Discourses are semiotic ways construing aspects of the world (physical, social or mental) which can generally be indentified with different positions or perspectives of different groups of social actors. For instance, the lives of poor people are not only construed through different discourses associated with different social practices (in politics, medicine, social welfare, academic sociology) but through different discourses in each which correspond to differences of position and perspective. I use “construe” in preference to “represent” to emphasize an active and often difficult process of “grasping” the world from a particular perspective (Fairclough, forthcoming)