Mediated Discourse Analysis: Tracking Discourse in Action

Abstract

Mediated discourse analysis, sometimes called nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), is an action-oriented approach to critical discourse analysis that takes sociocultural activity as its primary focus, looking closely at a physical action as the unit of analysis rather than an ethnographic event or a strip of language (e.g., utterance, turn of talk). In this way of thinking about activity, every action is simultaneously co-located within a local embodied community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and a far-reaching nexus of practice, the expected and valued ways of interacting with materials among people. The purposes of MDA are

1. to locate and make visible the nexus of practice-a mesh of commonplace practices and shared meanings that bind communities together but that can also produce exclusionary effects and reproduce inequitable power relations;

2. to show how such practices are made up of multiple mediated actions that appropriate available materials, identities, and discourses;

3. to reveal how changes in the smallest everyday actions can effect social change in a community’s nexus of practice.