Keynote by Prof. David Machin: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis approach to healthy and ethical food

The notion of health dieting has become a huge issue for many western governments with the rise of diet related illnesses and the massive related health costs.  There has also been a massive rise in interest in healthy and ethical eating.  Here health can relate not only to the body but to wider notions of well-being and being in harmony with the planet.  And food manufacturers have sought to both colonize and develop these markets.  For the average person, however, the massive and competing array of claims made by different food products to be good for us can be highly confusing.  Food marketed to us as healthy or ethical can carry a bewildering array of claims.  While this can be regulated at the level of language, the packaging designs are not.  

In this talk I look at how using MCDA we can carry out an analysis of food packages as material objects to draw out the complex and contradictory discourses of health and ethical eating which they carry, how these are communicated at different levels in packaging shape, texture, color, etc.   Through doing this I show how MCDA can be used as an approach for answering concrete research questions as regards drawing out the discourses carried by any instance of communication. I stress that this must involve seeing these not as simply representations but as materials which in their shapes, textures and colors, house discourses. And we must always place such instances into the wider social practices of which they are apart and the ideological interests they serve.