Discourse, critique and ethnography: Class-oriented coding in accounts of child protection

This paper foregrounds the need to formulate the critical efforts of discourse analysts in the processsual and dialogic terms of on-going ethnographic contact. It develops this argumentation on the basis of an analysis of significant tendencies in a limited corpus of interview data. The focus of analysis is on class-oriented codings in a number of experiential accounts of contact with institutions of child protection. The analysis is thus presented as an agenda-shaping stage in the researcher's ongoing contact with the institutional sites through which the initial interview data was obtained. It is preceded by a review of two closely-related paradigms for social discourse analysis: systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis.