In discourse analysis, transcribing audio or video data is a necessary evil. In this process of entextualization and recontextualization, recordings become transcripts – the textual simulacra discourse analysts rely on to analyze what and how people ‘do things’ with language.
There are number of commercial transcription tools available but if you’re looking for a basic (Windows only) speech transcription utility, I recommend VoiceWalker (if it’s bells and whistles you want, try Transana). VoiceWalker was designed by University of California linguists John W. Du Bois and Mary Bucholtz and can be downloaded freely.
In addition, a somewhat more ambitious tool is SoundWriter. This (beta) software is designed to link a transcription to the audio source file, “to help the researcher hear and visualize relationships between utterances in conversational interaction”. Download for free here.
Quote of the day from Thomas Popkewitz and Sverker Lindblad:
It is not race, gender or class that is the central concern of research, but the production of the race-ness, gender-ness or class-ness of individuality. (2000: 23)
And, indeed, the production of individuality itself.
In their paper they outline two sets of approaches to studying the relation between educational governance and social inclusion/exclusion. What they call the equity problematic largely adopts policy makers’ discourse, aiming to improve inclusion:
Policy research becomes bound to the policy makers’ definition of the problem, taking the categories and problem definitions derived from governmental policies as the problems of research without any serious intellectual scrutiny. (2000: 6)
In the knowledge problematic, on the other hand, the construction of the categories to identify inclusion and exclusion is the focus of research:
The problem is not only access and participation, but the rules through which divisions and distinctions qualify and disqualify individuals for action. (2000: 23)
Popkewitz, T., & Lindblad, S. (2000). Educational Governance and Social Inclusion and Exclusion: some conceptual difficulties and problematics in policy and research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 21(1), 5-44. (Longer report can be downloaded here).
Sue-Im Lee’s 
The book looks to be a wide range of both theoretical and more situated, analytical chapters, in which authors get to grips with what they call “nano-media.” Contributors “discuss different “nano-media” forms and practices, which surface as tellers of truth, which serve as sites for fresh interpretations of our realities, and which often disrupt the frames and conventions of mainstream mediated communication.”