Critical Discourse Analysis and Policy-Orientated Housing Research

Abstract

Positivism continues to exert a powerful influence on housing research. To a limited extent, this began to change in the mid to late 1990s with a number of researchers in Europe and Australia employing critical and poststructural theories to investigate contemporary housing issues. Critical discourse analysis (CDA), in particular, started to be seen as a tool that could be used to analyse and critique policy debates about urban regeneration, housing policy reform and managerialism. This paper begins by positioning discourse analysis within the field of housing research. The second part of the paper uses an empirical case study of housing policy change in the Australian state of Queensland to illustrate the limitations and possibilities offered by critical discourse analysis. The conclusions drawn from the study indicate that critical discourse analysis is a valuable adjunct to the dominant positivist tradition in housing research. However, for this value to be fully realised, more work needs to be done in a number of areas, including the development of more explicit links between material and discursive practices and a closer integration of CDA with other social research methods.