The representation of social actors in texts and discourse is an important analytical focus for people working with CDA. Ever since van Leeuwen published his seminal work on how to analyse the representation of social actors, the importance of how social actors are represented has been recognised by people who want to critically analyse texts and discourse.

However, webinar series leader Dr Michael Farrelly argues, CDA can get much more out of van Leeuwen’s system for analysing the representation of social actors in text and discourse than has typically been the case. Further, he argues that the system itself can be developed further. 

In this series of webinars - aimed at PhDs or researchers who want a deeper understanding of how to analyse the representation of social actors - we examine how critical discourse analysts set about identifying and analysing the representation of social actors in texts and discourse. We explore how such analysis can extend our critical insights into how texts are used to do conceptual work in various social settings.

This is a series of four live online webinars - every Friday throughout September 2025:

• 5th September 2025: Introduction to analysing the representation of social actors

• 12th September 2025: Identifying and categorising representations of social actors

• 19th September 2025: Development: ambiguous and embedded representations of social actors

• 26th September 2025: Development: social actors as features of genre/text-type and interdiscursivity

Sign below up for each webinar separately and for as many, or few, as you prefer.

At the start of each webinar, we will briefly recap material from the previous week.

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Each webinar will consist of a talk with slides from Dr Michael Farrelly and, depending on number of participants, interaction, and discussion.