Dominant Frame Research Articles

Framing Pro-Palestine Protests: A Comparative Analysis of News Coverage by The Guardian and USA Today

This study examines the framing strategies employed by The Guardian and USA Today in their coverage of the pro-Palestine protests in American universities during April and May 2024. Accordingly, the corpus comprises 213 news texts, with The Guardian contributing 106 articles and USA Today contributing 107 articles from April 17 to May 17, 2024. The research identifies and contrasts the dominant frames used by these two newspapers by conducting a framing content analysis on the selected news articles. The Guardian frequently utilizes conflict and adversarial frames, emphasizing university-wide ideological and political struggles. Conversely, USA Today focuses on broader political confrontations and administrative accountability, often highlighting institutional responses and governance issues. The analysis process is guided by framing theory to reveal how news representations influence public perception and interpretation and media agenda-setting theory to explore how media news coverage prioritizes specific issues within the same event. The findings underscore the decisive role of media framing in shaping public opinion and priorities, particularly in the context of global and political issues.

“Water is life … the problem is there’s only one tap”: A culture-centered and necrocapitalist inquiry to communicating health and water

ABSTRACT This paper records knowledge from below around the overlaps between health, water, and health interventions emerging from rural communities located in North 24 Parganas and Purulia in West Bengal. Using the culture-centered approach and necrocapitalism, this essay documents the localocentric stories from the subaltern communities disproportionately impacted by water insecurity. Based on data collected during a seven-week field study, a critical thematic analysis of the data reveals how research participants with minoritized caste and low-income backgrounds routinely challenge, disrupt, and re-organize the dominant frames of health, water, and health interventions as articulated by local–global organizational actors. Additionally, research participant narratives make visible how they navigate social, cultural, institutional, and capitalist structures that adversely affect water security and their health.

Eutrophicated: Tracking colonial histories of phosphate matter and the Plantationocene inheritances of the River Wye

This article examines the River Wye in the southwest UK as a political ecology marked by relations of colonial inheritance. A controversial case of contemporary British river pollution, the Wye is suffering from increasingly dramatic eutrophication events, with nutrient pollution from mineral phosphate fertilisers used in industrial agriculture causing algal blooms that destroy the river's ecology. This paper complicates dominant framings of the Wye's eutrophication as a local event and future crisis, instead arguing that eutrophication is structured by over a century of colonial histories of phosphate. Motivated by recent debates in geography and other cognate disciplines on decolonial ecology and the Plantationocene that point to the colonial origins of ecological crisis, this paper develops a theoretical framework of inheritance/transmission to articulate the situated histories of violence and dispossession shaping phosphate matter. It then empirically tracks the phosphate inheritances of the Wye by analysing the archives of the British Phosphate Commissioners (1873–1983), a 20th century governmental company that procured fertiliser for the British Empire by intensively mining phosphates on the Pacific Islands of Nauru and Banaba. Through this archive emerges a history in which, on a national and local level, the Wye is connected to the people, corporations, and institutions responsible for the emergence of the mineral phosphates industry that has spread ecological devastation across the globe. Through theoretically and empirically examining the Wye's phosphate inheritances, this paper foregrounds ethical obligations to think systematically and historically about phosphates as a prerequisite for bringing about deep structural changes needed to repair phosphate's harms.

Winging it: visions, automation, and narrating alternative mobility futures

This paper is concerned with the way that futures for autonomous mobility are envisioned, specifically in industry representations. We begin by analysing a pair of representative commercial narratives around future autonomous mobility, from Wing and Audi, finding them to be simplistic, exclusionary, and focused on individual freedoms. Building on this analysis, we draw on ideas around mobility justice and creative mobilities methods to craft an alternative science fiction vignette, one that augments a future from a gig worker’s perspective. In doing so, we foreground multiple injustices and insecurities, and aim to highlight the potential within creative and narrative methods to complicate dominant stories about technological futures, to articulate alternative futures, explore them, research with them, and make other futures more tangible. The paper concludes by discussing the need for such approaches given the dominant framings around autonomous mobility futures.

Tobacco companies, corporate social responsibility and the use of third-party awards: a framing analysis

ObjectiveCorporate social responsibility activities, such as third-party awards, provide an opportunity for tobacco companies (TCs) to promote themselves as socially, economically and environmentally responsible organisations. This study aimed to determine...

