Critical realist discourse analysis, motherhood, and gender: a systematic methodological approach to analysis

This chapter proposes a multi-level, ‘synthesised’ methodological approach for undertaking applied Critical Realist Discourse Analysis and – in so doing – adopts a specific focus on talk around motherhood, female employment and day-care. This methodological approach combines features from traditional forms of discourse analysis with principles and practices that derive from applied critical realism. The chapter argues that critical realist philosophy allows us to side-step the age-old structure/agency and materialism/idealism dualisms in favour of an approach that conceives of these as dialectically co-constituted. As such, it claims that Critical Realist Discourse Analysis provides a starting point for researchers who wish to avoid both the anthropocentric social constructionist tendency to reduce all dimensions of our existence to discourse and biological reductionism or materialist determinism.