Van Dijk's Academic Autobiography

The academic autobiography that Van Dijk has written is a very useful and friendly account of how he has developed his academic interests and work. This along with what Ruth wrote on Critical Discourse Analysis in the same style can help a person like me to see the historical development of CDA in general or personal versions of CDA during the course of last 15 or 20 years.

Van Dijk gives an analysis of his cognitive mediated production and understanding discourse and mentions how he has been convinced that he should look into psychology for answers. He also talks about his favourite topics of Knowledge, Context and Ideology.

There are two not-necessarily-academic points which are interesting to me in this article. First is to see how a critical discourse analyst or a critical scholar in general becomes an activism by publicly denouncing racist remarks of Gerrit Komriji in Netherland and trying to show that he has also been writing more racists material anonymously. Consequently Van Dijk is sued by the writer and is cleared afterwards. This brings some more consequences because Komriji tries to convince the University of Amsterdam to fire Van Dijk and of course tries to ridicule discourse studies and his academic credits.

He says:

'when years later Publish a book on the whole affair (van Dijk 2003) with extensive arguments and demonstrations of involvement of the famous writer in this affair, no publisher dared to publish the book and when I published the book on my own account, the press suddenly fell silent, despite its obviously burning topic not a single book review of the book was published, so that the book was totally unknown and ignored by public at large-selling hardly more than 150 copies' (Page 24)

This important to see that Academic studies of this type is not very much far from becoming a social activist and that we are not just sitting around and discuss things which we only know of. Rather what we do can take a form of action in raising the awareness among public at large.

The second point that is very much related to the first one is the image of CDA in general in society and political arena. That is the subject matter of studies of this kind is not usually favoured (least to say) by political figures, policy makers and budget planners thus in Van Dijk's words:

'financial for this kind of research was [is] very hard, if not impossible to get, also for my assistants and PhD students working on this topic'(page 24)

Although Van Dijk is talking about a specific case here, one cannot deny that it is generally the case that there is a hidden or overt tendency not to fund studies of this kind. Let's say no government likes to fund a study which is going to prove that the ministers are racist or any other unpleasant traits of that kind. The extend on how far these policies can go against researchers of this kind from mere lack of interest to allocate funding to open act of hostility and coercion, of course depends on the context of the country where such a study takes place. To make it more relevant I should refer to my own line of work in my Masters in Iran where there was/is a clear tendency not to encourage studies of that kind along with the advice of keeping a low profile when you do things like that. (This probably is expected for a country like Iran or rather in Middle East where there is a risk in doing any critique even at social level) That is why my only option in doing a PhD like is to be on my own with no official attachments and hence having no financial support.