Disability Critical Discourse Analysis

Content analysis typically counts manifest features — how often disability appears, how often a frame is used — and aims at quantified description. Disability CDA reads texts closely for how language constructs disability through word choice, metaphor, framing, and silence, and then links those choices to discourses, power, and social practice. It asks not just how often something is said but what discursive and ideological work the language does and whose interests it serves. The orientation is interpretive and critical rather than tallying, drawing on the CDA tradition Grue adapts to disability.

Because such choices encode stance, agency, and evaluation. Wheelchair-bound construes the person as confined and passive, while wheelchair user construes the chair as an enabling tool and the person as an agent. Grue uses this contrast to show that lexical alternatives are not neutral synonyms: they position disabled people differently and carry different assumptions about impairment. Aggregated across many texts, such choices sediment into discourses that naturalize particular understandings of disability, which is why close attention to lexis is central to the method.

Silence is itself meaningful. When disability is absent from a news story, a policy debate, or a cultural product where it is relevant, that absence produces and reproduces exclusion just as framing does. Grue stresses analyzing both representation and non-representation, because what is left unsaid shapes the subject positions available to disabled people and signals whose experience counts as worth representing. Examining absence alongside presence gives a fuller account of how discourse includes or excludes disabled people than analyzing explicit content alone.