Beyond toolkits: Critical autoethnography and a relational agenda for discourse studies in media and communication

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) faces three vulnerabilities: Eurocentric canons, computational reductionism, and rhetorical decolonization. This article offers a retrospective critical autoethnographic intervention that reimagines CDS as relational practice. Writing as a Filipino communication scholar, I revisit my trajectory—from textbook encounters with multimodal CDA to the theorization of trust cultures and relational sovereignties—to show how scholarly becoming generates theory. From this emerge four provocations: beyond toolkits, beyond textbooks, beyond derivative Souths, and toward ambivalence and hope. I clarify relational critique as an approach that treats relationality as the ontological ground of critique rather than a contextual supplement. I also specify the retrospective autoethnographic materials and analytic stance guiding this inquiry. Rather than rejecting toolkits, I argue for decentering toolkit-centrism by situating methods as secondary to the theorization of social problems. Finally, I outline a relational agenda that bridges interpretive inquiry with emerging computational practices.