Rebecca Rogers: Can you talk about future directions for CDA? Norman Fairclough: I wouldn’t like to speak on behalf of CDA. I mean what is interesting now is that it is being taken up so widely and in so many different disciplines that it has now become something thank goodness that it could not be…

Rebecca Rogers: How do you teach? Norman Fairclough: Well, how I teach. I guess the way I prefer to teach these days is to teach groups of not linguists or people with a particular background in discourse analysis, so that is the first thing to say. So my preferred groups for teaching are people doing…

Rebecca Rogers: Can you talk about your thinking as you have moved from one project to the next? How have your questions developed? Norman Fairclough: Yeah. I’ve said in the plenary here that the way I tend to see this has been embarking on a research topic, one has to undergo a process of constructing…

Rebecca Rogers: Can you talk about your views on context? Norman Fairclough: I find the idea of saying let’s talk about texts and contexts problematic and I would just assume not start there. I would start with social events and social practices, and social structures. I would be interested in understanding the dialectical relations between…

Rebecca Rogers: Can you talk about the various approaches to CDA? And, then, how your own approach fits into the various traditions? Norman Fairclough: Again, I want to complicate that because I think it is risky classifying too sharply between different approaches. I would not… I find it difficult to say what my own approach…

Rebecca Rogers: Can you talk through why you thought to bring together these ideas? Norman Fairclough: I started in linguistics, the appointment that I first had at Lancaster was a very strange one in a sense because I was appointed to teach varieties of English and writing systems and was forgotten about as soon as…

Rebecca Rogers: What do you see as the history of CDA? Norman Fairclough: I guess that is two different questions. Do you mean the history of this particular network? Or the history of critical work on language and discourse? Because I think they are two very different things. RR: Good point. Can you talk a…