Mental Health Care and Policy (In)justice in Ontario: Making Intersections Visible

This paper applies an Intersectionality Based Policy Analysis Framework to Ontario’s current mental health plan – The Roadmap: A Plan to Build Ontario’s Mental Health and Addictions Services – in order to identify the contextual influences, underlying values and assumptions, which promote or undermine the uptake of human rights and equity as a mental health policy priority in Ontario. We found that dominant framings of the “problem” of mental health (as lack of access, coordination or integration, as a fiscal drain, as an economic burden, and as a clinical or medical problem) served to obscure and ignore the underlying social and structural conditions that impact mental health and the human rights violations that routinely occur in the context of “care.” We discuss the implications of The Roadmap ignoring social and structural determinants of health, and by way of contrast, explore how citizen engagement and activism can support rethinking mental health policy so that it is more just and equitable.

Visual Framing of Climate Change in Selected Newspapers in Kenya

Raw information on issues such as climate change and the environment can be incomprehensible and meaningless to segments of the media audience. To ease audience's understanding of such information, the media may filter and (re)construct both the information and the experiences that generated it; this is called framing. This study analysed how climate change is visually framed in selected print media in a bid to understand how this could influence the audience's understanding of climate change information. This study was guided by the Framing Theory. Data was collected from two newspapers in Kenya (The Standard and Daily Nation) published between January 2013 and December 2017 which were purposively sampled due to their wide circulation and coverage. Qualitative content analysis was used both as a methodology and a data collection tool and the data analysed thematically. The study findings indicated that visuals were rarely used in the selected newspapers. From the findings, the depiction of actors was mainly based on their social class. The most dominant visual frame was the politicians and talking head frame. A new frame that was depicted in this study was the humour imagery frame. The causes of climate change are depicted as small causes and small solutions, but the impacts are depicted as large scale which can lead to low self-efficacy amongst the citizens. This study concludes that visual framing of climate change is an area not fully embraced by the media in presenting climate change, yet it offers an array of opportunities to communicate the climate change message.

Muslim youth collective amnesia of US government-inflicted violence against Muslims in the War on Terror

Evidence suggests that incidents of US government-inflicted violence against Muslims are absent from the post-9/11 generation of Muslims’ collective memory. To examine and confirm this collective amnesia, young Muslim American adults were nationally surveyed and interviewed on their knowledge of the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib detention centers. In total, 100 survey responses were collected and 5 interviews were conducted to examine the extent and formation of the Muslim American youth’s collective perception of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. While nearly all participants displayed awareness of the 9/11 attacks, a significant number of them were unaware of Guantanamo Bay, and most of them were unaware of Abu Ghraib. This study reveals a potential generational gap in the collective memory of Muslim Americans, the individual-level perception of post-9/11 violence against Muslims amongst young Muslim Americans, and new topics for future directions as outlined in the conclusion. It also argues that the absence of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib from young Muslims’ collective memory of the War on Terror (WOT) creates an image of Muslims being the perpetrators of violence and never victims, making it impossible for young Muslims to break out of the dominant frame of memory of 9/11 and its aftermath.

Media Framing of COVID-19 Crisis in Print Media

Since the coronavirus outbreak, the Media houses have focused on the health crisis fittingly. The news of the pandemic spread faster than the virus itself. The impact of media does not only originate with what information is being disseminated but also how it is framed. It gives Mass Media the credit for forming Public Opinion. This study aims to determine and compare the dominant frames in coverage of COVID-19 news. Based on readership and popularity, two English and two Hindi newspapers are selected. The study, descriptive in nature, uses Content Analysis as a tool of analysis. With the deductive approach, the researcher considered pre-determined frames (extracted from the previous literature) analyzed and compared the stories according to them. The time frame of this study was two months, starting from April 1, when the second wave in India intensified, to May 31, 2021. The unit of analysis included all articles, features, and columns published within the time frame. It was discovered that the Hope frame (18.4%) and Fear frame (16.8%) dominated the overall study. It was also found that there were similarities and differences in framing used by both English and Hindi newspapers.

Addressing Post-Truth in the Classroom: Towards a Critical Pedagogy

Post-truth strategies are characterized by the manipulation of facts and personal assertions of the truth for political gain. By seeding polarization, skepticism, and mistrust, post-truth presents challenges to teaching and learning within academic settings. In this paper, we explore how post-truth is articulated in higher education literature using a critical pedagogical lens. We suggest that pedagogical scholarship needs to expand its scope beyond a focus on the media antics of individual politicians in order to interrogate the reliance on dominant framings that simply define “post-truth” as circumstances where personal beliefs take precedence over established facts. We argue that the current framing of post-truth shapes the educational response to this issue, which focuses on helping students discern correct from incorrect information, as opposed to teaching students how power and knowledge are intertwined in post-truth and ways to understand and address the subsequent and potentially harmful power relations. Since post-truth strategies are enacted to restrict thoughtful reflection on dominant relations of power, we propose a critical pedagogical framework to problematize the notion of objective truth, account for the politics of exclusion, examine power relations, and contest post-truth strategies.

Perception of carbon capture and utilization - a framing analysis of German-speaking media

Carbon dioxide capture and utilization (CCU) technologies are one building block in Germany’s industrial decarbonization strategy. With CCU technologies, carbon dioxide emissions are captured from an industrial point source or the ambient air (direct air capture, DAC) and either used directly as an industrial feedstock or transformed and used as a carbon resource in industry. Despite the potential benefits of CCU in decreasing industrial dependency on fossil fuels and decreasing global CO2 emissions, robust empirical evidence of the general public opinion and societal acceptance of carbon capture and utilization technologies is lacking. Here, we studied the German-speaking media discourse as a proxy for the public discussion of carbon capture and utilization (CCU) technologies. We show that CCU technologies are overall framed more positively than negatively. Responsible for the optimistic framing are the two dominant media frames: “climate protection-frame” and “benefit-frame,” which are mainly used by scientists and policy actors or representatives from the industry sector respectively.

Internal CSR and the decline of organised labour: a possible elective affinity?

Purpose This paper aims to explore the potential relationship between internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the decline of organised labour in countries of the global North. Given the opposing trends since the late 20th century and the widespread adherence of internationally recognised labour standards in CSR codes, standards, and reporting frameworks, questions arise about the disparity between CSR rhetoric and practice regarding the collective rights of in-house employees. The paper further explores the tendency in CSR scholarship to overlook violations of collective rights for in-house employees in the global North. Design/methodology/approach To examine whether there is an elective affinity between the rise of CSR and the decline of organised labour, the paper uses a discursive institutionalism approach, providing a meta-theoretical analysis of academic literature on internal CSR. A scoping review methodology was used to identify relevant literature and compile it into an empirical corpus for a metatheoretical analysis. The empirical corpus, consisting of 38 articles, was generated through a Google Scholar (GS) search guided by the following questions: (1) What are the dominant conceptual framings of internal CSR? (2) What are the dominant roles and practical aspects of internal CSR? Findings The paper identifies two key disparities in the literature: (1) between rhetoric and practice regarding the collective rights of in-house employees in the global North and (2) between the extensive CSR research on violations of collective rights of value chain workers and the limited attention to in-house employees’ collective rights. The analysis highlights two factors contributing to these disparities: the integration of internal CSR into the corporate managerial toolbox and the distinction in CSR discourse between core labour standards and workplace issues. The analysis shows that internal CSR has an elective affinity with the decline of organised labour. Research limitations/implications While scoping reviews are often standalone studies, this paper used the methodology for its stated purpose. Limitations include the broad span of internal CSR across various academic fields and reliance solely on GS. Measures taken to enhance inclusivity were unlimited review period, refined inclusion criteria and keywords during the selection process and cross-checks of cited articles. Social implications Considering the implications of the decline of organised labour on workers’ collective voice, poverty and the distribution gap in wealth and income, this paper suggests that for CSR to play a significant role in advancing sustainable social justice, scholars and practitioners should look at ways to reduce the disparity between rhetoric and practice regarding employees’ voice and collective rights. Originality/value The paper lays the foundation for a better understanding of the potential links between internal CSR and the decline of organised labour. It addresses a gap in the literature on the interrelations between CSR and organised labour in the global North and proposes root causes of this gap. This contribution enriches the scarce literature exploring the potential elective affinity between CSR and transformations in the global economy and labour markets since the late 1980s. Finally, the paper deepens the understanding of the implications of CSR for employees’ collective rights and voice as well as for organised labour.

The changing politics of road death in Britain: from policy action to kicking the can down the road

Britain has one of the lowest road casualty rates globally, yet tens of thousands of people are killed or seriously injured annually, and numbers have plateaued since 2012. Despite the consequential impact of road trauma, there has been limited evaluation of Britain's policy response. This paper uses Kingdon's Multiple Streams Model to understand agenda setting and analyses how road safety policies were made or not made over time. Critical discourse analysis evaluates patterns and themes in new data acquired via thirty-five interviews with politicians and policy participants, and data from Parliamentary debates and policy documents, spanning the period between 1987 and 2021. The data suggests two distinct time periods: 1987 to 2002, the policy problem was accepted, policy solutions advanced, when policy windows opened as political discourse was constructive, the multiple streams coupled, and policy change resulted. Policy development in road safety is therefore possible when it is viewed as an important policy agenda in need of attention. After 2003, there was a perception the problem had been resolved. Road safety lost out to a dominant mobility framing, road deaths were reframed as accidental and so unavoidable, solutions were contested, the politics stream flowed slowly, and from 2011, with the tight fiscal environment, discarded targets, and significant competition for attention from alternative policy areas, policy stasis resulted. The prevailing politics meant that the policy problem remained sidelined and policy solutions continued to be kicked down the road. The paper explores how this shift occurred and the consequences on the politics of road death.

The unfairness of place: A cultural history of the UK's ‘postcode lottery’

The 'postcode lottery' has become a dominant political framing for place-based health inequalities in Britain, used by patient groups, politicians and in media coverage of regional health and healthcare inequalities. Using newspapers, parliamentary material and health policy documents, this paper traces how this term has changed and expanded from its origins as a protest about access to new pharmaceutical treatments, to a broader commentary about geographical variations in the quality of NHS and other public services, health outcomes, and deprivation. It traces this emergence and evolution from its origins in the 1989-91 introduction of the 'internal market' and the 1994 reintroduction of the National Lottery, through to New Labour health reforms, the introduction of austerity, and the Levelling Up programme in the present day. This paper finds that the term's concern with unfairness has enabled its incorporation into a range of political positions, both as a defence of universalism against market-based reforms in the NHS, and to rationalise distinctions between 'unequal' and 'unfair' disparities in health outcomes. We conclude that understanding and addressing place based differences and inequalities in health, healthcare, and health outcomes may be aided through investigation of cultural ideas and values as well as the deep histories of place and local services.

"Insurgent Indigeneity": A New Threshold of Indigenous Politics

Abstract: Celebrating Indigenous zones and movements of revival and "resurgence" has become a dominant frame of sorts for Indigenous political theory. Emergent Indigenous political praxis in Hawai'i, led by certain grassroots groups and organizers, leads me to theorize a qualitatively and quantitatively different modality of Indigenous politics—what I offer as "insurgent Indigeneity." This essay traces a genealogy of resurgence paradigms, presenting a set of philosophical presuppositions that entail circumscriptions on Indigenous political horizons and praxis: namely, an inward focus and a dyadic politics of a friend-enemy distinction. Drawing from the emergent practices of Hawaiian insurgent Indigeneity, and the political schema of expanding hegemony in Antonio Gramsci's The Modern Prince , I theorize how actors build upon resurgence to strategically proliferate outward, building mass power in a complex field of forces and actors to pursue a wider horizon of change.

FrameSum: Leveraging Framing Theory and Deep Learning for Enhanced News Text Summarization

Framing theory is a widely accepted theoretical framework in the field of news communication studies, frequently employed to analyze the content of news reports. This paper innovatively introduces framing theory into the text summarization task and proposes a news text summarization method based on framing theory to address the global context of rapidly increasing speed and scale of information dissemination. Traditional text summarization methods often overlook the implicit deep-level semantic content and situational frames in news texts, and the method proposed in this paper aims to fill this gap. Our deep learning-based news frame identification module can automatically identify frame elements in the text and predict the dominant frame of the text. The frame-aware summarization generation model (FrameSum) can incorporate the identified frame feature into the text representation and attention mechanism, ensuring that the generated summary focuses on the core content of the news report while maintaining high information coverage, readability, and objectivity. Through empirical studies on the standard CNN/Daily Mail dataset, we found that this method performs significantly better in improving summary quality and maintaining the accuracy of news facts.

