Setting the Agenda: Beyond Discourse Dependence and a Dependence on Discourse

The exploration of discourse has been enormously generative to critical family communication scholarship (CFC), as scholars have both studied discourse in and of families as well as theorized about what discourse is and does. The heuristic value of discourse to CFC moves us to offer an agenda for future CFC research that asks family communication scholars to theoretically expand beyond discourse. Drawing on the momentum of CFC work grounded in discourse, we aim to: (a) offer scholars more conceptual tools to examine CFC; (b) clarify how some common concepts are differentiated (e.g., discourse, ideology, articulation, interpellation, hegemony, apparatus); and (c) provide research ideas for studying family communication and identity as constituted through other processes emerging from critical theory.