Critical Discourse Analysis of Iranian Publication and Dissertation Advertisements

This study aimed at investigating the dissertation and publication ads of Iranian research institutes appearing on Enghelab Street of Tehran to explore ideologies underlying them and to inspect how the ads exercise and simultaneously, reproduce the ideological suppositions considering dissertation and publication services in Iran based on CDA studies and critical context studies (van Dijk, 2009). The exploration can be regarded as evaluating ideological suppositions of commercialized research institute advertisements. This study can be classified as qualitative as it employed thematic coding that led to core thematic patterns. Discourse practices play integral roles in forming the socio-cultural norms and, so influence how they actualize in society. Advertisements can be considered as major examples of such discourses in which perceptions of social practices are formed. A contextual exploration of ideological assumptions behind the discourse of these ads divulges that they tend to reproduce manipulated commercialist views of research activities especially in the field of dissertations and publications. Through a critical view, this underlying ideological representation is discussed.