Discourse Analysis & Worldviews

1. We become who we are through relationship - through the meaning we make of other's perceptions and of us and interactions with us.

2. We organize our lives through stories.
    We can make many different stories or meanings of any particular event.
    There are many experiences in each of our lives that have not been “storied.” Each of those events could, if storied, lead to a different, often preferable, life narrative.

3. The dominant discourses in our society powerfully influence what gets storied and how it gets storied.
    A discourse is a system of words, actions, rules, beliefs, and institutions that share common values. Particular discourses sustain particular worldviews. We might even think of a discourse as a worldview in action.
    Discourses tend to be invisible--taken for granted as part of the fabric of reality.

4. Locating problems in particular discourses helps us see people as separate from their problems.
    We seek to identify the discourses that support problematic stories. Once a problem is linked to a problematic discourse, we can more easily help people oppose the discourse or chose to construct their relationship in line with a different, preferred, discourse.


One classical marxist arguement against discourse anlysis may be that the stable/dominat discourse is actually inherent in the  metric and structure of  a capitalist society itself - Capital and the systems that maintain it.