What’s (Un)critical about critical discourse analysis? A reflexive re-reading of Taiwanese EFL textbooks through positionality and situated knowledges

This paper calls for a recentring of researcher positionality and reflexivity in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by foregrounding a historically situated understanding of (de)coloniality in comparative education. Drawing on examples from a recent CDA study of Taiwanese EFL textbooks by scholars based in the People’s Republic of China, we argue that positionality (the social, political, and epistemic location from which scholars produce knowledge) and reflexivity (the practice of interrogating this location) are central to the validity of CDA in Taiwan’s educational contexts. The absence of such engagement risks reinforcing the very geopolitical hierarchies that critical inquiry seeks to dismantle. Our re-reading of selected textbook passages shows how our positionality shapes interpretation less as ideological determination than as a form of pedagogical negotiation. Recognising Taiwan as a distinct site of epistemic production, we call for a reflexive comparative stance that foregrounds plurality and situated understanding over universalist critique.