Knowledge structures for knowledge communication: Dominant semantic frames in research articles

Taking Frame Semantics as its theoretical framework, this corpus-based study addresses a lack of research on semantic knowledge in research articles at the genre level, as opposed to the discipline level, by identifying the dominant Semantic Frames in the academic portion of the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Semantic Frames in the corpus were first automatically identified with a pre-trained large language model fine-tuned with data from FrameNet, a large database built on the principles of Frame Semantics. Subsequently, 84 dominant Semantic Frames in research articles were extracted based on the frequency distributions of identified semantic frames, constituting a Research Article-specific Semantic Frame List. Based on their definitions and detailed analyses of typical example sentences, these 84 Research Article-specific Semantic Frames were classified into three groups: Academic Activity Frames, which describe typical activities for creating knowledge, Academic Communication Frames, which relate to typical ways for disseminating knowledge, and Academic Interest Frames, which include typical entities or attributes that interest researchers across disciplines. The Research Article-specific Semantic Frame List sheds light on the semantic knowledge that is characteristic of the research article genre and shared across disciplines, thereby paving the way for compiling a research article-specific framenet. Further research is encouraged to explore the Frame Element distribution patterns of Research Article-specific Semantic Frames and Semantic Frames specific to other academic genres.

Experimentation in Wicked Situations: How activists construct pragmatic action frames

Experimentation is key in wicked situations; it provides small wins while keeping several options open for the future. The literature is, however, scarce on how experimentation is framed, a crucial aspect to the understanding of how actors identify and pursue experiments in situations that are constantly changing and lack a clear resolution. We address this gap by drawing on the concept of ‘action frames’ and deploying a comparative case study of nine cases in diverse contexts in which activists experimented with wicked problems. We find that activists pragmatically shy away from pursuing a permanent solution to focus instead on achieving small wins, diagnosing ‘symptoms’ rather than ‘root causes’ of problems, and ‘working around’ institutional constraints instead of directly ‘confronting’ them. This pragmatic action frame prompts them to initiate pilot experiments that involve trial-and-error and collective learning, and that sometimes scaffold into cumulative small wins. Reflecting on our findings, we build a model of how pragmatic action frames fuel distributed possibilities to experiment in wicked situations. Our model contributes to the literature on wicked problems by revealing how activists ‘welcome’ complexity instead of ‘taming’ it. We contribute to the literature on action frames by demonstrating how multiple viable pragmatic action frames are constructed iteratively without threatening an alternative, dominant frame. Lastly, we contribute to the literature on robust action by demonstrating how pragmatic action frames pave the way for distributed experimentation and by unpacking the core attributes that make ‘robust actors’ accepting of open-ended wayfinding journeys.

Gastroimaginaries: a framework for conceptualizing narratives of food and place in the American South

ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of gastroimaginaries – narratives that use food as a rhetorical device to define and encapsulate what are believed to be the essential characteristics of a people, place, and time. The article adapts the concept of social imaginaries – defined by Taylor (2023) as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others … ” – to underscore the significance of food-related narratives for shaping, reinforcing, and potentially contesting regional identity and place-making projects, and for signaling membership within a particular group or imagined community. I apply the gastroimaginary framework to an analysis of food media representations of the American South, arguing that dominant gastroimaginary frames – which emphasize potent but generally uncritical ideas like hospitality and nostalgia – generally elide the realities of food system labor and environmental and other externalities; alternative or subversive gastroimaginaries, however, can both attend to these past and present realities while imagining more radical futures.

Different Realities Surrounding the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian Conflict: The Cases of Russia Today and CNN

The aim of this small-scale research is to provide a combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of the framing of news articles about the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian conflict, focusing on online news portals Russia Today (RT) and CNN. The 5 generic frames: Attribution of responsibility, Human interest, Conflict, Morality, and Economic consequences, developed by Semetko and Valkenburg (2000), were used to perform the analysis. The purpose of this study was to compare the dominant frames and the extent of their usage in the two outlets. Following the compilation of two separate corpora with an equal distribution of 100 articles from each outlet, the articles were classified according to the frames they exhibited by utilizing a set of yes/no questions. To ensure reliability, the classifications were performed independently by both authors. The results of the analysis showed on one hand significant differences in the framing of the war between the two outlets, and on the other similarities in the extent to which framing was utilized. RT mostly relied on the Attribution of responsibility frame to present the West as responsible for the outbreak of war, as well as the Economic consequences frame to portray the Russian economy as resilient despite the Western sanctions. On the other hand, the most frequent frames in CNN’s articles were Conflict and Human interest, which focused on battlefield reports and the portrayal of the Ukrainian side as worthy of assistance, respectively.