The authors identify and examine the problems, issues, and struggles of contemporary life; ground critical discourse analysis in a coherent social theory and theory of critical social scientific research; and clarify its relationship to other types of social analysis and to linguistics. Discourse in late modernity Social life and critical social science Discourse The critical analysis of discourse Narratives of late modernity and a research agenda for CDA Language, space and time Discourse, difference and the openness of the social Critical discourse analysis and linguistics