Field-based Discourse Analysis — Analysing Language within Social Fields

Field-based discourse analysis integrates Pierre Bourdieu's sociological concept of the field — a structured social space of positions, capital, and struggle — with the close textual methods of discourse analysis. Rather than treating language as a neutral medium, it examines how discourse is produced, circulated, and received within specific social fields (education, law, journalism, science, etc.), and how discursive choices reflect and reproduce the distribution of power and capital within those fields.