Critical Discourse Analysis and Research on Post-Communism

Abstract

In this paper I propose a transdisciplinary approach to research on transition in East-Central Europe and in Romania in particular. I draw primarily on Cultural Political Economy (on concepts such as re-scaling, etc.) in order to investigate transition from a critical discourse-analytical perspective. In a range of texts (having to do with higher education reform, strategies of political branding, strategies for combating poverty, delegitimation of the ‘politically correct’ left, etc.), I analyze the way in which global or European discourses are recontextualized in the Romanian post-communist context. I indicate how these diverse recontextualizations are inflected by particular features of Romania as a recontextualizing context and suggest that particularities of recontextualizing contexts are likely to lead to longer-term differences of outcome.