widespread disenchantment with politics, a growing
cynicism about the political process, and much concern about the so-called ‘democratic deficit’.
And yet, how much do we actually know about the real world of politics? Is our eroding trust in
politicians based on a lack of understanding about the activities they actually engage in?
m o r e
November 2008
Education and the Knowledge-Based Economy in Europe
This book addresses the recent impact of the ‘knowledge-based economy’ as an economic ‘imaginary’ and as a set of real economic developments on education, and especially higher education in
Europe, including educational strategies and policies such as those of the Bologna process on a European scale. The contributors come from various disciplinary backgrounds (education, history,
linguistics, sociology) but share a commitment to trans-disciplinary research and a view that changes in educational policy and practice can productively be researched with a focus on discourse. The papers in this collection apply a range of approaches to discourse analysis, as well as narrative policy analysis, and several contributors use a cultural political economy perspective which
incorporates a version of critical discourse analysis. The book will be of interest to researchers, post-graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in several subject areas
Sample
October 2008
"The Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration in Austria"
By Michal Krzyzanowski & Ruth Wodak,
Published by Transaction Publishers, 2008
ISBN 1412808367, 9781412808361
Haider, Rechtsextremen Populismus und Migration in Österreich
Extract
May 2008
Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
"Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere"<
This volume addresses the acute dilemma of the public sphere, which is by definition open to everyone but in practice often
excludes particular groups of people in particular societies at particular points in time. Thus, the theoretical and conceptual issues of
participation and democratisation are at the core of this volume. The guiding questions for this collection of articles are therefore:
Who has access to the public sphere? How is this access enabled or disabled? Under what conditions is it granted or withheld, and by
whom?
more »
February 2008
Identity, Belonging and Migration
Synopsis: This volume addresses the question of migration in Europe. It is
concerned with the extent to which racism and anti-immigration discourse
has been to some extent normalised and 'democratised' in European and
national political discourses. Mainstream political parties are
espousing increasingly coercive policies and frequently attempting to
legitimate such approaches via nationalist-populist slogans and coded
forms of racism. Identity, Belonging and Migration shows that that
liberalism is not enough to oppose the disparate and diffuse xenophobia
and racism faced by many migrants today and calls for new conceptions of
anti-racism within and beyond the state.
m o r e
2007
Book Series: Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture
DISORDERS OF DISCOURSE
Ruth Wodak is investigating the interplay of language and communication in various institutions and areas of society. Applicable results are as important to her as innovative interdisciplinary theories.
As a student of Linguistics Ruth Wodak already wanted to bring more into the understanding of language behaviour than mere formal analysis of sentences or dialogues. The development of language and interaction over longer periods seemed to her to be important, as did the institutional setting in which communication took place and the non- and para-verbal that accompanied all statements. The gist of the matters that have concerned her since was already set out in her dissertation on the language of defendants in court, published in 1975 as a book: language as the result and coproducer of power structures and inequalities and – as she herself summarizes her scientific interest– ”investigating the relationship between society and communication, both in theory and in practice, i.e. with practical applications.”
Wodak has been a full Professor of Applied Linguistics at Vienna University since 1991. She has studied language behaviour in group therapy sessions, in mother-daughter relationships, in political debates, in school classes, in hospitals and in bureaucracies. Together with different teams of researchers she has analysed the comprehensibility of legal texts, radio news broadcasts and consumer magazines and has drawn up guidelines for the avoidance of sexist usage of language. For several years she has been working increasingly on the communicative production and reproduction of prejudices and discrimination in public and private discourse, put another way, with the breaking of social taboos in the media and in the pub, ”and with the speech of politicians.”
The subject of socio-linguistics does not have a narrowly confined sphere of applicability and the oft-abused term ”interdisciplinary” is fully justified in Wodak’s institute. ”We have always made use of contributions from media studies, social psychology, history, political science and others, without which we could not reach our specific results. Our aim is the joint development of theories that represent and explain something qualitatively new.”
In 1996 Ruth Wodak received one of the first two Wittgenstein Prizes. With the prize money she intended, ”to make Vienna into one of the most important centres for modern discourse analysis.” She has been working towards this goal in several ways. ”We have managed to establish a worldwide network (with project cooperations, an Advisory Board, comparative research etc.) on the topic of discourse, politics and identity.” She is receiving administrative support thanks to a Research Professorship from autumn 1999 to autumn 2002 at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where she has encountered ”teamwork, research, innovation and optimal working conditions.”
The interdisciplinary composition of the research team has created further research topics and results. Fieldwork at EU organizations has enabled a theoretical and empirical analysis of discourses on unemployment and a decoding of globalization rhetoric as ”necessary constant” for the political legitimation of particular new economies. This represents the first systematic research on the working of EU committees at the micro-level. Since the change of government in Austria in February 2000, Ruth Wodak can further observe ”a unique situation for our research, namely that research into political rhetoric is actually in demand!”
